Published in British Academy Review, No. 29 (January 2017).
The print version of this article can be downloaded as a PDF file.
Audio or video recordings of most British Academy events are made available via the Academy’s website shortly afterwards (www.britishacademy.ac.uk/recordings).
Also available on the Academy’s website (via www. britishacademy.ac.uk/fellow-talk) are recordings of Fellows of the British Academy in conversation on matters relating to their work and interests. Here are three examples.
What’s wrong with a Bill of Rights?
The British Academy has been publishing a series of briefings on the UK’s relationship with the European Convention on Human Rights, and on the implications of proposals to replace the Human Rights Act with a Bill of Rights for the UK. To accompany the publication in August 2016 of the briefings on the implications for Scotland and for Northern Ireland, the Academy posted a recording of a conversation between the two reports’ authors – Professor Christine Bell FBA and Professor Colin Harvey. They suggested that the proposals seemed to underplay the complications that would arise from the devolution settlements that now exist for different parts of the UK. Professor Bell observed: ‘I’ve never really been able to work out whether the apparent legal illiteracy in some of the proposals and documents was naivety, or in fact because this isn’t really being played out as a legal argument but a political one. I suppose as a lawyer that’s a bit disturbing. And also as a citizen with a stake in things working coherently and legally and lawfully, it’s disconcerting to see the legal niceties and complications being almost ignorantly by-passed. And aside from the legalisms of whether consent is needed from the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Government has been fairly clear that it is. And it seems to me that as a political matter that puts us in the realm of constitutional crisis – in that if we have a constitutional dispute which the constitution does not have the tools to resolve, then that would seem to me a classic definition of a constitutional crisis.’
Listen to conversation recording
The briefings on Scotland and on Northern Ireland (published in August 2016), and those on Wales and on the UK’s international human rights obligations (published in November 2016) can be found here.
Warming tales of Cold War summits
Listen to conversation recording
Can we count on the polls?
In a conversation recorded in September 2016, Professor John Curtice FBA talked to the British Academy’s Chief Executive, Alun Evans, about the performance of the opinion polling industry during the three recent close contests: the 2014 Scottish Referendum, the 2015 General Election, and the 2016 EU Referendum. In that last case, Professor Curtice suggested that perhaps the pollsters succumbed to the presumption that ‘surely at the end of the day the country isn’t going to vote leave’, and during the referendum campaign they constantly refined their methods in ways that tended to skew the figures towards ‘Remain’. Nevertheless, he explained why opinion polling always had a crucial role to play. ‘Our understanding of what lies behind the Brexit vote, what lies behind Trump, what lies behind Marine Le Pen, is the result of survey research. That’s what tells us that it’s people with relatively few educational qualifications, older people, people who are culturally challenged by immigration, people who are concerned about the economic consequences of globalisation. Leaving aside the headline-grabbing horse-race aspect, opinion polling – together with much more broadly academic survey research – is crucial for enabling us to understand why people are doing what they’re doing, and therefore ensuring that politicians of all political persuasions are adequately informed about the messages that come out of the ballot box.’
Listen to conversation recording