UK 2015 general election

Political marketing has become a fundamental aspect of modern political life. Since the 1980s, party behaviour has been rapidly changing in accordance with major social, technological and economic developments. Political parties no longer pursue grand ideologies, but instead have had to adjust their behaviour in order to respond to the increasingly critical electorate or attempt to influence their demands. In this new electoral market, voters act like consumers and parties like businesses, meaning the whole democratic system has changed.

This paper is undertaken in an attempt to fill the current gap in research that exists as a result of recent developments in political marketing and the influence it’s had on individual intellectual autonomy. Following an overview of the diverse range of literature in the field, the author will analyse the increasing trend towards the use of misleading facts, psychographic profiling and dark ads during political campaigns in the UK.

The study concludes that manipulative political marketing is a serious threat to the individual intellectual autonomy and is most dangerous to socio-economically disadvantaged members of society. The argument follows that this issue can be partially solved through a series of reforms, regulations and grassroots movements, however, the real power currently lies in the hands of government and social media giants.

This essay discusses the orientation to politics and the political process among evangelical Christians in 21st century Britain. It is based on a large body of survey data collected from the evangelical population of Britain by the Evangelical Alliance between 2010 and 2014. The essay offers an analysis of this data, exploring to what extent evangelical orientations to politics are distinctive from the broader British population, and what emerging patterns indicate about underlying assumptions and motivating values among this sub-group of British Christians. Thematically, the essay focuses on how evangelicals engage with the political process, including electoral voting patterns, their changing support for different political parties, the significance of UKIP, and their perspective on the devolved parliaments in relation to nationalism. The essay concludes with an analysis of how evangelical beliefs and values map onto patterns of support for the major political parties.

This thesis seeks to explore the place and role of ideology in political communication under conditions of mediatization. Exploring the place of ideology, as I will argue, involves exploring the ways political meaning is produced through the mediatic practices of personalisation, conversationalisation and dramatisation, while exploring its role involves exploring the ways political power is exercised through these practices. Particularly, the thesis builds upon an analytics of mediatization according to which ideology lies in, the textually-discursively organised and ordered, performative capacity of mediatic practices to recall and rework institutional symbolisms from the past serving the institutional exercise of power in the present, or the recontextualizing dynamic of media performativity. To operationalise this analytical approach, the thesis employs a paradigmatic case study; the study of political advertisements produced by the two major political parties in Greece and the UK in the run-up to the January and May 2015, respectively, General Elections. The empirical analysis seeks to demonstrate that central to all the ideological mediatic practices is the fusion of the private with the public through different aesthetic regimes, such as the authenticity of charisma, the intimacy of ordinariness, and the ritualism of spectacle, each emerging invested with its own recontextualizing dynamic – the politics of mission, everyday life and belonging. Each, in other words, has its own capacity to emotive-cognitively and spatiotemporally rework institutionally symbolic meanings from the past enacting different forms of institutional agency (e.g. partisan or cross-partisan) and ordering (e.g. displacement, temporalisation or eternalisation) in the present. The overarching contribution of this analysis is to argue/establish that we cannot gain a full understanding of how political parties’ ideology is renegotiated nowadays without a critical interrogation of the recontextualizing dynamic of mediatic performances. Nor can we gain a full understanding of how parties and other political institutions ideologically deal with the pragmatic challenges of the present without a critical interrogation of the aestheticity and affectivity of (mediatized) political discourse.

The United Kingdom’s electorate is headed to the polls after the country’s coalition government missed most of its targets for deficit and debt reduction, managing only to provide a return to prosperity for London and southeast England. The election looks thoroughly European, with a true plurality of parties emerging, making the possibility of another coalition or minority government inevitable. Gone are the days of the two-party system. Disparate portions of the country, once held together by collective achievements such as the National Health Service (NHS), nationalized industries, and the welfare state, are drifting. Nationalist parties such as the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), Plaid Cymru, and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) are rushing to capitalize on the change in ways which are only now becoming apparent. British and, perhaps surprisingly, English identity is at stake.

This article investigates the different electoral successes of the British National Party and UK Independence Party over time.  What explains their opposing degrees of normalisation and success within the British political landscape?  Article published with 'Political Observer on Populism', 1 June 2015.

In all of the fervor around 2014 and 2016 — the years of the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums, respectively — 2015 has been relatively neglected in British political scholarship. This is despite the year’s importance in establishing English national identity as a driving political force. The general election strategy of the Conservatives and Labour, the Conservatives' governmental policy, and prevailing social attitudes of 2015 offer researchers interested in English identity much to consider. 2015 featured an overt recognition of English national identity through policies such as English Votes for English Laws (EVEL), more Euroskeptic manifestos and attitudes from the main UK political parties, and campaign strategies which promoted English concerns. I examine each of these broad areas, drawing upon primary sources such as party election manifestos and 2015 newspaper articles, and secondary political and historical literature and media analysis. I come to two conclusions. First, cultural and political Englishness were strong in 2015; Englishness is a nuanced and complex phenomenon, contrary to what “English nationalist” narratives perpetuate. Second, policy responses to English identity in 2015 attempted to capitalize on England’s louder voice in the Union, by emphasizing values such as fairness and exposing the ways in which England was ignored in an asymmetric devolutionary settlement.

This chapter examines the impact of a broken pledge on subsequent attempts at promise-making. Taking as its case study the Liberal Democrats’ U-turn on university tuition fees, it uses rhetorical analysis to examine the Party’s strategies of image restoration, which in turn provided a foundation for their manifesto pledges in the 2015 general election campaign. However, the Liberal Democrats were unable to neutralize the dominant narrative that, on entering into coalition with the Conservatives, they sacrificed their principles for power. The chapter also considers why the Liberal Democrats’ broken promises were so damaging to their reputation, and it concludes that the episode has become an iteration of the ‘betrayal myth’, a warning to politicians against making promises on which they cannot deliver.

A new generation is starting their working life in an age of inequality. The income of 22 to 30-year-olds is projected to be 7.6% lower in 2014-15 than it was in 2007-8, according to new analysis of median incomes from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. But they estimate incomes will be 2.5% lower for those aged 31 to 59. And now messages about the problems of inequality from the spheres of global finance and economics are converging on a similar path.

There has been a recognition among many prominent financial organisations, institutions and economists that unrestrained capitalism is the source of the world’s widening economic inequality. Resolution lies in a fairer distribution of material and cultural resources among the less well-off in society. For some time, researchers have recognised how education systems sustain and reproduce these material and culture inequalities.