New Labour's approach to gender mainstreaming is perhaps best exemplified through the work of the Women and Equality Unit (WEU). In this article we chart the development of the Unit and varied initiatives in which it has been involved and provide a preliminary assessment of the Unit's work. We start with a discussion of Labour's approach to mainstreaming. This provides a context for a profile of the work of the Women's Unit (WU) between 1997 and 2001 and its successor the WEU, between 2001 and 2002. We consider the work of the Units in relation to the government's reforms to the policy‐making process, focusing upon location, issue territory and connectivity. Using these three criteria our appraisal of the work of the WEU draws attention to three issues: firstly, the institutional uncertainty surrounding the status of the Unit; secondly, the degree to which the remit of the Unit has been unlike that of other cross‐cutting units in addressing a broad gender agenda rather than specific policy areas, but that this is now shifting with the increasing focus on economic issues; and thirdly, the extent to which the Unit is reliant on non‐feminist actors within the decision‐making elite to help pursue its aims. We will suggest that the Unit may have made a small, but significant, contribution to the development of gender mainstreaming processes. Its contribution has been greatest where gender equality policies coincide with government priorities. Its contribution to the process of mainstreaming gendered perspectives into all policy‐making is much harder to discern.
Labour's electoral college chose Ed Miliband as the party's new leader on the basis of votes that were influenced by trade union activities. Some trade unions made a number of decisive interventions in the 2010 leadership election contest: they coordinated their nominations, canvassed intensely for their nominees (channelling considerable resources into their campaigns), and distributed ballots with strong recommendations in the same package as the voting slips. Such was the closeness of the election that, we argue, these interventions determined the result. This conclusion is all the more surprising since commentators and academics alike had maintained that the introduction of 'one member, one vote' had fundamentally reduced the role of trade unions in Labour party politics. In contrast, our opinion is that having been apparently deprived of control by the introduction of one member one vote, trade union elites developed a strategy to mould the outcome of the Labour leadership contest and so reassert their traditional influence over the party. Such was the extent of the role played by the trade unions that, we believe, the normative legitimacy of the electoral process by which Ed Miliband was elected can be called into question although the rules of the contest were not broken.
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Parliamentary Affairs following peer review. The version of record [published in vol. 66 no. 4 (2013), pp. 708-731] is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pa/gss012. That version was first published online 'early view' in June 2012 Please check against final version of record before quotation.We were brothers all In honour, as in one community (William Wordsworth, The Prelude)
Most studies of the 'friends and neighbours' effect in voting behaviour have accounted for their observed patterns using Key's classic identification of this effect as reflecting localism and voting for the 'home town boy'. This paper introduces other potential local influences, and hypothesises that there should be separate local friends', neighbours', and political friends' effects. This expanded model is successfully tested using data from elections for the leadership of the UK's Labour Party in 1994 and 2010. All three effects operated, to a greater or lesser extent, in the pattern of voting for most of the candidates.
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