Book Notes
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00208 |
| Published date | 01 June 1999 |
| Date | 01 June 1999 |
| Subject Matter | Book Notes |
Book Notes
British Politics
Lynn Bennie, Jack Brand and James Mitchell, How Scotland Votes (Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1997), xi 174 pp., £40.00 ISBN 0 71904510 X, £10.99
pbk ISBN 0 7190 4511 8.
This, one might say, is a book of two halves. The second ± actually only 63 out of 160 pages ± is a
useful and interesting analysis of Scottish voting behaviour over the period since 1979, making
particular use of the authors' 1992 Scottish Election Study. The authors show the continued, but
declining, relevance of class and religion in explaining the Scottish vote, but demonstrate the
importance of voters' perceptions of Scotland's poor economic standing relative to Britain as a
whole, and the rising support for constitutional change over eighteen years of rule by a party
perceived to be clearly pro-English. The ®rst half of the book is intended to set the scene by
outlining the governmental and administrative arrangements for Scotland and by discussing the
SNP and the Scottish wings of the three major British parties. But this part of the book is too long
for a contextualizing introduction,and too super®cial to hold one's interest. It becomes a somewhat
tedious plod ± not helped by being rather poorly written. It would have been better to curtail this
part fairly drastically and to have extended the discussion in the second part ± which is clearly
where the authors' real interests lie.
GORDON HANDS
Lancaster University
Rodney Brazier, Ministers of the Crown (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997),
xxxv 379 pp., £45.00 ISBN 0 19 825988 3.
In a study on governmentfrom a constitutional lawyer, Rodney Brazier bringstogether much that is
otherwise available but in an accessible and coherentform; a study that is informed by a reasonable
balance between law and government, even if, for good reason, politics is rather neglected. This is
not another `Introduction': Brazier rightly assumes much prior knowledge of British history and
government. Rather, it is a readable `handbook' for teaching and research, from which advanced
students can also bene®t much. There is sequential logic to the book within which the constant
theme is handled well with an eye on the larger story. There are the occasional forays into related
topics, speci®cally that of the Prime Minister, but otherwise everything is closely relevant to the
chosen theme. Arguably more forayswould have been useful, especially on the rules of the Supreme
Court and the Supreme Court Act, 1981. The chapters are all good, but some stand out: the
treatment of the complicated and often ill-understood topic of ministers and the lawis particularly
good, while that of ministers and parliament is by far better than most. Rodney Brazier keeps the
meaning of the `constitution' altogether clean, and attributes to it nothing morethan the legal, and
the necessarily conventional. But if the `constitution' as a topic is not discussed, nor arethere lofty
and loose references to it, or irrelevant harping on `accountability' etc.; yet the text is easily a
prolegomena to the study of the `constitution'. One criticism is that some topics appear in more
than one chapter and are, as a result, insuciently treated.
FRED NASH
University of Southampton
Derek Draper, Blair's Hundred Days (London, Faber and Faber, 1997), xi 223 pp.,
£7.99 pbk ISBN 0 571 19346 3.
The election of New Labour was bound to lead to a rush of books seeking to expoundthe workings
of the new government, and given the ease with which books are now published these are likely to
#Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 CowleyRoad, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Political Studies (1999), XLVII, 393±421
be of very varying quality. Hopefully, if only for the sake of the trees, most of them will make a
greater contribution to understanding than this manages. The book takes the form of a diary of
events from May to August 1997. It is written as an insider's account of this period, as if the author
were perched on Tony Blair's, Gordon Brown's,Peter Mandelson's et al. shoulders. The result is a
breathless canter through the government'sinitial months in the style of broadsheet political gossip
columns, though with a certain Barbara Cartland aspect, where `brilliant' people are always
`bursting' into rooms. The book has little analysis; for example, its insight into the government's
policies on environmental issues is to tell us that such concerns are felt only by the middle classes,
and working class trade unionists are `much less bothered'. One can only hope that it is true not
only of the government, but also of books about it, that `things can only get better'.
JIM TOMLINSON
Brunel University
Thomas Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, 1920±1996 (Basingstoke, Macmillan,
1997), xv 347 pp., £40.00 ISBN 0 333 73161 1, £12.99 pbk ISBN 0 333 73162 X.
This book may be said to address what might be called the Bob Hope problem. The message of
Hope's famous melody is that it is possible to remember the pastso well that one gets it wrong. And
one gets it wrong not because of wilful distortion but because the past is supposed to be our friend
and on our side. It is a witness to the righteousness of our cause. Such remembering, either in its
suering or its triumphs, is a passionate matter. The great value of Hennessey's book is its dis-
passionate and detailed chronicle of events.It provides a ®nely researched record of the last seventy-
®ve years which allows students of Northern Ireland politicsto assess the competing memories of
unionism and nationalism. Hennessey's assiduous work reveals that there is more irony in history
than possibly George Santayana knew. Even when history is remembered people sometimes seem
condemned to relive it. The discussion of the Craig±Collins pacts bears comparison to the
stratagems of the peace processof the 1990s. This work by one of the new and energetic generation
of scholars in the ®eld makes a solid contribution to our understanding of a much contested history.
ARTHUR AUGHEY
University of Ulster at Jordanstown
Michael J. Oliver, Whatever Happened to Monetarism? Economic Policy Making and
Social Learning in the United Kingdom since 1979 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1997),
xv 187 pp., £42.50 ISBN 1 85928 433 7.
Did the Conservative governments learn their monetarist lessons? Michael Oliver's interesting
volume engages theoretical and empirical debatesoutlined by Harvard political scientist Peter Hall,
who has applied models of social learning to the transition from Keynesianism to Monetarism in
British economic policy after 1979. Oliver's empirical contributionis his analysis of what came after
this transition. In the mid-1980s the Thatcher government surprisingly and, according to Oliver,
prematurely abandoned its monetarist experiment. Five factors caused this change in policy: the
recession of the early 1980s, resulting unemployment, a change in attitude towardthe exchange rate,
®nancial liberalization, and disagreements betweenpoliticians and policy makers. This last factor is
most important for Oliver's theoretical concern, policy making as social learning. Oliver showsthat
fragmentation in and disagreement about the policy paradigm prevented both a coherent, con-
servative approach to monetary policyand the institutionalization of a new paradigm after the end
of the monetarist experiment. Oliver's main analytical argument is that a more complex model of
social learning should be developed, a model that explicitly includes not only ®rst-orderchange (in
settings of policy instruments), second-order change (in basic techniques), and third-order change
(in the hierarchy of policy goals), but also fourth-order change (in the ability of policy makers to
learn). However, it is not clear thatfourth-order social learning characterized British policy making;
Thatcher and the Conservatives forgot their monetarism as quickly as they thought they had
learned it.
RAWI ABDELAL
Cornell University
394 Book Notes
#Political Studies Association, 1999
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