Vernon Bogdanor

Vernon Bogdanor a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, is the author of Devolution and of The People and the Party System.

Letter

Elephants Sulking in Corners

16 April 2014

Colin Kidd advocates correcting the ‘democratic deficit’ in our constitution by transforming the House of Lords into a ‘German-style Bundesrat, with a membership drawn from the governments of the nations and regions of the United Kingdom’ (LRB, 17 April). But the English ‘regions’, unlike Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, have no elected governments, and show no signs of wanting them....
Letter

Don’t give up yet

8 March 2012

Colin Kidd is too pessimistic about Labour’s electoral chances were the union with Scotland to be dissolved (LRB, 8 March). ‘Without support from its Scottish heartlands,’ he asks, ‘how often, if ever, could Labour hope to form a majority in England, or even in England and Wales?’ Only in the highly marginal general elections of 1950, 1964, February and October 1974, when Labour scraped home...
Letter

The queen, the workers, the Jews

8 September 2011

Ferdinand Mount reports that Macmillan’s diaries are ‘tinged with anti-semitism’. It ought, however, to be remembered that, in 1961, Macmillan was instrumental as prime minister in persuading Eton to remove a 1945 statute requiring the fathers of candidates for scholarships to have been British at birth, since Jews were, in the words of the provost, Claude Elliott, ‘too clever’ or ‘clever...
Letter

The End of the UK

27 May 2010

David Runciman in his piece on the election refers to the ‘risible’ performance of the BNP (LRB, 27 May). If only. It is true that Nick Griffin failed dismally in Barking and that the party lost all of its councillors in Barking and Dagenham. But, largely by fighting on a wider front and tripling the number of its candidates, it doubled its national vote from 2005 to 1.9 per cent. Nearly two in...
Letter

Changing places

9 January 1992

Avi Shlaim admits – proclaims even – that, in his article on the Madrid Peace Conference (LRB, 9 January), he gave ‘the Palestinians the benefit of the doubt while judging Israel harshly’ on the grounds that the Israelis are, in his view, ‘the oppressors’ and the Palestinians ‘the oppressed’. It is a pity that he did not accompany his article with a warning that it was intended to be...

Pieces about Vernon Bogdanor in the LRB

On the Move: Constitutional Moments

Stephen Sedley, 8 October 2009

There’s an episode of The Wire in which the intellectual drug baron Stringer Bell, trying to launder his gang’s profits by legitimate real estate development, finds the project...

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Institutions

Alan Ryan, 26 November 1987

The history of thinking about political institutions and political behaviour has for two millennia oscillated between two opposed poles. Realists have seen politics in defensive terms: human...

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Would a hung Parliament have made any difference?

Martin Pugh, 21 July 1983

But for Britain’s antediluvian electoral system the House of Commons would now comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler...

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Long March

Martin Pugh, 2 June 1983

The trouble with timely books is that time is apt to run out rather suddenly for them. No doubt when the 20 members of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet planned the essays in Renewal they expected...

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Beyond Proportional Representation

David Marquand, 18 February 1982

The ‘Attlee consensus’, under the aegis of which the welfare state was consolidated and the mixed economy established, has been in ruins for some years now, but it is still too soon...

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