Eleventh Edition
Eleventh Edition
Politics UK is an indispensable introduction to British politics. It provides a thorough and accessible overview of the institutions and processes of British government, an excellent grounding in British political history and an incisive introduction to the issues and challenges facing Britain today.
Welcome to the Instructor and Student Resources website for Politics UK, 11th edition.
This accompanying Instructor and Student Resource website provides free digital materials to enhance student engagement with the book, test their knowledge and support instructors in preparing lessons.
Content Creator/Author: Jesse Grainger
Bill Jones joined the Extra-Mural Department at Manchester University in 1972 as the person in charge of politics and government, serving as Director 1987–92. His books include The Russia Complex (on Labour and the USSR); British Politics Today (which ran through seven editions before being republished with the suffix The Essentials in 2010); Political Issues in Britain Today (five editions); Debates in British Politics (with Lynton Robins, 2001); and The Dictionary of British Politics (2nd edition 2010). He was Vice Chair and Chair of The Politics Association 1979–85, being made a Life Fellow in 2001. He suffered a stroke while jogging in 1992 and took medical retirement from Manchester University. Having recovered almost completely from his stroke, in 2006 he took up a part-time teaching position at Liverpool Hope University, being made a professor in 2009. He also occasionally broadcasts on radio and television. He now lives in retirement in Beverley, East Riding, where he continues with his writing, teaches adult classes in the University of the Third Age, and edited two series for Manchester University Press: Politics Today and the recent Pocket Politics. His latest book is Just like Us? The Politics of Ministerial Promotion in UK Government, Routledge, 2024.
Philip Norton (Lord Norton of Louth) was appointed Professor of Government at the University of Hull in 1986. In 1992 he also became Director of the Centre for Legislative Studies. In 1998 he was elevated to the peerage, as Lord Norton of Louth. From 2001 to 2004 he was Chairman of the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution. He has been described in The House Magazine – the journal of both Houses of Parliament – as ‘our greatest living expert on Parliament’.
Isabelle Hertner is a senior lecturer in the Politics of Britain in Europe at King’s College London. She is also a co-editor of Government and Opposition, an International Journal of Comparative Politics. Isabelle’s research focuses on political parties in the UK, Germany, France, and at the European level. Her recent publications have focused on women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s representation inside political parties. At King’s, Isabelle teaches British Politics and European Gender Politics.
Claire Ainsley moved from being Executive Director the Rowntree Foundation to become Keir Starmer’s head of policy in 2020, having written her influential The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes, in 2018. She is currently Director of the Project on Centre-Left Renewal at the progressive Policy Institute. An article in Unherd described her as “pretty clear-eyed about the political shift away from economic and social liberalism, and the new centrality of social, culture and identity issues in British politics.
Lynn Bennie is Reader in Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations, School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen. Her research and teaching interests span the areas of elections and political parties, political participation and climate politics. She has published books and articles on UK and Scottish politics, and on the membership of the Liberal Democrats, Green Party and Scottish National Party. In 2024, Surges in Party Membership: The SNP and Scottish Greens After the Independence Referendum, co-authored with James Mitchell and Rob Johns, was published by Routledge.
Michael Clarke is Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He is also Visiting Professor at the University of Exeter, where he is Associate Director of its Strategy and Security Institute, Fellow of the University of Aberystwyth, and in 2019 was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Defence Studies. He was Director General of the Royal United Services Institute from 2007 to 2015 and is now a Distinguished Fellow at RUSI. Prior to that he was Professor of Defence Studies at King’s College London, and Deputy Vice-Principal for Research Development. He was a Specialist Advisor to the House of Commons Defence Committee from 1997 to 2019, and is now Specialist Advisor to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. He has served on the Prime Minister’s Security Forum and the Chief of Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel. His most recent books are: The Challenge of Defending Britain (2019), Tipping Point: Britain, Brexit and Security in the 2020s (2019) (with Helen Ramscar), and Britain’s Persuaders: Soft Power in a Hard World (2021) (with Helen Ramscar).
Russell Deacon is currently a visiting Professor in Welsh Governance and Modern Political History at the University of South Wales and a lecturer at Coleg Gwent. He has been a civil servant and worked in the Welsh Assembly on policy creation. Professor Deacon has written widely on devolution and written a number of books on this area including Devolution in the United Kingdom (2012) and Government and Politics of Wales (2018). He is also a political historian who specialises on the Welsh Liberal Party and the wider Liberal Democrats. His most recent publication in this respect is A History of the Welsh Liberal Party (2014). Professor Deacon is also the administrative director for the Welsh political and business think tank Gorwel, a board member of These Islands think tank and Chair of the Lloyd George Society and Van Community Council, and sits on numerous other bodies.
David Denver was Emeritus Professor of Politics at Lancaster University. He authored the well-known text – Elections and Voters in Britain – which has gone through various editions, as well as numerous other books and articles on elections.
Russell Foster is a Lecturer in British and European Politics Education at King’s College London. He was also Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Fellow in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is convener of the EIS research group Europe’s Borderlands, and co-convener of the IHR Rethinking Modern Europe seminar series. He has provided political commentary on BBC, CNN, Sky News, MSNBC, Al-Jazeera, the Financial Times, and The Economist. He is currently co-convener of the UACES network ‘The Limits of EUrope’. He is the author of Mapping European Empire: Tabulae Imperii Europaie (Routledge, 2015).
Charlotte Galpin is Lecturer in German and European Politics and Deputy Director of the Institute for German Studies at the University of Birmingham. She has held the Alfred Grosser Visiting Professorship in Civil Society Research in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and has been a visiting researcher at the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science at the Free University Berlin, and the Willy Brandt Center for German and European Studies at the University of Wrocław, Poland. She has provided analysis of German politics for a number of news outlets, including Associated Press, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio West Midlands, Deutsche Welle, Business Insider UK, the i newspaper, and the Huffington Post. She has also given evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
Chris Game is an Associate of the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), where he previously lectured, and was Convenor of INLOGOV’s undergraduate Public Policy degree, and a Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan. He is joint author, with De Montfort University’s Professor David Wilson, of five editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom and its translations into Chinese and Korean; also of La Modernització del govern local al Regne Unit in Catalan. He has been a columnist for The Birmingham Post for over 20 years and is a regular blogger.
David Gauke studied law at St Edmunds Hall, Oxford, becoming a solicitor in 1997. Becoming active in politics he was elected for South-west Hertfordshire in 2005, serving in posts at The Treasury and in May’s cabinet as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, then a Justice Secretary. When Boris Johnson became prime minister, he made it known he could not serve under him, given the risk he would choose a ‘no deal exit’ from the EU. After casting his vote against the government on a confidence issue he and 20 other MPs were effectively cast out of party. In 2012, Gauke stood as an independent in his constituency and came second with an impressive 26% of the vote. His excellent collection of essays, The Case for the Centre Left, was published in 2023.
Wyn Grant is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Warwick and is the author of Economic Policy in Britain (2002). He is a regular commentator for radio and print media on economic policy issues.
Kevin Hickson is senior lecturer in politics at the University of Liverpool where he teaches and researches British politics, with particular emphasis on political ideologies and political economy. He is the author/editor of ten books and numerous chapters and journal articles.
Robert Johns is Professor of Politics at the University of Southampton. He researches and teaches in the areas of public opinion and political psychology, has been a member of the Scottish Election Study research team since 2007, and is co-author of Elections & Voters in Britain, arguably the leading textbook in the field.
Hannah Jones is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and has worked at the University of Warwick since 2013. She worked in London local government before completing her PhD in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. She also holds degrees in Human Sciences (University of Oxford) and Policy Studies (University of Edinburgh). She has been a Guest Researcher at the Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg; Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University; a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London; a Research Associate at the Centre for Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford; and a Research Associate in the Department of Social Policy and Criminology, The Open University. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Hannah is Director of Impact for the Department of Sociology.
James O’Brien was educated at the LSE and became a journalist writing for the Daily Express, Daily Mail and other publications including The Spectator. This graduated into radio broadcasting with LBC in 2003 and his show, often involving interviews and phone-ins, has become a major modern media figure. The New Statesman’s Left Power List in 2023 placed him 38th, describing him as a ‘liberal firebrand’ and ‘master of the soundbite. His 2023 ‘How They Broke Britain’, stayed in best seller lists for well over a year. His podcast, ‘Full Disclosure with James O’Brien’ was launched in 2019.
Sir Anthony Seldon is the biographer of every prime minister since (and including) John Major; a leading modern historian and a highly respected public intellectual. A much fuller analysis of prime ministers is found in his The Impossible Office? The History of the British Prime Minister revised and updated, 2024.
Louise Warwick-Booth is a Reader and Associate Director of the Centre for Health Promotion Research. She has worked at Leeds Beckett since 2005 and completed her PhD in 2006 (University of Sheffield). She teaches on an MSc Public Health-Health Promotion as well as on a collaborative MSC with King’s College, London, in Health and Social Care Policy for civil servants. Her research projects are diverse and include commissioned evaluation work within the voluntary and statutory sector. Her expertise relates to the evaluation of health promotion interventions with vulnerable populations, including women experiencing domestic abuse. Her textbooks include Social Inequality 3rd Edition (2022) and Creating Participatory Research (2021 with colleagues).
Ben Williams is a Politics Tutor at the University of Salford. He completed his PhD at the University of Liverpool between 2009 and 2013, focusing on Conservative Party social policy. He has written for a range of books, magazines, blogs and journals covering British politics and political theory and provides media commentary on current affairs.