SPIRE: School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy @ Keele University

Written by Dr Barry Ryan, SPIRE.


People often go quiet when you tell them you study international relations. It seems something vast and impossible. Bad enough they think trying to work out the politics of the country but the politics of the entire world! A taxi driver in Dublin once asked if I knew the names of the prime minister and president in every country. He then proceeded to name out as many as he could remember. Taxi drivers in Dublin spend a lot of time on their own listening to the news and are famous for being garrulous know-alls. When he had finally exhausted his list – it included Stalin, Ronald Reagan. Maggie Thatcher and George Bush Jr. – I admitted that he did far better than I would have done. Not only did he do better by being able to name more statesmen and women than I but he also gave the exercise a degree of absurdity that I would never have thought of including.


Those who study international relations are constantly faced with trying to understand the absurdity of the world. It is a tragic absurdity but nevertheless world politics confounds rational analysis. It happens in a vast deep wide space and it distorts time, plays with logic and haunts our dreams of the future. In short, international relations is a great drama. Had I the opportunity to relive that Dublin taxi ride and have the perfect retort to his famous list I would tell him that international relations is the study of real drama. War, death, disease, genocide and raw power are the celebrities in the big brother we watch when we read our books and evaluate its episodes in our discussions. But the true absurdity of it all comes in the way we try to deny the fact that we are the big brother; that we are participants in the show that we are watching, We are picking our winners and losers, empathizing with some and not with others. We are distant observers but we are also politically a part of the drama, And so international relations is not only about Cameron and Putin and Gaddafi, it’s truly about everything and how every human on earth experiences this everything, Absurd, as I said.


Prior to being a lecturer in IR I worked for a number of years in Namibia as a development worker. Namibia made me fascinated by international relations. It gave me the necessary curiosity. And, as though in a film, this fascination happened on the very first day I landed. Besides the tangible heat and the gorgeously alien smell of desert, the most striking memory of Namibia occurred during a meal on my first night in a village called Omaruru. The mayor had invited me to dinner but not in an official capacity – she was a friend of a friend. It was September 1997, exactly fourteen years ago – and Lady Diana the Princess of Wales was being buried on live tv. There was I thousands of miles from home, on the edge of Namib Desert, south western Africa, and my hosts were utterly transfixed by the images on the television coming from London. Here I stood amongst them, wanting to learn about Africa and all I could see was it staring back at my culture. In the mayor’s sitting room, with her husband and children I stood watching the drama and taking part at the same time. This then is what international relations is all about. It’s the sifting through the most extreme, banal and ridiculous events that are never as distant as they appear. It’s the realization that these events are specific and unique, and that the patterns we draw to give them sense come from our own experiences and expectations. We are in a way enslaved to what we know, and what we believe. If international relations asks us to do anything, it asks that we try to expand our horizons, to think in a way we haven’t tried before in order to try to understand what is happening. It’s about much more than presidents and prime ministers.


It is now autumn and the new academic year is about to begin. Looking at last years lecture notes I marvel at how much has changed in a year. Who knows what’s going to happen in the next? Who knows what events will anger us or make us feel sad? What’s going to happen? What wars revolutions, natural disasters or peace treaties are going to attract our attention, change our lives, change the way we see our lives? Most probably, only a Dublin taxi driver could tell.

By Dr Brian Doherty (11.11.10)

 Around 250 Keele students and staff were on last Wednesday's education cuts demo (10.11.10) – a surprisingly high turnout for our small and politically quiet university. For most this was their first demonstration, a student rite of passage perhaps – but this was different in many ways from my own participation as a left-wing student in past protests. This time there were hardly any Trot paper sellers and no one asked for solidarity with Nicaragua. Make no mistake there was no shortage of political passion and ideas – about justice and fairness, but no sense that this was part of an ongoing ideological struggle. Little of the commentary in the media on this demonstration has focused on its most remarkable feature, which is the willingness of the current generation of students to take action on behalf of future generations.



So, what did we learn from our day of doing politics in the street? That you can put in a lot of hours and feel that you are just one of those making up the numbers. The Keele coaches arrived very late; by the time we had joined the march it was almost over and we hardly got to walk more than a few hundred yards. We also learned our own experience can be completely at odds with the news. We took part in a noisy and good natured protest, but the real story according to the papers was that a peaceful protest had turned ugly. No it hadn't – for us and for all but a few hundred protesters the protest started and finished peacefully.
But the occupation of Millbank, damage to the building and the injuries to police and protesters became the story and as someone who researches and teaches on protest there was much that was familiar in the way that this played out. First was the claim that non-students (probably 'anarchists') must have been responsible, although it now seems that most, maybe all, of those who went into the building were school, FE and university students. Most protests involving young people get reported in this way – the young are supposedly impressionable, easily led, vulnerable to manipulation and simply less sensible than those of us with children, mortgages and pensions. But as more details emerged there were other, more complex, stories. The crowd that was supportive of the students getting onto the roof was hostile to the one person who dropped or threw the fire extinguisher, and so, was not merely an irrational mob. Also since Millbank was targeted because it was where the Tories had their HQ, it is remarkable (and a relief) that the 'thugs' don't seem to have attacked any actual Tories.



It struck me that more experienced protesters would have been able to get into the building without using violence – and might have been able to do something more interesting without smashing up the building. For instance, if the aim was to stay – why not prepare for an occupation with lock-ons and supplies – making that roof a site for an ongoing argument about the cuts? But the skills of non-violent direct action (NVDA) are developed through practice and in movements that plan carefully. Skilled NVDAers don't go into the wrong building first. Any planning and co-ordination for the Millbank occupation was probably of the kind that says – 'we'll see if we can get into the building and then see what happens.'



Was it all spoiled by a few hundred folks then? Yes, and no. Yes in that people were injured and the violence became the story but no in that good consequences can sometimes come from bad actions. The surprise combination of the largest student protest for decades and the anger expressed in the mini-riot at Millbank has changed the perception that the cuts are being accepted. Until now most people have probably felt that the cuts would not affect them. None of the main political parties has any credibility on student fees or wider public sector cuts, but it needed groups with organisation and resources like the NUS and UCU to kick-start something. It's hard to say whether we will now see a build-up of opposition but an indication that we might came in the unlikely setting of a presentation by Cheshire PE teachers that I attended the night after the London demo. They run a Schools Sports Partnership which over 10 years of volunteer work backed by government-funding has built up a fantastic programme linking school students with sports clubs and providing them with coaching and other qualifications – a great example of what the Big Society might actually mean in practice. It became apparent, however, that this was all about to disappear as Schools Sports Partnerships were a casualty of the 'Bonfire of the Quangos' announced in the summer and many of those speaking that night would lose their jobs. But there was a petition, a campaign and plans for a march. I don't know how much of this is going on in other places where the cuts are about to bite, but if the PE teachers are mobilising, the government should be worried.

By Hannah Gascoigne (NKCF Chair 09/10) and Lauren Proctor (NKCF Deputy Chair Political 09/10) 22.06.10


Michael Jordan's comment about basketball is also true of politics. In politics, much as in sport, those who want to win are the ones who make it happen. This is not a piece about the wonders of the Conservative Party's victory, or partial victory depending how you look at it, but a personal account by two Conservative Party student activists who wanted to make it happen in Newcastle – under – Lyme. As students of politics at Keele we think our experience is relevant for other students whatever party they support. Shouting at the TV during the leaders' debates or even blogging about policy on Facebook is not enough to make a difference. You need to get out and campaign.


Sat in the Newcastle Conservative Association parliamentary candidate selection meeting in November 2008, neither of us could have foreseen quite how much impact the election campaign would have on our lives. The idea that an election campaign is only fought in the final few (intensely media focused) months before polling day is completely ridiculous to anyone who has been involved. Our candidate Robert Jenrick began his campaign from day one, nearly eighteen months before the eventual polling day. In the early campaign, the focus was on getting Robert’s face seen and known by the electorate within Newcastle –under – Lyme. This meant leaflets (lots of them!) mostly delivered by hand by members of the Association and Newcastle and Keele Conservative Future (NKCF). Leafleting is not fun work. It involves putting seemingly endless literature through seemingly endless letterboxes in all weathers, often with only the promise of a pint in a warm pub at the end of the day.


As the election moved closer the focus moved on to canvassing, which involves asking the electorate to divulge their voting intentions. At times it can be quite intimidating, especially for the many of us who had never been canvassing before, but in some ways can be quite enjoyable. One elderly lady refused to divulge her voting preference until our canvasser found her cat. After much fruitless searching for the cat, the lady told the canvasser that she had not decided who she was voting for anyway.


With our dissertations handed in on the 5th May we managed a few hours much needed sleep before the 4:30am wake up for the dawn raid on polling day. The dawn raid involved more leafleting and, after a quick breakfast break, more knocking on doors to check that those people who had said they would vote for us had gone out and voted. This process carried on until 9pm when we were granted a short break before reconvening at the count at 11:30.


There, we watched the boxes being opened and after spot surveys it looked like a close result. In fact, we had lost but it was by a narrow margin.: our campaign had reduced Labour's majority from 8,108 to 1,552. Other than winning the seat, this was the best possible result we could have hoped for. At the count that night someone who had been campaigning for another party said to us “I’ve been campaigning for a month, I’m really tired”. I think we were fully justified in telling them that: “that’s nothing, try doing it for eighteen months”.


To those of you who wanted and wished for change at the 2010 election, whatever your party preference, did you get the result you wanted? If not, ask yourself: next time how can I get involved? How can I be more influential in the politics and values I believe in?

Written by Professor Andrew Dobson

How can Politics lecturers be objective if they support a particular political party? This is a question that we are often asked – particularly by parents and guardians on Open Days. And I’ve asked myself the question a number of times, because I’ve been a member of the Green Party for a few years and wrote the Party’s General Election Manifesto this year. It’s hard to be more committed to a Party’s politics than that. (Although we must also remember our recently-retired American politics expert, Mike Tappin, who spent five years as a Labour Euro MP).


One response is to resist the premise of the question and ask: should we be objective when we teach? There is a school of thought which suggests that students respect lecturers much more when they (the lecturers) show their true colours rather than hide behind a pseudo-balanced façade. And most lecturers know that ‘taking a stance’ can be a useful pedagogic tool when challenging students into a response.


I don’t think this works as an argument – or at least not beyond the occasional tactical use of ‘stance-taking’. If all we did was promulgate the party line we’d be no different to a politician in the House of Commons or on BBC TV’s Question Time. Students rightly expect something different – a fuller, more balanced, more rounded account and analysis of the political options.


So the question remains: will students get this fuller and more rounded analysis from a politically-committed lecturer? To some degree the answer depends on the lecturer, but there’s nothing in principle that stops her or him from giving a balanced view. In fact I’d go further and say that the committed lecturer is in one of the best positions to do so.

This is because you only get to a committed view if you’ve carefully considered all the alternatives. In particular this involves confronting the very best arguments that ‘the opposition’ can put up. It’s a kind of dialectical process, and the strongest conclusion is the one reached after confronting the strongest arguments. Then it’s just a question of being honest in the classroom and making sure that every argument is given a fair run for its money.

We also have to remember that lecturers have authority over students in a way that politicians don't. Politicians are trying to persuade us that their view and only their view is correct whereas lecturers have to respect that students may have a different point of view to their own. Students look to lecturers as figures in authority wither expert knowledge, which puts a special obligation on us to respect views that are opposed to our own.


And, of course it helps to have a skeptical frame of mind (not the same as a cynical one). There’s no political position that’s unassailable, and it always helps to be on the lookout for flaws and weak spots in one’s own position. I think that ethos is the nearest we can get to objectivity in teaching.

Perhaps that’s the main difference between lecturing and electioneering: when you’re electioneering you hope you won’t be asked any hard questions, and when you’re lecturing you hope you will be. And the beauty of it is dealing with the hard questions in the seminar room or the lecture hall makes it easier to handle the ones thrown at you in election hustings.

By Dr. Helen Parr


A Liberal-Conservative coalition government is an unprecedented step in British politics. As Professor Andrew Gamble pointed out in his talk at Keele last week, there has never previously been a formal coalition government in peacetime in Britain: 1918-22 was predominantly the Conservatives supporting Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George; 1931 was a Conservative government with a few Labour and Liberal ministers and 1974 saw a minority Labour government with a further general election called later that year. What’s more, the Liberal Democrats share a heritage predominantly with the British left. It was disquiet with the Labour party of the 1970s and early 1980s that led to the formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981, the merger of which with the Liberals later in that decade created the modern Liberal Democrats. The current coalition thus owes everything to the visions of David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Cameron wanted to be Prime Minister, of course, but he also sought to consolidate his own modernisation of the Conservative party. Clegg, once it became apparent the scale of the concessions the Conservatives were willing to make, saw his opportunity to press for historic Liberal Democrat goals: greater civil and individual liberty, alongside parliamentary and electoral reform.


So, will it work? Well, it depends upon what one wishes it to do. But, for it genuinely to usher in a new era of British politics, then it must succeed in introducing constitutional reform. Liberal Democrats wary of the coalition may be mollified by advances in civil liberties, and attracted by Vince Cable’s potential influence in banking reform, but they are unlikely to tolerate the deal for a longer period unless there is significant advance in this area. There are promising signs. The coalition agreement promises to bring forward the Wright Committee recommendations in full. These recommendations would give more power to parliament over the conduct and management of parliamentary business and scrutiny of legislation. It also heralds a committee to examine reform of the House of Lords, with the aim to establishing a mainly or fully elected second chamber, on the basis of PR. The introduction of a fixed term parliament further helps to diminish the power of the executive; although the provision that parliament can only be dissolved upon a vote of 55% of the House appears to make it harder to hold the government to account through a no confidence motion, trampling over the former convention that 50% plus one was enough to topple a government.


It is over electoral reform, however, where the radical possibilities of the coalition will be tested most severely. The Lib Dem election manifesto pledged to introduce proportional representation via the Single Transferable Vote. The coalition agreement promises to hold a referendum on whether to introduce not STV, but the Alternative Vote. The Alternative Vote is more similar to the existing system of first past the post: one single member is elected per constituency, but voters are allowed to rank their preferences. If there is no majority for a first preference candidate, second and subsequent preferences from the losing candidate(s) are re-allocated until a majority is reached. AV therefore ensures that all MPs have a majority of constituents favouring them, but it is not proportional. A third or minor party will not win seats based upon their share of the vote, but will have to compete, as they currently do, for outright victory.




In other words, if the referendum agrees to change the voting system – and how the referendum will be conducted will be a major area for debate – the Lib Dems will still face a tremendous difficulty at the 2015 election, assuming that the government makes it that far. AV could be seen as a first step towards more radical reform: but how will this be attained? By 2015, the Lib Dems will most likely have to compete against the Conservatives and Labour in a voting system no more likely to favour them than the current one. Depending then upon the positions of Conservatives and Labour towards further electoral reform – and Labour may come out in favour of proportional representation – the Lib Dems could find themselves torn. How this will play out is extremely difficult to foresee, but also very important for the Lib Dems. If this central reform does not manifest, the Lib Dems could find themselves crushed.

By Professor Andy Dobson


At 6am on 7th May 2010, something happened that has never happened before in UK parliamentary history – a member of the Green Party was elected to the Westminster parliament. Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party and candidate in the Brighton Pavilion constituency, just beat off the challenge of the Labour Party candidate to squeeze into Westminster by a little over 1000 votes. In a first-past-the-post electoral system that notoriously militates against small parties this is quite an achievement – tempered by the realization that overall the Green Party vote actually went down compared to 2005 levels. Lucas’s success is down to a number of factors: her own capacities, some excellent local organizing during the campaign (the Party had 200 volunteers getting the vote out on election day), a local campaign that spoke to some key issues in Brighton, and a strong local base of elected councillors.

I spent the two days previous to election day leafleting houses in the constituency and manning stalls in the town centre. Having stood for Parliament myself and experienced the isolation that small party candidates can feel, it was quite a thing to see Green Party stickers and banners in windows far outnumbering those of other parties. If the election had been on a poster count, Lucas would have won by a street.


Another interesting factor was the palpable sense on the street that the Party is slowly shaking off its ‘single-issue’ reputation. The Green Party has never only been a party of the environment though that’s the impression it has sometimes given (and the media have been happy to go along with this). We took a deliberate decision to put jobs and the economy first in this year’s manifesto, and to put climate change way down the batting order (page 33 if memory serves). A number of media commentators picked up on this change of emphasis, and I hope that the Party keeps banging away at this shift of priorities. (Though it’s not really a shift – more an explicit recognition that economy and environment are two sides of the same coin rather than two separate issues).


So a glass ceiling has been breached. What next? So much still depends on proportional representation. If I had a quid for every time someone’s said to a Green Party candidate, ‘Great that you’re standing! (But I won’t be voting for you because it’s a wasted vote)’, I’d be a wealthy man. So far on the PR front the Libservative coalition doesn’t look too promising. The best we’re going to get is a referendum on the Alternative Vote system, with the majority partner in the coalition campaigning against it. This is not – I think - what people who voted Lib Dem were hoping for.

Absent a proper PR system it’s hard to see the Green Party making big inroads into the Westminster parliament, though there’ll be plenty of work going into the target constituencies of Norwich South and Lewisham in the months and years to come. Green Party success is likely to continue in local elections, where the party now has over a hundred councillors at various levels. And they get re-elected too, which shows that when the party has a chance to put its ideas into action, people like what they see.

So watch this space – and in the meantime, expect to see Caroline Lucas appearing even more regularly on BBC’s Question Time.

By Dr Stephen Quilley

No Portillo moment then…just a bitter Lembit. I can’t imagine that Edward would have had the good humour to appear on Have I Got News for You on the night of his political Waterloo (But then he was never nearly married to a Cheeky Girl). The strange thing is that this is all turning out to be pretty interesting. Here I am staying up late every night, glued to New 24, sucking up the punditry, shouting at the TV. I can’t help myself. This really is as good as the X Factor.



It is certainly compelling human drama. And with the Euro-crisis and all, Shirley Williams is perhaps not wide of the mark referring to a ‘phoney war’ and the ‘calm before the storm’. There appears to be no doubt that another economic meltdown could be just round the corner and that a great deal depends on how ‘the markets’ react to the new government, when it finally appears.


So is Britain really facing its most dangerous crisis since 1940? Well that very much depends on your time horizons. Since individual Britons rarely live longer than 100 years, it is perhaps reasonable that the box marked ‘possible crises confronting Britain’ includes wars, trade disputes, political implosion, ‘loss of seat at the high table’ – but systematically excludes processes working on evolutionary or geological time scales ( e.g. the next ice age). Since ‘Britain’ as a political entity goes back a couple or ten centuries depending on your history book, it is perhaps less reasonable that the political memory struggles to extend back 50 years and that the habitual S.W.O.T. (‘strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats’) analysis framing even the most strategic decisions of our political elders and betters, never extends beyond the next election. A political-anthropologist from a more patient and longer-lived species, perhaps reporting on the election for a Galactic version of Panorama, would surely point out that whilst the imminent unravelling of the pound might be big news over the electoral cycle, it is not the only nor the biggest black cloud on the horizon. Within the life-time of first time voters, demand for energy is likely to outstrip supply, and the end of cheap energy is likely to present our global petro-civilisation with an enormous and conceivably terminal shock. It is not at all clear that technology will deliver us from this problem. What certainly is the case is that with economic growth in Asia and Africa driving demand for energy to ever more precipitous heights, it will be very difficult (Lovelock says impossible) to prevent the burning of every last gramme of available fossil fuel – from China’s enormous reserves of dirty coal, to the tar sands of Alberta. Now if that happens, we may learn the real meaning of crisis. So coming back to Shirley Williams and the rest of the arm-chair pundits (of whom by the way Portillo is one of the best, and the nicest – Is it possible that Edward missed an opportunity for redemption of some kind?), the problem is not just their time horizons, but the unit of analysis. The real crisis affecting Britons will not be in their capacity as citizens of a nation-state, but as citizens of an integrated but vulnerable global civilisation, and possibly in their capacity as human beings. If human activity triggers rapid climate change of more than 3 degrees, it is quite possible that civilisation will crash; possible that humanity might disappear in its wake; and possible even that life on earth may not be sufficiently resilient to recover [read the last chapter in Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees if you want to kill yourself].


So why then, I hear you ask, do you give a figurative fig about the outcome of this election? Because as Will Hutton said, this really is the most important event in our political history for the last hundred years. If Clegg holds out for Proportional Representation then it is possible that we may end up with an electoral system in which radical diagnoses, ideas and prescriptions at least get an airing. We may end up with a political culture mature enough to deliver bad news. It might be that we get not just one Green MP, but half a dozen, perhaps even a couple of competing green parties, representing very different policy options. Imagine different green caucuses in Parliament, making rhetorical alliances with different bits of the Labour, Liberal and Conservative Parties and engaging in a real debate about whether we need a crash programme of nuclear power generation and geo-engineering projects to buy some time for a more fundamental accommodation with the biosphere and the climate. That is what young folk used to refer to as 'heavy'! But it is this sort of practical forward thinking that should occupy every waking hour of our political class. Currently we can’t have that kind of debate because Westminster is an exclusive club in which members are chaperoned and arguments pre-scripted. Imagine Parliament sitting in 1938 and Churchill being unable even to mention a possible crisis brewing in Sudetenland. Imagine Hitler being banished as an item for discussion with MPs forced instead to consider the price of eggs. That is the situation we are in now with regard to climate change. So let us pray that Clegg holds his nerve and blows the system open.