Utopia, you are standing in it!

In today’s blog Dr Hannes Kleineke, editor of our Commons 1461-1504 project, looks back to the winter of 1470, as Henry VI found himself on the throne once more...

On 26 November 1470 a Parliament assembled at Westminster. This was in itself no remarkable event, even if there had been no such assembly for over two years. What was remarkable was that for the first time since the late summer of 1460 the writs for the Parliament had been issued in the name of Henry VI, who had been released from the Tower, declared restored to the throne, and installed in the bishop of London’s palace near St Paul’s just weeks earlier.

Following more than a year of…

The inexorable march to separatism – manifest in the political clamour to have Maori children removed from the protection of state welfare agencies – raises questions which most commentators have overlooked or prefer not to tackle. 

Lindsay Mitchell is not so coy.  She asks if the future of a child with a modicum of Maori blood should be decided solely by Maori members of a family and raises the matter of the rights and claims of non-Maori family members.    

Rights were brought smack-bang into the issue when the Human Rights Commission threw its support behind calls by the Children’s Commissioner for urgent action to keep at-risk Māori children with their wider  family.

In effect, these authorities are telling us the rights of Maori family members outweigh the rights of non-Maori family members.   

The Children’s Commissioner this month published the second of two reports on a review of…

Posted by Sara M. Butler; 25 November 2020.

On Saturday, June 15, 1287, an inquest was held at the king’s prison of Carlisle (Cumbria) into accusations against William le Macegrene of Langrigg, arrested and imprisoned for the homicide of Richard de la Ferete, for which he stood indicted. The inquest had been assembled to establish whether the indictment had been procured legitimately or maliciously, as the defendant claimed. The defendant’s objective was to be released from prison on bail. The next general eyre was five years away. Five years in prison was a dangerous and expensive proposition at a time when prisoners regularly died from “gaol fever,” malnutrition, or just outright starvation. Thus, while it was English policy to detain all defendants accused of homicide without bail, exceptions might be made if the accusation was found to have sprung from hate and spite (de odio et atya) and…

The final century and a half of Spanish colonial rule brought additional changes to the Andean political, social, and economic systems that had emerged during the age of Viceroy Toledo. From 1650 to 1750, the South American empire experienced declining mining production and tax revenues, which, from the perspective of the government in Spain, resulted in a century of depression and decline. At the same time, because the weaker imperial government intruded less on the lives of Andeans, the same century brought prosperity to local elites, who retained more resources to maintain a gracious lifestyle. Less exploitation also brought relief to indigenous populations, whose numbers finally began to recover in the 1700s. Only during the last decades of the eighteenth century did a new royal dynasty, the Bourbons, attempt to redress the empire’s loss of authority and revenue. By creating a more modern, activist state, the Bourbon monarchs, especially Charles…

By Paul Homewood

Well worth half an hour of your time, and sharing with friends.

Many modern constitutional systems, despite the prevalence of adult suffrage, forbid certain classes of person from participation in the most important aspects of the democratic process, whether by withholding the vote from them or by denying them the right to hold office. While the former has received a considerable amount of attention in the literature, the latter has been comparatively neglected.

In a recent article I aimed to redress this imbalance. The article – “Constitutional Disqualification: A Critique of English and English-Derived Law” published in the Vienna Journal on International Constitutional Law, Volume 14, Issue 2, October 2020, at pages 167-197 – starts by offering, quite generally, a taxonomy of such bans. It then appraises, with particular reference to the constitutions of the English-speaking world, some of the most common grounds for disqualifying persons from holding elective office and the various purposes that these might be thought to serve.

Ahead of Tuesday’s Virtual IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear fromDr Liam Liburd, at King’s College London. On 1 December 2020, between 5:15 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., Liam will be responding to your questions about his pre-circulated paper on the British Radical Right and opposition to Commonwealth immigration. Details on how to join the discussion areavailable hereor by contactingseminar@histparl.ac.uk.

On 20 April 1968, Conservative MP and Shadow Defence Secretary, Enoch Powell (1912-1998), rose before the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham to deliver a speech that would become infamous in British political history. His ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech set forth a racist and apocalyptic vision of Britain ruined by Commonwealth immigration. In what was intended as a frightening picture of the future, Powell raised the spectre of a nation in which ‘the black…