Download or read book The Blair Years written by Alastair Campbell and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 749 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory account of Tony Blair’s tumultuous leadership, The Blair Years gathers extracts from the diaries of the man who knew him best: Alastair Campbell—Blair’s spokesman from 1994 to 2003, his press secretary, strategist, and closest confidant. It is a compelling chronicle of contemporary British politics and the rise of New Labour, providing the first important record of a remarkable decade in Britain’s history. Here are the defining events of the time, from the Labour Party’s new dawn to the war on terror; from the death of Princess Diana to negotiations for peace in Northern Ireland; from Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq to the Hutton Inquiry of 2003, the year Campbell resigned his position. Here also are Blair’s relationships with world leaders and heads of state, including presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But above all, here is Tony Blair up close and personal, making the decisions that affected the lives of millions, under relentless and frequently hostile pressure. Often described as the second most powerful figure in Britain, Alastair Campbell is no stranger to controversy. Feared and admired in equal measure, hated by some, he was pivotal to the founding of New Labour and the sensational election victory of 1997. Campbell spent more waking hours alongside the prime minister than anyone, and his diaries—at times brutally frank, often funny, always engrossing—take the reader right to the heart of government. The Blair Years is a story of politics in the raw, of progress and setback, of reputations made and destroyed, under the relentless scrutiny of a 24-hour media. Unflinchingly told, it covers the crises and scandals, the rows and resignations, the ups and downs at No. 10 Downing Street. But amid the landmark events are insights and observations that make this a remarkably human portrayal of some of the most influential people in the world. A completely riveting book about life at the very top, told by a man who saw it all.

Download or read book Diaries Volume Three written by Alastair Campbell and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Prelude to Power' is the first of four volumes and covers the early days of New Labour, culminating in their victory at the polls in 1997. It details the extraordinary tensions between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Download or read book The Alastair Campbell Diaries Power and the people 1997 1999 written by Alastair Campbell and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Prelude to Power' is the first of four volumes and covers the early days of New Labour, culminating in their victory at the polls in 1997. It details the extraordinary tensions between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Download or read book Transfer State written by Peter Sloman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of a guaranteed minimum income has been central to British social policy debates for more than a century. Since the First World War, a variety of market economists, radical activists, and social reformers have emphasized the possibility of tackling poverty through direct cash transfers between the state and its citizens. As manufacturing employment has declined and wage inequality has grown since the 1970s, cash benefits and tax credits have become an important source of income for millions of working-age households, including many low-paid workers with children. The nature and purpose of these transfer payments, however, remain highly contested. Conservative and New Labour governments have used in-work benefits and conditionality requirements to 'activate' the unemployed and reinforce the incentives to take low-paid work - an approach which has reached its apogee in Universal Credit. By contrast, a growing number of campaigners have argued that the challenge of providing economic security in an age of automation would be better met by paying a Universal Basic Income to all citizens. Transfer State provides the first detailed history of guaranteed income proposals in modern Britain, which brings together intellectual history and archival research to show how the pursuit of an integrated tax and benefit system has shaped UK public policy since 1918. The result is a major new analysis of the role of cash transfers in the British welfare state which sets Universal Credit in a historical perspective and examines the cultural and political barriers to a Universal Basic Income.

Download or read book Diaries Volume Two written by Alastair Campbell and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Power & the People covers the first two years of the New Labour government, beginning with their landslide victory at the polls in 1997. This second voume of Campbell's unexpurgated diaries details the initial challenges faced by Labour as they come to power and settle into running the country. It covers an astonishing array of events and personalities, progress and setbacks, crises and scandals, as Blair and his party make the transition from opposition to office.

Download or read book How Labour Governments Fall written by T. Heppell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What similarities exist between the reasons for Labour losing office in 2010 and those behind why previous Labour governments were defeated? This edited volume provides a detailed historical appraisal which considers the importance of themes such as economic performance; political leadership and the condition of the Conservatives in opposition.

Download or read book The Fox Hunting Controversy 1781 2004 written by Allyson N. May and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: August 1781 saw the publication of a manual on fox hunting that would become a classic of its genre. Hugely popular in its own day, Peter Beckford's Thoughts on Hunting is often cited as marking the birth of modern hunting and continues to be quoted from affectionately today by the hunting fraternity. Less stressed is the fact that its subject was immediately controversial, and that a hostile review which appeared on the heels of the manual's publication raised two criticisms of fox hunting that would be repeated over the next two centuries: fox hunting was a cruel sport and a feudal, anachronistic one at that. This study explores the attacks made on fox hunting from 1781 to the legal ban achieved in 2004, as well as assessing the reasons for its continued appeal and post-ban survival. Chapters cover debates in the areas of: class and hunting; concerns over cruelty and animal welfare; party politics; the hunt in literature; and nostalgia. By adopting a thematic approach, the author is able to draw out the wider social and cultural implications of the debates, and to explore what they tell us about national identity, social mores and social relations in modern Britain.

Download or read book Alastair Campbell Diaries written by Alastair Campbell and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having succeeded Tony Blair as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown wants Alistair Campbell at his side. Campbell resists. Soon, he is earning not only praise but big money from motivational speaking and writing novels which darkly reflect the personal mood swings that continue to concern both him and his family. Serious journalism across platforms old and new puts him back in the public eye. With politics constantly tugging his sleeve, he eventually returns to the front line to marshal a party in disarray.

Download or read book Rhetoric in British Politics and Society written by J. Atkins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the art of rhetoric is central to the practice of politics it also plays an important role in civic and private life. Using Aristotelian notions of ethos, pathos and logos, this collection offers engaging discussions on everything from Prime Minister's Questions and Welsh devolution to political satire and the rhetoric of cultural racism.

Download or read book Standing Up for Scotland written by Torrance David Torrance and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Torrance reassesses the relationship between 'nationalism' and 'unionism' in Scottish politics, challenging a binary reading of the two ideologies with the concept of 'nationalist unionism'. Scottish nationalism did not begin with the SNP in 1934, nor was it confined to political parties that desired independent statehood. Rather, it was more dispersed, with the Liberal, Conservative and Labour parties all attempting to harness Scottish national identity and nationalism between 1884 and 2014, often with the paradoxical goal of strengthening rather than ending the Union. The book combines nationalist theory with empirical historical and archival research to argue that these conceptions of Scottish nationhood had much more in common with each other than is commonly accepted.

Download or read book Monarchy and the End of Empire written by Philip Murphy and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique and meticulously-researched study examines the triangular relationship between the British government, the Palace, and the modern Commonwealth since 1945. It has two principal areas of focus: the monarch's role as sovereign of a series of Commonwealth Realms, and quite separately as head of the Commonwealth. It traces how, in the early part of the twentieth century, the British government promoted the Crown as a counterbalance to the centrifugal forces that were drawing the Empire apart. Ultimately, however, with newly-independent India's determination to become a republic in the late 1940s, Britain had to accept that allegiance to the Crown could no longer be the common factor binding the Commonwealth together. It therefore devised the notion of the headship of the Commonwealth as a means of enabling a republican India 'to continue to give the monarchy a pivotal symbolic role and therefore to remain in the Commonwealth.' In the years of rapid decolonization which followed 1945, it became clear that this elaborate constitutional infrastructure posed significant problems for British foreign policy. The system of Commonwealth Realms was a recipe for confusion and misunderstanding. Policy makers in the UK increasingly saw it as a liability in terms of Britain's relations with its former colonies, so much so that by the early 1960s they actively sought to persuade African nationalist leaders to adopt republican constitutions on independence. The headship of the Commonwealth also became a cause for concern, partly because it offered opportunities for the monarch to act without ministerial advice, and partly because it tended to tie the British government to what many within the UK had begun to regard as a largely redundant institution. Philip Murphy employs a large amount of previously-unpublished documentary evidence to argue that the monarchy's relationship with the Commonwealth, which was initially promoted by the UK as a means of strengthening Imperial ties, increasingly became an source of frustration for British foreign policy makers.

Download or read book Brown at 10 written by Anthony Seldon and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-03 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: GORDON BROWN's three years in power were among the most turbulent in Downing Street's post-war history. Brown at 10 tells the compelling story of his hubris and downfall, and with it, the final demise of the New Labour project. Containing an extraordinary breadth of previously unpublished material, Brown at 10 is a frank, penetrating portrait of a remarkable era, written by one of Britain's leading political and social commentators. Using unrivalled access to many of those at the centre of Brown's government, and original material gleaned from hundreds of hours of interviews with many of its leading lights, Brown at 10 looks with greater depth and detail into the signal events and circumstances of Brown's premiership than any other account published since the May 2010 general election. It also relates, for the first time, the full extraordinary tale of the pivotal role played by Brown in persuading the world's leaders to address the global banking crisis head-on. The result is the definitive chronicle of Gordon Brown's troubled period in Number 10, from the unique perspective of those who worked most closely with him.

Download or read book Faster Than A Cannonball written by Dylan Jones and published by White Rabbit. This book was released on 2022-10-13 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades tend to crest halfway through, and 1995 was the year of the Nineties: peak Britpop (Oasis v Blur), peak YBA (Tracey Emin's tent), peak New Lad (when Nick Hornby published High Fidelity, when James Brown's Loaded detonated the publishing industry, and when pubs were finally allowed to stay open on a Sunday). It was the year of The Bends, the year Danny Boyle started filming Trainspotting, the year Richey Edwards went missing, the year Alex Garland wrote The Beach, the year Blair changed Clause IV after a controversial vote at the Labour Conference. It was a period of huge cultural upheaval - in art, literature, publishing and drugs, and a period of almost unparalleled hedonism. Faster Than a Cannonball is a cultural swipe of the decade from loungecore to the rise of New Labour, teasing all the relevant artistic strands through interviews with all the major protagonists and exhaustive re-evaluations of the important records of the year, by artists including Radiohead, Teenage Fanclub, Tricky, Pulp, Blur, the Chemical Brothers, Supergrass, Elastica, Spiritualized, Aphex Twin and, of course, Oasis.

Download or read book Making British Defence Policy written by Robert Self and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the process by which defence policy is made in contemporary Britain and the institutions, actors and conflicting interests which interact in its inception and continuous reformulation. Rather than dealing with the substance of defence policy, this study focuses upon the institutional actors involved in this process. This is a subject which has commanded far more interest from public, Parliament, government and the armed forces since the protracted, bloody and ultimately unsuccessful British military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The work begins with a discussion of two contextual factors shaping policy. The first relates to the impact of Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States over defence and intelligence matters, while the second considers the impact of Britain’s relatively disappointing economic performance upon the funding of British defence since 1945. It then goes on to explore the role and impact of all the key policy actors, from the Prime Minister, Cabinet and core executive, to the Ministry of Defence and its relations with the broader ‘Whitehall village’, and the Foreign Office and Treasury in particular. The work concludes by examining the increasing influence of external policy actors and forces, such as Parliament, the courts, political parties, pressure groups and public opinion. This book will be of much interest to students of British defence policy, security studies, and contemporary military history.

Download or read book Government Communications and the Crisis of Trust written by Ruth Garland and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book opens up the black box of government communication during the age of political spin, using archival and official documents, memoirs and biographies, and in-depth interviews with media, political and government witnesses. It argues that substantive and troubling long-term changes in the ways governments manage the media and publicly account for themselves undermine the public consent essential to democracy. Much of the blame for this crisis in public communication has been placed at the feet of politicians and their aides, but they are just part of the picture. A pervasive ‘culture of mediatization’ has developed within governments, leading to intended and unintended consequences that challenge the capacity of central public bureaucracies to implement public values and maintain impartiality. It concludes that public servants, elected officials and citizens have an important role to play in accounting for governments’ custodianship of this most politically-sensitive of public goods – the public communications function.

Download or read book The Zinoviev Letter written by Gill Bennett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-12 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in British politics, an intrigue that still has resonance almost a century later: the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Almost certainly a forgery, no original has ever been traced, and even if genuine it was probably Soviet 'fake news'. Despite this, the Letter still haunts British politics nearly a century after it was written; it was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and cropped up in the media as recently as during the Referendum campaign and the 2017 general election. The Letter, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervour, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Bolshevik propaganda organization, to the British Communist Party in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, it arrived during the general election campaign and was leaked to the press. The Letter's publication by the Daily Mail on 25 October 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a 'Red Scare' in the media. Labour blamed the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been a right-wing Establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it. The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call 'fake news'. But it is also a gripping historical detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.

Download or read book Salmond written by David Torrance and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW POST-REFERENDUM EDITION. Alex Salmond is well known in Scotland, the UK and beyond as the leader of the Scottish National Party and Scotland's First Minister, but relatively little is understood about Salmond as a human being, what makes him a Nationalist, what shaped his political views, and what sort of country he believes an independent Scotland can be. In this first biography, with which close colleagues and friends have co-operated, the acclaimed political biographer David Torrance turns his attention to perhaps one of the most capable and interesting politicians Scotland has produced in the last few decades. Utilising a raft of published and unpublished material, Torrance charts the life and career of Alex Salmond from his schooldays, his political activism at St Andrews University, his early career at the Royal Bank of Scotland, his election as the MP for Banff and Buchan and, in greater depth than ever before, his two spells as leader of the SNP and, from 2007, as First Minister of Scotland.