The 1970 British Commonwealth Games: Scottish reactions to apartheid and sporting boycotts

Abstract The 1970 British Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh is widely thought to have been a barnstorming success and an excellent advertisement for Scotland. Recent research by the authors, however, shows that the event was a deeply politicized one: reflective of Scotland’s status as a “stateless nation,” of Westminster politics during the era more generally, and of the politics surrounding apartheid South Africa’s sporting contacts with the outside world. The games managed to avert a mass boycott organized by the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), in retaliation for the Marylebone Cricket Club’s recent invitation of the South African national cricket team. This article will explore Scotland’s place as a nonstate actor within the 1970 crisis. Attention will be given to the domestic political response from Scottish members of Parliament, members of local Scottish councils (particularly within Edinburgh itself), and Scottish National Party (SNP) activists, angered that Scotland should pay for the crimes perceived to be made by an English sporting body. However, our piece goes beyond these discourses, to examine the broader sporting relationship that Scots had with South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), governed by white supremacist regimes during the period. Policy documents, housed in the National Records of Scotland, express UK Cabinet-level concerns about the actions of individual sporting clubs’ tours of the countries. This article will also look at how cabinet ministers, most notably Labour’s Minister for Sport Denis Howell, intervened to shape Scotland’s devolved sporting councils’ policies on contacts with South Africa and Rhodesia.</jats:p

Analysing assessment practice: how useful is the summative/formative divide as a tool?

A view of assessment as 'naturally' divided into the categories of formative and summative has become a taken-for-granted way of thinking about, talking about and organising assessment in universities, at least in the UK where the division is inscribed in national, institutional and departmental policy and guidance (eg. Quality Assurance Agency, http://www.qaa.ac.uk). In these documents summative and formative assessment tend to be understood as serving separate purposes with summative assessment understood as summing up the level of performance and formative assessment as feeding into future learning. We question the utility of the division in terms of better understanding assessment practices on the basis of an empirical study undertaken in a higher education institution in the UK. The aim of the Assessment Environments & Cultures project is to gain a better understanding of how academics assess and why they assess in the ways that they do. Interview and observational data have been collected from academics working in three subject areas: Design, Business and Applied Sciences. Initial analysis has focussed on the discourses in use and the subject positions taken up by academics when they talk about and undertake assessment. Analysis of our data suggests that, whilst academics used the categories of formative and summative to talk about their assessment practices, the distinction between assessment purposes may be 'messier' than the separate categories imply. Various examples from the project will be introduced to illustrate this point. This raises a number of questions in terms of researching assessment practices that will be raised for discussion at the roundtable. For example:Might it be useful to understand formative and summative assessment as occupying a shared and contested space rather than as distinct categories

Redetermination of parameters for semi-empirical model for spallogenic He and Ne in chondrites

A semi-empirical model described previously satisfactorily reproduced a number of shielding-dependent variations in the relative production rates of spallogenic He and Ne in chondrites. However, data for cores of the Keyes and St. Severin meteorites showed a subsurface build-up in He-3 which was not predicted with the original model parameters and the model was not pursued. Renewed interest in the preatmospheric size of meteorites, spurred in part by the desirability of understanding the exposure history of the SNC meteorites, justifies redetermination of model parameters

Surgical Treatment of the Upper Extremity in Rheumatoid Arthritis

All surgical procedures designed to preserve or improve function in the extremities, whether in rheumatoid arthritis or not, must consider the functional emphasis of the upper extremity as compared to the lower extremity. The upper extremity has, as its primary goal, mobility and prehension, whereas in the lower extremity, stability is the most important goal, mobility the next in order of importance, and prehension the least important. For example, the feet fulfill a need for stability with very little requirement for prehension, but the hand is more an instrument for prehension and there is less need to consider stability. I have divided surgery in the upper extremity of the rheumatoid patient into the surgery of prevention and the surgery of repair--that is, those procedures designed to prevent the loss of function and those designed to restore some measure of function

Power Sources: General Electric and Other Generals at the White House (Book Review)

On Jane 9, 2004, Ronald Regan made his final journey to Washington, DC, the city he had vowed to transform when he arrived as the nation\u27s fortieth President nearly a quarter of a century before. His death four days earlier, after a decade of decline into Alzheimer\u27s, while not unexpected, still shocked and saddened the United States. Americans turned out in force to pay their last respects to the man who had transformed their nation and the world. The crowds on that steamy summer day, six to eight deep along Constitution Avenue, waited hours to pay tribute as the caisson bearing the President\u27s coffin passed by, accompanied by the symbolic riderless horse with Reagan\u27s boots backwards in the stirrups

The Limits of Natural Law: Thomas Rutherforth and the American Legal Tradition

The history of American constitutional jurisprudence has been marked by a persistent fascination with the idea of natural law. This springs first and foremost from the fact that we understand as our constitutional foundation those “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” to which Thomas Jefferson made such eloquent appeal in the Declaration of Independence. Further, American politics since the founding of the republic has been characterized by a commitment, with more or less success, to the simple truth James Madison posited in The Federalist. “Justice,” Madison declared, “is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.”1 Natural law has provided a convenient rhetorical framework for the moral progress of our politics. But natural law understood in what sense? In and of itself, the term natural law is vague and ambiguous; its content is not immediately apparent. As a result, the history of natural law in American political life is a history marked more by the utility of the phrase than by the moral certainty of the idea. It can be claimed by either side in almost any debate. At its deepest level, the idea of natural law that has periodically percolated to the surface of American politics is a confused collection of often contradictory claims. Whether “natural law” is being invoked in the sense of St. Thomas Aquinas or in the sense of Thomas Hobbes is a very important thing to know; the philosophic differences are profound.2 Sorting out those differences is thus essential to understanding the proper relationship of the Constitution to the Sweeping historical tradition of natural law. Implicit in the natural law foundation of the written Constitution is the question of when and how may the people recur to that foundation, to the natural law and natural rights that undergird the constitutional edifice. How is the textual permanence of the written Constitution to be reconciled practically with the philosophic permanence of those self-evident truths of the laws of nature and of nature’s God? More precisely, what role was intended for natural law in interpreting the written Constitution? A useful guide in this inquiry is Thomas Rutherforth, whose Institutes of Natural Law was a work widely read and cited among those of the Founding generation and of the first generation under the Constitution of 1787.3 But Rutherforth’s influence is not merely time-bound; he has been summoned as authority on both sides of the contemporary debated in constitutional theory.

Highly Original (Book Review)

Since his appointment to the United States Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, Justice Antonin Scalia has been (to borrow a felicitous phrase from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) a brooding omnipresence over the constitutional landscape, revered by conservatives and reviled by liberals This first Italian-American justice has electrified American constitutional law (and, thereby, American politics) by his firm and largely unfaltering commitment to the idea that the original meaning of the Constitution is the only legitimate basis for judicial decision. Any other approach, he insists, is nothing less than a standing invitation to judicial arbitrariness and policy-driven decision making