Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of the modern concept of the reasonable person in nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that this development resulted from the legal and economic needs of the industrial revolution and was informed by the metaphysics of the Scottish sentimental Enlightenment. The chapter’s point of departure is the case known as Blyth v The Company of Proprietors of the Birmingham Waterworks, one of the first cases to discuss explicitly modern law’s reasonable person. Distinguishing between a rational Enlightenment and a sentimental Enlightenment, the chapter then shows that the underlying rationale of the reasonable person relies heavily on the sentimental Enlightenment, namely on David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s thought on the importance of empathy, judgement making in relation to the feelings of others, the incomplete understanding of morality that can be gained from objective reason, and the importance of a human common sense. The third section explains how the industrial revolution and the sentimental Enlightenment influenced the life of Baron Alderson, the judge who oversaw Mr Blyth’s case against the Birmingham Waterworks.

This chapter examines the unprecedented era of urban rebuilding which took off in the late 1950s and lasted into the 1970s, in which enthusiasm for ‘comprehensive’ town centre redevelopment and modernist urban renewal was at its peak. This was the era when shopping malls were imported from the United States and planted at the centre of British towns and cities, and these developments rested upon an unusual alignment between the modernist planning ideals of urban professionals, the developmental agendas of local authorities and the commercial strategies of a handful of development companies. I stress how important the rhetoric of modernisation was in uniting these different interests, but also how loosely and variably notions of ‘the modern’ were defined and applied. I also highlight the importance of the technocratic enthusiasms of the age, particularly in the early 1960s, when the idea of engineering efficient urban environments came to the fore. Planners, policymakers and property developers adopted a deeply Taylorist, mechanistic idea of urban renewal, in which prosperity, efficiency and growth would be precisely engineered while ‘obsolescence’ would be excised from the modern city with surgical precision. For urban authorities facing darkening economic prospects, these were seductive ideas, and viewed as a means to combat the onset of deindustrialisation.

This chapter looks at the abuse and regulation of schools. It begins with a brief history of religion and education law before examining the Trojan Horse Affair which began in 2014 and reverberates today. An extraordinary volume of disinformation encrusts this series of events, which is here related via an outline of the salient facts as drawn from official reports and court cases, with minimal reference to newspaper articles and academic commentary. The related issues of illegal schools and unregulated madrassas are touched on. The theoretical discussion illustrates that liberal individualism views education as a means to emancipate the individual into secularism, while multiculturalism treats it as a means to preserve and perpetuate minority cultures. It concludes that these perspectives fail to take schools seriously as institutions whose primary purpose is to provide as many British children as possible with a good education. The pluralist response points to what the Trojan Horse Affair and education law are really about: ensuring that every school, regardless of classification, is properly regulated, well-governed and capable of rebuffing any threat to its good functioning.

This chapter examines the link between election fraud and British Muslim populations. It begins with a brief history of electoral fraud from the earliest times to draw out the recurring challenges and past attempts to meet them. This is followed by an overview of the workings of modern election fraud encompassing systemic vulnerabilities, opportunities and mechanisms as well as the attendant statistical difficulties. This sets the phenomenon in context and explains the nature of its association with South Asian Muslims. The chapter proceeds with a theoretical discussion of the ways in which election fraud can be interpreted and addressed through law. It notes that a liberal individualistic approach can justify strong safeguards against individual wrongdoing but struggles to account for the collective dimensions of elections, while multiculturalism pays greater heed to the importance of groups but suffers from an indiscriminate understanding of the various types. The chapter concludes with a pluralist response which systematises the individual and group elements of the democratic process before developing an historically informed programme for practical reform.

Responses supplied by contributors from the West Midlands recorded by BBC Radio Stoke, BBC Radio Shropshire, BBC WM, BBC Coventry … Warwickshire, BBC Hereford … Worcester and BBC Asian Network

Responses supplied by contributors from the West Midlands recorded by BBC Radio Stoke, BBC Radio Shropshire, BBC WM, BBC Coventry & Warwickshire, BBC Hereford & Worcester and BBC Asian Network

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.