This chapter opens up a fuller discussion of how sites of socialisation outside the family reworked the meaning of stories about the past. Looking at Huddersfield, it focuses on the consequences of selective grammar schooling for disrupting ‘traditional’ attachments to working-class cultures of politics, shifting people’s class- and place-based identities and weakening the political status of memory. It explores these issues from the perspectives of both socially mobile grammar school leavers and their parents left in Huddersfield. It also highlights cases in which parents and their children concurred about these issues.

There has been a perception in Australia, at least since 1945, that official relations between Australia and the US, similar to earlier relations with Britain the first ’great and powerful friend’, have been smoother under a Liberal-Country Party (LCP) government than under Labor. There is serious disagreement, however, regarding the explanation for the difference. Although it is easy to exaggerate the differences which existed between Washington and the Labor governments of the 1940s and 1970s, US–Australian relations certainly improved when the LCP returned to office in Canberra after November 1975. Yet the material basis for the close Australian–US political-strategic cooperation of the 1960s had withered away following the American defeat in Vietnam and the election of a Democrat administration in 1976. By 1978, the USA had pulled its troops out of Taiwan and Thailand, while promising to leave Korea by 1984. So, despite the resumption of military activity in Southeast Asia in 1979, the region no longer had the global significance of previous years which had made it the venue for American military action and hence close cooperation with Australia.

The Liberal Democrats, at the time of writing, have only fourteen MPs. Yet the significance of Liberalism in the history of the Constitutional History of the United Kingdom does not lie in the immediate present: this is a story that stretches deep into the past; covering not merely the giants of the historic Liberal Party in the nineteenth century, but the Whig inheritance from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional disputes. Hence, while this chapter will conclude with reference to the modern Liberal Party – an alliance, from 1981, between historic Liberalism and the Social Democratic Party; fusing formally in 1988 – it will primarily consider the longer history of Liberalism and the British Constitution.

Chapter one examines the impacts of Irish nationalism in British centres during the Home Rule crisis, from the Irish Party’s Home Rule campaign to the Irish Volunteers’ preparations for civil war. It profiles the political languages and cultures of the ‘British’ Home Rule movement; examines the influence of extra-parliamentary crises - Ulster unionist, suffragist, trade unionist – on Irish nationalist identity in British centres; and assesses the militancy, and constitutional impacts, of advanced nationalist activism in metropolitan Britain by July 1914. Between 1912 and 1914, this chapter submits, the Irish Parliamentary Party presented ‘two faces’ of Home Rule - towards British political opinion and Irish nationalist opinion in Britain. John Redmond and the I.P.P., critically, were ‘representative’ of ‘British-Ireland’ and were embedded in the mainstream political cultures of Edwardian Britain on the eve of war. Irish activists in British cities, however, were radicalised by the extra-parliamentary representations of late Edwardian politics, straining the ideological coherence of, and popular adherence to, the I.P.P.’s proto-electoral strategy. The proliferation of Irish Volunteer units in British centres threatened to spark an Irish civil war on mainland Britain. The militarisation of Irish nationalism, in conclusion, constituted one of the ‘surface excitements’ of Edwardian Britain.

In the previous chapter, I showed how the Venezuelan opposition’s strategic choices helped Hugo Chávez erode democracy. In this chapter, I develop the other part of my argument by highlighting the role of the Colombian opposition in preventing democratic erosion. Between 2002 and 2010, Alvaro Uribe tried to erode democracy in Colombia. Like Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) in Venezuela, he introduced several reforms that sought to reduce the checks on the executive and extend his time in office beyond a second term. He was polarizing, and willing to push as far as he could to increase the powers of the presidency and stay in office beyond a second term. His government harassed opposition members, journalists, and members of the courts and worked in tandem with illegal armed actors to systemically undermine those who criticized the president. Contrary to Chávez, however, Uribe was not able to turn Colombia’s democracy into a competitive authoritarian regime. Despite his attempts to undermine the independence of the courts and the fairness of elections, Colombia’s constitutional order remained fairly strong, and Uribe had to step down after his second term.

After the promulgation of the free-womb law, in 1871, abolition was dropped from the institutional agenda, until 1879, when the law was supposed to be in full force. At this point, abolitionists invested in parliamentary strategies, led by a young Liberal Party leader, Joaquim Nabuco. A remarkable orator, Nabuco defended abolition in speeches and presented bills to Parliament, emulating William Wilberforce. Nabuco and Rebouças joined in a new abolitionist association, aiming to connect the abolitionist bloc in Parliament with the campaign in the public space. Nabuco also repeated the Borges' strategy, traveling to Europe and building alliances with abolitionists in Spain, France, and Britain, among others. Nabuco was the abolitionist candidate in the next parliamentary election but ended up not being elected. Nabuco then moved to London, where he kept Brazilian participation in the international abolitionist network alive. At this time, local mobilization grew in Ceará, one of the Brazilian provinces with few slaves. Abolitionists blocked the port there, preventing slaves from being transported. At this point, the abolitionist movement was a national network, with strong international connections. Abolitionist associationism had spread, with societies for the abolition of slavery all over the country.

After surveying how a capitalist culture and corresponding associationism expanded throughout the Pacific lowlands in the 1840s, Chapter 6 chronicles a final abolitionist movement in Colombia leading in the early 1850s to a final abolition law that compensated slaveholders. This chapter offers the first in-depth study of compensation in Colombia and Chocó specifically, a befuddling bureaucratic process for both lowland officials and ex-masters. Notwithstanding administrative challenges, former slaveholders in the lowlands circulated the government-sponsored “manumission bills” well into the 1850s, whether to pay off their private debts or fortify their descendants’ wealth via their last will and testament. These haunting records lay bare the immediate financial afterlife of slavery in the Colombian Pacific, revealing how enslaved lowlanders’ “paper bodies” continued to fuel the postslavery economy. Finally, the chapter examines the lowlands’ contending postslavery racial geographies and economies into the 1850s. Frontier authorities and former slaveholders sought to retain gradual emancipation rule and devised new methods of social control but had little success implementing such measures in the historically autonomous Colombian Pacific. On the coastal frontier, a social universe daily managed by independent black bogas and gold miners, the principal challenge for white rulers after emancipation was black autonomy.

Drawing upon the case studies of Norfolk North and Devizes, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in rural, mixed-class constituencies. Through its policies of tariff protection, targeted subsidies, marketing reforms and, in due course, preparations for wartime food production, the National Government transformed British agriculture in the 1930s. This was orchestrated on behalf of the government by Walter Elliot, the ambitious and reformist agriculture minister between 1932 and 1936, who projected the policies as integral to national recovery both by means of self-sufficiency and improved public health. The chapter shows that, despite their interventionist nature, these policies were embraced by local Conservatives as demonstrable evidence of the party’s commitment to agriculture. It also shows that historical critiques centred around the political and social control allegedly wielded by the Conservative landholding interest remained a common and updated feature of Labour and Liberal politics. Under the National Government, however, Conservatives were able to combine modernity and paternalism. Government policies helped to modernise farming methods and restore profitability, and in consequence rehabilitated traditional paternalist politics through new methods of welfare provision. Whether by means of private largesse (as in the case of Sir Thomas Cook MP in Norfolk North) or public provision, the amenities and improvements championed by rural Conservatives aimed to match those already available to the urban population and to secure for the rural worker a share in the national recovery.

Drawing upon the case studies of Ilford, Epping, Birmingham Moseley and Liverpool East Toxteth, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in suburban, predominantly middle-class constituencies. In the 1920s, as chapter 2 argued, suburban Conservatives rejected Baldwin’s attempts to appeal to voters along apolitical lines and instead urged a robust party stance; however, their own struggle to rehabilitate the conspicuous partisanship that had characterised the civic culture of Edwardian Conservatism – and which they interpreted as apathy among ‘known’ local Conservatives - led many activists to doubt the future prospects of Conservatism in the face of Labour competition. Chapter 5 argues that 1931 proved a turning point. The experience of the general election of that year initiated Conservative activists to the advantages of articulating a non-party variety of anti-socialism that matched the cross-party makeup of the National Government. It also encouraged them to cultivate an ostensibly non-party presence in the associational life of the suburbs, including in the new housing estates. Yet, as the chapter demonstrates, the National Government continued to challenge the suburban Conservative activist in some ways: National anti-socialism could be as much a source of competition as cooperation between local Conservatives and Liberals, and the government’s policy of Indian constitutional reform antagonised elements within the party. Even so, by 1935, the Conservatives’ suburban grassroots, so often the voice of diehard Conservatism, remained wedded to the National Government and looked enthusiastically to Baldwin as both the embodiment and facilitator of its ‘national’ appeal.

The formation of the National Government and the debates around national recovery bring into stark focus the national distinctions that still shaped British politics in the age of mass democracy and mass media. This chapter explores the effect of these distinctions on how Scottish Unionists and Welsh Conservatives related to the National Government, how they presented its record of economic recovery to local voters, and how their opponents responded. Drawing on case studies including Dunbartonshire and Dundee in Scotland, Pembrokeshire and Gower in Wales, the chapter analyses the popular politics of National Conservatism as it traversed the so-called ‘Anglo-Celtic frontier’. Starting with a discussion of the 1931 general election campaign, it demonstrates how the National Government helped the Conservatives to neutralise old hostilities while also helping their opponents to renew or inspire anti-Tory sentiment. This was reflected in the election results: in Scotland, the Unionists gained twenty-eight seats, including Dundee for the first time, while in Wales it gained only five seats and failed to regain Pembrokeshire. The chapter argues that this in turn set the politics of recovery in Scotland and Wales on different trajectories. Through its MPs and ministers, the government enjoyed a high-profile presence in Scotland that it lacked in Wales. Even so, in both nations its claims of recovery, like the National Government itself, provoked renewed anti-Tory – and often anti-Westminster – rhetoric among Liberals, Labour and, in Scotland, nationalists. At the 1935 general election while little changed in the relative strengths of Scottish Unionism and Welsh Conservatism, Labour emerged as the net beneficiary.