Very British Dystopias: three conclusions

June 18, 2013

Posted in Academic Impact My Archive on Four documentary Very British Dystopias was broadcast last Saturday night. If you missed it, it can be caught on iPlayer for a few more days. If you read this post too late to do that, I wrote an article for BBC Politics on the role dystopias play in …

Why did Britain spy on the Turkish Finance Minister?

Posted in Intelligence Image by World Economic Forum The surveillance scandal rumbles on. Following last week’s dramatic revelations about the scale of National Security Agency surveillance, media attention has now turned to Britain’s GCHQ. The Guardian has published more highly revealing documents about the role of Britain’s covert signals intelligence and eavesdropping service. These are …

Misunderstanding Iraq

June 14, 2013

Posted in British Politics This week the House of Commons held a debate to mark the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War. The motion, in backbench business committee time, was introduced by Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton, Pavilion. A central part of her argument (‘the burden of what I am saying’) was that …

Fiction & Politics: Remaking the classics

Posted in Art & Fiction,British Politics,Political culture Past months have seen a steady flow of remakes of classic British political TV series. For example, House of Cards has been adapted into a US political drama. I recently watched two homegrown efforts: the revival of Lynn and Jay’s Yes, Prime Minister and Secret State, ‘inspired by’ …

Fiction & Politics: The satirists’ Thatcher

June 13, 2013

Posted in Art & Fiction,British Politics,Political culture Exultant reactions to Margaret Thatcher’s death – which took various forms from street parties and burning effigies, to a concerted internet effort to get the song ‘Ding Dong the Witch in Dead’ into the top of the charts – shocked and dismayed some members of the commentariat.  Predictably …

David Cameron perpetuates factually inaccurate link between immigration and welfare dependency in pre-G8 speech

June 12, 2013

Posted in immigration Image by Ben Fisher/GAVI Alliance On 10th June, David Cameron gave a speech to DP World at London Gateway in Essex. The speech was wide-ranging, covering globalisation, Britain’s place in the world and, inevitably, immigration. In this speech, he made claims that have become ‘common knowledge’ in the UK. He said: “Those …

Fiction & Politics: the meaning of Ealing

Posted in Art & Fiction,British Politics,Labour Party,Political culture,Politics The release of The Spirit of ’45, Ken Loach’s paean to the reforms of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, combined with the Conservative/Liberal Democrat rhetoric of national consensus in the current period of economic austerity, make for a timely reassessment of the politics of Ealing studios. Ealing’s support …

Fiction & Politics: The birth of the royal biopic

June 11, 2013

Posted in Art & Fiction,Political culture,Politics In 1913 G.B. Samuelson and Will Barker got together to make an unprecedented British moving picture. The longest and most prestigious cinema project attempted to date, this superfilm of the life and times of the recently deceased Queen Victoria (she had only died in 1901) would chart the events …

An Introduction to Fiction & Politics

June 10, 2013

Posted in Art & Fiction,Political culture This Saturday I’ll be presenting Very British Dystopias on Radio Four as part of its Archive Hour series. The documentary is partly based on work I’ve done for this forthcoming book on political fiction in general, and it focuses on post-war fictions that imagined a politics gone wrong. It …

Politics Academics on Twitter

June 7, 2013

Posted in Academic Impact Image by Johan Larsson Following on from our league table of Politics departments on Twitter, we have drawn up a list of Politics academics that are also using Twitter. LSE have already produced an excellent list of academic tweeters, which offered a useful starting place, but we wanted to look specifically …