Changing Politics: Towards a New Democracy

In October 2014 the PSA joint-funded a Consultation event ‘Changing Politics – Towards a New Democracy’ with St. George’s House. The Chair of the PSA, Professor Matthew Flinders, chaired the event which brought together participants from a range of fields (including academics, think tankers and practitioners in several policy areas). Today, St. George’s House has published a report which highlights the main themes emerging from the discussion as well as some conclusions and recommendations. It identifies several areas where changes are urgently needed to reinvigorate democracy. The report concludes that to fully succeed in addressing the growth of political apathy and disengagement, parties and leaders must forget their differences and join citizens, academics, charities and others to address this problem with all available energy and resources

Instances and connectors : issues for a second generation process language

This work is supported by UK EPSRC grants GR/L34433 and GR/L32699Over the past decade a variety of process languages have been defined, used and evaluated. It is now possible to consider second generation languages based on this experience. Rather than develop a second generation wish list this position paper explores two issues: instances and connectors. Instances relate to the relationship between a process model as a description and the, possibly multiple, enacting instances which are created from it. Connectors refers to the issue of concurrency control and achieving a higher level of abstraction in how parts of a model interact. We believe that these issues are key to developing systems which can effectively support business processes, and that they have not received sufficient attention within the process modelling community. Through exploring these issues we also illustrate our approach to designing a second generation process language.Postprin

The coalition and constitutional reform

The author considers the impact of the coalition government formed in Britain in May 2010 on the process of constitutional reform. Looking at the formation of a peacetime coalition following a hung Parliament as a constitutional innovation in itself and reviewing the changes proposed by that government in the areas of Parliamentary voting and equalising of constituencies, fixed-term Parliaments and referendum on the alternative vote method of election. Article by Vernon Bogdanor (Research Professor, Institute of Contemporary History, King’s College London; Emeritus Gresham Professor of Law; Fellow of the British Academy) based on a lecture delivered at the IALS on May 23, 2011 - published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London

The Conservative dilemma

This article examines the organisational and ideological differences between the British Right and the French Right, from a historical perspective, in order to assess the Conservatives' inner tensions over several issues, including Europe, the nature and scope of the crisis which they currently experience, and the solutions offered to them

Winston Churchill as a One Nation Conservative

Paradoxically the social reforms which entitle Churchill to the title of One Nation Conservative were enacted when he was a member of a Liberal Cabinet after 1908. Indeed, it was partly because he believed that the Conservatives had ceased to be a party of social reform that he crossed the floor to the Liberals in 1904.Churchill pioneered the welfare state – measures such as labour exchanges, minimum wages in sweated trades, and the world’s first system of unemployment insurance. All this was in his words “the untrodden field of politics”. To help him, he brought into government in an advisory role, William Beveridge, later to be author of the famous report on social insurance. Churchill is best remembered of course for his leadership in war from 1940 to 1945. But in 1951, he had a second innings as peacetime prime minister. Here too he made his contribution to One Nation Conservatism, not by action as had been the case before 1914, but by inaction. He preserved the welfare state measures enacted by Attlee’s Labour government after 1945, rather than dismantling them as some Conservatives had wished. His peacetime government cemented his reputation as a One Nation Conservative