Statement by former Members of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards

Mr Andrew Tyrie MP; Most Rev and Rt Hon the Archbishop of Canterbury ;Mark Garnier MP; Rt Hon Lord Lawson of Blaby; Mr Andrew Love MP; Rt Hon Lord McFall of Alcluith; John Thurso MP; Lord Turnbull KCB CV

Nonverbal contention and contempt in U.K. parliamentary oversight hearings on fiscal and monetary policy

In parliamentary committee oversight hearings on fiscal policy, monetary policy and financial stability, where verbal deliberation is the focus, nonverbal communication may be pivotal in the acceptance or rejection of arguments proffered by policymakers. Systematic qualitative coding of these hearings in the 2010-15 UK Parliament finds that: (1) facial expressions, particularly in the form of anger and contempt, are more prevalent in fiscal policy hearings, where backbench parliamentarians hold frontbench parliamentarians to account, than in monetary policy or financial stability hearings, where the witnesses being held to account are unelected policy experts; (2) comparing committees across chambers, hearings in the Lords’ committee yield more reassuring facial expressions relative to hearings in the Commons’ committee, suggesting a more relaxed and less adversarial context in the former; and (3) central bank witnesses appearing before both the Commons’ and Lords’ committee tend towards expressions of appeasement, suggesting a willingness to defer to Parliament

The History of the North of Scotland Before 1945:As Told By Surfers

This article examines the telling of the north of Scotland’s history by people who participated in surfing. Surfing, as a sport/activity, is likely to have first appeared on the Pentland Firth, and in Caithness and Sutherland, after the 1954-58 arrival of the Dounreay nuclear power facility, and the fledgling Scottish/British and international surfing press was keen to stress the other-worldly qualities of surfing in an incongruous landscape and treacherous weather. History, elements of which were embellished or inaccurately understood, was a key to this. Travelling surfers, including some based in Scotland, emphasised Norse heritage or generic signifiers of Scottish identity, and surfing’s place within a broad arc of history with a heavy accent on adventure. Less discussed (but not altogether absent) were the Sutherland Clearances, a process which accelerated the coming of industry and radical population changes on the north coast. Reflective of these gaps is the (re)telling of the history of Thurso Castle, symbolic as it is of surfing’s tourist gaze and, with regard to international men’s surfing events, the marketing of elements of Scottish history and heritage towards commercial ends

La evasión en The House of Commons y el Congreso de los Diputados: un estudio intercultural

Falta palabras claveThe purpose of this dissertation is to carry out an analysis of political discourse used by politicians in the House of Commons1 in the United Kingdom and El Congreso de los Diputados2 in Spain. This analysis will consist of a comparative study of question and answer sessions in the British and Spanish Parliaments, with the idea of comparing and contrasting linguistic and cultural differences between the two nations mentioned, the United Kingdom and Spain. The concept of “face”, an idea proposed by Goffman (1955, 1967), and subsequently developed by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), and other authors such as R. Lakoff (1973), Leech (1983), and Fraser (1990) will be examined, and applied to political discourse. The phenomenon of equivocation, used in situations when people find themselves in a position where telling the truth could be hurtful and unnecessary, and telling a blatant lie could also be inappropriate, developed by Bavelas et al. (1990), will be thoroughly discussed and applied to the political debates analysed. The typology of equivocation put forward by Bull and Meyer (1993) will be thoroughly discussed, and we will see how the equivocation strategies which they propose are employed by the interviewees in the question and answer sessions of both the British and Spanish Parliaments. This will be followed by a discussion on the political similarities and differences between the two cultures, after which the pertinent conclusions will be drawn

Evaluating Communication in the British Parliamentary Public Sphere

This article begins with a re-evaluation of political communication research based on Habermas' original theory of the public sphere. It presents Habermas' alternative framework for assessing communication in contemporary ‘actually existing democracies’. The model is then tested with a case study of the UK parliamentary public sphere based on 95 semi-structured interviews with political actors (politicians, journalists and officials). It concludes that parliament today operates rather better, according to public sphere norms, than the public sphere described in Habermas' accounts of 18th and 19th-century England. Such a finding, on its own, is clearly at odds with public perception. The research accordingly offers two explanations for this disparity and the (perceived) crisis of political legitimacy in UK politics

‘Culture, Character or Campaigns?’ Assessing the Electoral Performance of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats in Cornwall 1945-2010

Politics in Cornwall in the twentieth century was dominated by the rivalry of two major parties: the Conservatives and the Liberals. Unlike much of the rest of Britain Cornwall retained a different political paradigm in which Labour did not replace the old left, with socialism, and until the modern day this localised duopoly has persisted. This thesis looks at the potentially different reasons why this divergence persists and identifies three possible explanations for this phenomenon: culture, character and campaigns. In Part I of the thesis, there is a comparison of politicians from the past and the attributes that these politicians possessed which are compared with modern day politicians to evaluate their relative strengths. The thesis also assesses historic campaigning as a cause of Liberal success as well as the different nature of Cornwall, with its distance from Westminster and its Celtic and Methodist background, which set it apart from much of the rest of England. Then in Part II, using modern day voter surveys conducted by telephone, this thesis identifies particular peculiarities in Cornwall which would seem to suggest that although there have been traditional cultural ties to Liberalism, mainly through the pre-dominant faith, Methodism, this cleavage towards the modern day Liberal Democrats has changed in nature as cultural reasons have become less significant. It also identifies the importance of so-called personality politics, in the Cornish context, as a key aspect of maintaining and then augmenting support for the party. As such major personalities from historic Cornish politics, such as Isaac Foot and David Penhaligon, are compared to modern day politicians to assess their relative significance. However, the significant majority of the original research conducted across Cornwall, and other parts of the country, attempts to identify whether the resurgence of the Liberal Democrats in the 1997 election, and subsequently, is linked to the campaigning the party conducts rather than these traditional assumptions for their electoral success. Conducting telephone surveys across thirteen parliamentary constituencies, before and after the 2010 general election, from the Highlands of Scotland to West Cornwall, this research identifies that grassroots campaigning, commonly referred to as Rennardism in the most recent past, but more accurately described as Community Politics, is the primary reason for the success of the Liberal Democrats in Cornwall between 1997 and 2010. By assessing not just seats in which the Liberal Democrats have been successful in recent years in Cornwall but also in similar, and different, regions of Britain a better assessment of the value of the party’s successes and failures can be evaluated both in Cornwall and comparatively. The research compares different potential reasons for voters supporting the party but the evidence would seem to suggest that in the period under discussion the party had built substantial levels of campaigning capacity in the target areas for the party and this helped to win all the seats in Cornwall for the Liberal Democrats in 2005. Surveys were conducted before and after the 2010 election and there is also evidence that as the party became a less effective campaigning machine it began to lose support in Cornwall and this helps to explain why the party lost seats in Cornwall in 2010. This thesis adds to the increasing awareness, amongst political scientists, of the significance of local constituency campaigning, in British politics, which has been the subject of debate in this field in recent years. Historically scholars have debated the significance of national swing, with early political scientists, like David Butler and Robert Mackenzie, favouring this explanation to electoral success assessing the general election campaign as being essentially a national one. However, as three and now arguably four or even five party politics is the norm academics such as David Denver, Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley have identified that constituency campaigning matters much more to those parties breaking into the post-war duopoly, than early political scientists have suggested. This thesis evaluates, not just whether there is a local campaign factor in the Liberal Democrats’ success, but whether the volume and penetration of this local campaign matters and, as such, this research is original and forms a unique contribution to academic debate in this field

The political influence of the Church of Scotland, post-devolution: public policy-making and religion in Scottish politics

The research is an in-depth, empirical study of the political behaviour of the Church of Scotland; it is primarily intended as a contribution to the territorial field of Scottish politics. The most important aim of the thesis is to assess the overall effectiveness of the Church of Scotland when it takes part in political activities. More generally, the research has three key themes: first, it examines the place of religion in politics by analysing churches as political pressure groups rather than simply looking at voting behaviour; second, it looks at the development of the new Scottish political system, post-devolution; third, it explicitly compares the political behaviour of the Church of Scotland with the Scottish Catholic Church. Chapter two focuses on the political behaviour of the Church and Nation Committee of the Church of Scotland and concludes that its effectiveness is limited, primarily due to a shift in societal values. Chapter three focuses on the political behaviour of the Board of Social Responsibility of the Church of Scotland and concludes that is possesses more potential for influence than the Committee, due to the nature of the issues it is concerned with. Chapter four compares and contrasts the political behaviour of the Church of Scotland with the Scottish Catholic Church, and concludes that the latter is often more effective than the former when they act as political pressure groups. Chapter five analyses the results of the elite survey questionnaires and interviews; one of its main conclusions is that while most Scottish politicians believe the Church of Scotland to be influential, they do not perceive themselves to be personally influenced. The thesis argues that the political influence of the Church of Scotland is varied, depending on which area of policy is being addressed, and the place of religion generally in Scottish politics is becoming increasingly peripheral