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When New Labour were elected in 1997, the party’s leader, Tony Blair, claimed the dawn of radical labour market reforms that would substantially reduce long-term unemployment and welfare dependency. This thesis is an evaluation of New Labour’s active labour market policy (ALMP), and focuses on the three central components of that policy agenda: the New Deal programmes, Tax Credit programmes and the National Minimum Wage. These reforms were targeted at key client groups such as the young (defined as those aged 18 to 25 year olds), the long-term unemployed, those aged over 50, the disabled and lone-parents. This thesis adopts Economics of Conventions (EC) as its focal theory, and uses a range of quantitative methods to analyse official labour market data while drawing into question the trajectories of improvement found in the official statistics. It also provides a systematic review of existing evaluative research including that conducted by the Department for Work and Pensions, Low Pay Commission and HM Treasury. This thesis found that rates of unemployment declined while New Labour were in power, arguably as a result of strong economic growth but potentially as a result of their ALMP. Rates of economic activity and inactivity did not significantly change, even after the introduction of additional obligations on lone parents. However, due to the introduction of programmes like the New Deal for Young People, individuals were re-categorised, drastically altering labour market statistics and trends. Indeed, when it comes to the justification and evaluation of their ALMP, New Labour made clear moral judgements about ‘the deserving poor’ and ‘the undeserving poor’ based on links between rights and responsibilities of benefit claimants. Indeed, the economic policies of New Labour continued and promoted neo-liberal precepts of labour market management, i.e. they focused on individual behaviour and personal responsibility, at the expense of potentially more effective policy alternatives.

This thesis examines how married couples bought and created a modern home for their families in suburban Glasgow between 1945-1975. New homeowners were on the cusp of the middle-classes, buying in a climate of renters. As they progressed through the family lifecycle women’s return to work meant they became more comfortably ensconced within the middle-classes. Engaged with a process of homemaking through consumption and labour, couples transformed their houses into homes that reflected themselves and their social status. The interior of the home was focused on as a site of social relations. Marriage in the suburbs was one of collaboration as each partner performed distinct gender roles. The idea of a shared home was investigated and the story of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ emerged from both testimony and contemporary literature. This thesis considers decision-making, labour and leisure to show the ways in which experiences of home were gendered. What emerged was that women’s work as everyday and mundane was overlooked and undervalued while husband’s extraordinary contributions in the form of DIY came to the fore. The impact of wider culture intruded upon the ‘private’ home as we see they ways in which the position of women in society influences their relationship to the home and their family. In the suburbs of post-war Glasgow women largely left the workforce to stay at home with their children. Mothers popped in and out of each other houses for tea and a blether, creating a homosocial network that was sociable and supportive unique to this time in their lives and to this historical context. Daily life was negotiated within the walls of the modern home. The inter-war suburbs of Glasgow needed modernising to post-war standards of modern living. ‘Modern’ was both an aesthetic and an engagement with new technologies within the house. Both middle and working-class practices for room use were found through the keeping of a ‘good’ or best room and the determination of couples to eat in their small kitchenettes. As couples updated their kitchen, the fitted kitchen revealed contemporary notions of modern décor, as kitchens became bright yellow with blue Formica worktops. The modern home was the evolution of existing ideas of modern combined with new standards of living. As Glasgow homeowners constructed their modern home what became evident was that this was a shared process and as a couple they placed their children central to all aspects of their lives to create not only a modern home, but that this was first and foremost a family home.

Over the past three decades, historians of the long eighteenth century have emphasized both the stability of the British state and the progressive growth of national sentiment over the period. The enormous mobilization of manpower during the French Wars is often characterized as the culmination of this evolution. Arming to fight the French, it is argued, was a formative process, which encouraged greater social cohesion, and forged an overarching sense of national identity. This thesis will contend that the ‘Nation-in-Arms’ interpretation has been constructed at a considerable remove from the culture and lives of common people. Adopting a ‘history from below’ approach, it will re-evaluate the popular experience of mass arming, by focusing upon two relatively neglected branches of the armed forces, the army and militia. Three central themes have been selected for investigation: The recruitment process, the experience of soldiering in the home garrison, and the role of armed force in maintaining public order. It will be shown that, between 1790 and 1805, the government was faced by a mixture of popular ambivalence and hostility towards the raising of the army and militia. It will be demonstrated that economic privation was the preeminent cause of enlistment and that, once recruited, soldiers and militiamen retained their working-class attitudes, and viewed their service primarily as a contractual form of labour. The extent to which armed service was viewed as conditional and negotiable will be emphasized through an examination of the military crimes of mutiny and desertion. Finally, an analysis of military deployments during industrial protests and food riots will demonstrate that, during the French Wars, the state became much more reliant upon armed force for maintaining public order. By adopting a ‘history from below’ approach, the limits of social stability and social cohesion will be tested, and a richer, more variegated, understanding of the popular experience of mass-arming will be offered.

This thesis examines the lives of poor children living in Shropshire between 1834 and 1870. They lived in three different environments: in the workhouse, as part of a labourer’s family, or as part of a family in receipt of out-relief. The standard of living of the families of agricultural workers, the predominant form of employment in most of Shropshire, was very low, with wages too low to provide adequate levels of nutrition. Families in receipt of out-relief had an even lower standard of living than those of agricultural labourers, because levels of out-relief were lower than labourers’ wages. This thesis also examines the life that children led if they were inmates of the workhouse. Children in the workhouse received an education, the quality of which varied across the county, but was very good at the Bridgnorth workhouse school, latterly known as South East Shropshire District School. Poor children living at home would have had limited opportunity for education because of the cost. Medical care was organised by the Poor Law Union for indoor and outdoor paupers, and provided free. It was not provided for independent families. Apprenticeships were satisfactorily organised by the Shropshire Unions, though some apprentices were inappropriately placed in mines. Amounts of out-relief differed across Unions with those Unions committed to the use of the workhouse ungenerous in their payments when compared to Unions taking a positive view of out-relief. For poor children, life in the workhouse, despite its disadvantages, provided greater material benefits than a childhood spent in a poor labourer’s family or in a family on out-relief.

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The Covenanting Movement was essentially composed of radicals and conservatives. Radicals were in a minority among the noble estate, but had a strong base among the gentry and the burgesses. In addition, pragmatic Royalists were Royalists who accepted and subscribed compulsory Covenanting oaths and obligations in order to secure admission to public office, particularly Parliament. The radical wing of the Covenanting Movement dominated parliamentary proceedings from 1639-1646. A radical political and constitutional agenda had been formulated prior to the 1639 Parliament. Such an agenda was enacted in the Scottish Constitutional Settlement of 1640-41. The radicals similarly-orchestrated the calling of the 1643 Convention of Estates and the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant. Whilst there was a rapprochement between radical and conservative nobles in 1645-1646, the cutting edge of the radicals was maintained by the gentry and burgesses and the emergence of a Scottish Commons can be detected. The crisis over the position of the king in 1646-1647 led to the ascendancy of conservatism among the Scottish Estates, 1647-1648. The defeat of the Engagement Army in the summer of 1648 led to a coup d'etat in Scotland and the instillation of a radical regime which held power unchallenged until the defeat at the Battle of Dunbar in September 1650. Thereafter there was a patriotic accommodation between the various political factions in Scotland in light of the growing threat to national independence from Cromwellian military forces. Following military defeat at the hands of Cromwell, Scotland eventually became incorporated within the Commonwealth and Protectorate. In political terms, the continuance of an "Argyll interest" can be observed. The Restoration witnessed the rescinding of Covenanting legislation. although Covenanting procedures were adopted, rather than abandoned. Whilst the Restoration witnessed the reassertion of noble power. a significant political role for the gentry was still maintained. That the gentry and burgesses provided the political backbone of the Covenanting Movement was reflected in the complicated committee structure of Parliament. 1639-1651. In addition. non-parliamentary gentry and burgesses were regularly involved in the proceedings of both parliamentary session and interval committees. Detailed parliamentary procedures and regulations were established in 1640-41 and continued to be modified according to circumstances throughout the 1640s and continued to 1651. The Restoration Parliament of 1661 saw a return to more traditional parliamentary regulation, particularly under the control of the crown and crown royal appointees.

This thesis provides a detailed account and analysis of Anglo-French relations in the Levant and their impact on the more general relationship between the British and the Free French during the important year of 1943. It aims to examine and explain how the Levant, traditionally an area of mutual suspicion and rivalry, created and accentuated discord and dissension between wartime Allies and , on occasion , even came perilously close to rupturing their relations. The introduction provides a survey of Anglo-French relations in the region as a backdrop against which the period covered by the thesis must be viewed. Chapters I-IV examine two policies pursued by Britain in the interests of the war effort, the persuasion of the Free French to honour their independence pledge to Syria and Lebanon and the encouragement of the formation of a unified French movement in North Africa. Arising from these policies, the mounting tensions between the Foreign Office and its principal representative in the Levant and between Churchill and de Gaulle are explored. The influence of deteriorating AngloFrench relations in the Levant on the Churchill-de Gaulle relationship is considered as are the high-level AngloFrench discussions in the summer of 1943 which acknowledged the need for better co-operation in the Levant. Chapters V and VI investigate the increasing Bri tish involvement in Levant politics, which resulted in the establishment of strongly nationalist and anti-French governments in both Syria and Lebanon. Chapters VII-XII are concerned exclusively with events in the Lebanon during late October and November 1943 which provoked a major crisis in Anglo-French relations. Attention is focused on the efforts of the Foreign Office and their French counterparts to defuse the crisis and to lessen its overall impact, and is contrasted with the intransigence displayed by Churchill and de Gaulle and with the belligerence of both French and British authorities on the spot. The final chapters deal with the efforts made to heal the breach in the Anglo-French relationship by both sides and the attempt by both to re-evaluate and reform their policies in the Levant. The troubled course of the AngloFrench alliance in the Levant throughout the remainder of the war, including the crisis in Syria in May and June 1945, is examined in a brief epilogue.

This thesis examines the role of British newspaper coverage of Africa in the process of decolonisation between 1957 and 1960. It considers events in the Gold Coast/Ghana, Kenya, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, South Africa, and the Belgian Congo/Congo. It offers an extensive analysis of British newspaper coverage of Africa during this period. Concurrently, it explores British journalists’ interactions with one another as well as with the British Government, British MPs, African nationalists, white settler communities, their presses, and African and European settler governments, whose responses to coverage are gauged and evaluated throughout. The project aims, firstly, to provide the first broad study of the role of the British press in, and in relation to, Africa during the period of ‘rapid decolonisation’. Secondly, it offers a reassessment of the assumption that the British metropolitan political and cultural context to the end of empire in Africa was extraneous to the process. Thirdly, it aims to contribute to a growing literature on non-governmental metropolitan perspectives on the end of empire.

Despite their use in every British general election of the twentieth and twentieth first century, the political poster remains largely unconsidered by the majority of historians working in the field of British politics. This thesis is the first study dedicated entirely to the posters role in British elections. Through five election case studies, the work contextualises the poster within the broader narratives of election culture. Unusually for studies of political communication, it is the type and content of the communication – namely the poster – that forms the central focus of each chapter. Each of which seeks to locate the production, content and display of posters parties produced for an election, within the broader landscape of that elections particular culture. Understandably given the structure of the thesis, chronologically long, but heavily focused on specific events, the conclusions are at times pertinent to a particular moment. By studying communication in this way, however, by locating posters in one election and understanding them as products of the culture that produced them, the research expands on and questions some of the key totems that define research into British political communication. Moreover, the thesis positions the poster not as an archaic dying form of communication; one replaced by those electronic media that have been of far greater interest to academics, namely television and more latterly online platforms. Rather, as argued here, parties’ use of the poster has constantly been in a state of flux. Ultimately, posters are objects that are constantly being re-imagined for each new age.