Resisting relocation and reconceptualising authenticity: the experiential and emotional values of the Southbank Undercroft London UK

The tagline, ‘You Can’t Move History: You Can Secure the Future’, encapsulated the battle at the heart of the campaign to retain the Southbank Undercroft skate spot in the light of planned redevelopment of the Southbank Centre, London. The 2013-15 campaign against relocation adopted a position of no compromise and provides a lens through which three key areas of heritage theory and practice can be examined. Firstly, the campaign uses the term found space to reconceptualise authenticity and places a greater emphasis on embodied experiences of, and emotional attachments to, historic urban spaces. Secondly, the paper argues that the concept of found space opens up a discussion surrounding the role of citizen expertise in understanding the experiential and emotional values of historic urban spaces. Finally, the paper considers the wider relevance of found space in terms of reconceptualising authenticity in theory and practice. The paper is accompanied by the award-winning film ‘You Can’t Move History’ which was produced by the research team in collaboration with Paul Richards from Brazen Bunch and directed by skater, turned filmmaker, Winstan Whitter

To regain lost ground at the next election, Labour will need to convince voters that it can deliver greater social justice and security without risking the economy

Commentators have often noticed Keir Starmer’s apparent attempt to win back lost supporters by treating Brexit as if the issue is now finished with and by making appeals to patriotism. Nevertheless, the biggest move Labour needs to make is on the familiar territory of left-right politics: to convince lost supporters that it can deliver greater social justice and security without risking the economy, write Paul Webb and Tim Bale

‘All mouth and no trousers?’ How many Conservative Party members voted for UKIP in 2015 – and why did they do so?

A survey of ordinary members of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party carried out in 2013 revealed that nearly 30% of them would seriously consider voting for the country’s radical right wing populist party (United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)). However, we show that at the general election in 2015, only a very small proportion of them – around 5% of Tory grassroots members – actually did so, driven it seems mainly by alienation from the leadership and David Cameron in particular, as well as, perhaps, by concerns about the Conservative-led government’s austerity policies. However, those party members who did eventually vote for UKIP were still much more likely to have expressed a propensity to vote for it in 2013 than those who did not. Since the Conservative Party has not experienced the same increase in membership as some of its competitors, and since members are an important part of parties’ electoral campaigning, they should avoid alienating those members they do have – something of which Theresa May appears to be aware

Social networkers and careerists: explaining high-intensity activism among British party members

Drawing on survey data on the members of six British parties gathered in the immediate aftermath of the general election of 2015, this article asks what motivates members to engage in high-intensity election campaign activism. It argues that two factors are especially prominent: the aspiration to pursue a career in politics (which only accounts for a small minority of these activists) and becoming integrated into a local social network (which accounts for a much larger proportion). By contrast, members who lack either of these characteristics, but are mainly motivated to join by ideological impulses, largely restrict themselves to low-intensity activity. These findings are likely to be especially pertinent to countries with single-member district electoral systems

Explaining the pro-Corbyn surge in Labour’s membership

In the course of a year and a half, Labour Party membership has increased massively. The number of full members has moved from 190,000 in May 2015 to 515,000 in July 2016 – an influx of 325,000 new members. Monica Poletti, Tim Bale and Paul Webb explore how we can explain the pro-Corbyn surge in this growt

So who really does the donkey work? Comparing the election campaign activity of party members and party supporters

One of the traditional functions of party members is to campaign on behalf of their party at general elections. However, they are not the only people who volunteer for the job. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that non-members who strongly support a party may do even more than those who actually join it. This paper examines how different actors contributed to the electoral campaigns of six parties at the 2015 UK General Election. It uses new survey data covering not only members of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, United Kingdom Independence, Scottish Nationalist, and Green parties but also, firstly, voters who identified themselves as being close to one of those parties but did not formally belong to them and, secondly, those belonging to trade unions officially affiliated to the Labour Party. As well as exploring how much work they do during campaigns, we ask whether the three groups choose different activities and are differently motivated. We find that, at the individual level, party members do more than union members or non-member supporters, and that this is especially true of more intensive forms of activity. We also find that constituency context and political attitudes influence levels of activity, although there is no consistent impact from demographic factors. At the aggregate level, we estimate that the campaign work done by supporters and trade union members may match or even exceed that done by party members

Minority views? Labour members had been longing for someone like Corbyn before he was even on the ballot paper

Recent media reports suggest Labour MPs may be gearing up to move against Jeremy Corbyn. This is supposed to happen before a change in rules could see the number of nominations needed for any would-be candidate to enter a leadership contest reduced. Yet Corbyn was not elected by mistake, explain Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Monica Poletti. A large number of Labour members – whether they joined before or after Corbyn was nominated by MPs – wanted what they got. Persuading them to change their views now they’ve got it will not be easy

Same difference? Female (and male) members of Britain’s political parties

A recent report by the Party Membership Project run by Monica Poletti, Tim Bale and Paul Webb has shown how the membership of Britain’s main political parties is more like to be male, middle aged and middle class. The results of this survey were explored in a discussion with several leading female MPs, which highlighted common concerns about party behaviours, class and gender barriers that reinforce these disparities in participation

Visual motion integration is mediated by directional ambiguities in local motion signals

The output of primary visual cortex (V1) is a piecemeal representation of the visual scene and the response of any one cell cannot unambiguously guide sensorimotor behavior. It remains unsolved how subsequent stages of cortical processing combine (“pool”) these early visual signals into a coherent representation. We (Webb et al., 2007, 2011) have shown that responses of human observers on a pooling task employing broadband, random dot motion can be accurately predicted by decoding the maximum likelihood direction from a population of motion-sensitive neurons. Whereas Amano et al. (2009) found that the vector average velocity of arrays of narrowband, two-dimensional (2-d) plaids predicts perceived global motion. To reconcile these different results, we designed two experiments in which we used 2-d noise textures moving behind spatially distributed apertures and measured the point of subjective equality between pairs of global noise textures. Textures in the standard stimulus moved rigidly in the same direction, whereas their directions in the comparison stimulus were sampled from a set of probability distributions. Human observers judged which noise texture had a more clockwise (CW) global direction. In agreement with Amano and colleagues, observers' perceived global motion coincided with the vector average stimulus direction. To test if directional ambiguities in local motion signals governed perceived global direction, we manipulated the fidelity of the texture motion within each aperture. A proportion of the apertures contained texture that underwent rigid translation and the remainder contained dynamic (temporally uncorrelated) noise to create locally ambiguous motion. Perceived global motion matched the vector average when the majority of apertures contained rigid motion, but with increasing levels of dynamic noise shifted toward the maximum likelihood direction. A class of population decoders utilizing power-law non-linearities can accommodate this flexible pooling