In 1945 a Labour government deployed Britain's national autonomy and parliamentary sovereignty to nationalise key industries and services such as coal, rail, gas and electricity, and to establish a publicly-owned National Health Service. This monograph argues that constitutional constraints stemming from economic and legal globalisation would now preclude such a programme. It contends that whilst no state has ever, or could ever, possess complete freedom of action, nonetheless the rise of the transnational corporation means that national autonomy is now siginificantly restricted. The book focuses in particular on the way in which these economic constraints have been nurtured, reinforced and legitimised by the creation on the part of world leaders of a globalised constitutional law of trade and competition. This has been brought into existence by the adoption of effective enforcement machinery, sometimes embedded within the nation states, sometimes formed at transnational level. With Britain enmeshed in supranational economic and legal structures from which it is difficult to extricate itself, the British polity no longer enjoys the range and freedom of policymaking once open to it. Transnational legal obligations constitute not just law but in effect a de facto supreme law entrenching a predominantly neoliberal political settlement in which the freedom of the individual is identified with the freedom of the market. The book analyses the key provisions of WTO, EU and ECHR law which provide constitutional protection for private enterprise. It dwells on the law of services liberalisation, public monopolies, state aid, public procurement and the fundamental right of property ownership, arguing that the new constitutional order compromises the traditional ideals of British democracy.

This book argues that Doctor Who, the world's longest-running science fiction series often considered to be about distant planets and monsters, is in reality just as much about Britain and Britishness. Danny Nicol explores how the show, through science fiction allegory and metaphor, constructs national identity in an era in which identities are precarious, ambivalent, transient and elusive. It argues that Doctor Who's projection of Britishness is not merely descriptive but normative-putting forward a vision of what the British ought to be. The book interrogates the substance of Doctor Who's Britishness in terms of individualism, entrepreneurship, public service, class, gender, race and sexuality. It analyses the show's response to the pressures on British identity wrought by devolution and separatist currents in Scotland and Wales, globalisation, foreign policy adventures and the unrelenting rise of the transnational corporation.

This book argues that Doctor Who, the world's longest-running science fiction series often considered to be about distant planets and monsters, is in reality just as much about Britain and Britishness. Danny Nicol explores how the show, through science fiction allegory and metaphor, constructs national identity in an era in which identities are precarious, ambivalent, transient and elusive. It argues that Doctor Who's projection of Britishness is not merely descriptive but normative-putting forward a vision of what the British ought to be. The book interrogates the substance of Doctor Who's Britishness in terms of individualism, entrepreneurship, public service, class, gender, race and sexuality. It analyses the show's response to the pressures on British identity wrought by devolution and separatist currents in Scotland and Wales, globalisation, foreign policy adventures and the unrelenting rise of the transnational corporation.

The Law Lords have attributed the supremacy of European Community law in Britain to Parliament's 'entirely voluntary' surrender of sovereignty. This study tells the parliamentary story of how sovereignty came to be lost. It charts the evolution of MPs' constitutional understandings of EC membership and the transformation from a constitution based on politics to one based on law.