Official histories of parliament and the nature of the union of 1707:a forgotten episode in Anglo-Scottish academic relations

The Scottish Committee on the History of Parliament was established in 1936 as an offshoot of Col. Josiah Wedgwood's scheme for a collaborative ‘history of parliament’ researched and written on biographical lines. Circumstances, however, determined that the Scottish history would take a separate path. When Wedgwood's scheme was revived in 1951 an unsuccessful attempt was made to reintegrate the two projects. Discussions between the respective managing committees were conflicted and often bad-tempered, focussing on different interpretations of the nature of the united parliament created in 1707. The Scottish committee insisted that it was a new constitutional entity, while the English saw it as a continuation of the Westminster parliament with Scottish MPs added. This story of mutual incomprehension illustrates the profound differences between Scottish and English academics in the writing of parliamentary history, and also reveals a hitherto unobserved element in the development among leading Scottish jurists of a strain of ‘legal nationalism’ based on their interpretation of the constitutional significance of the Union.

The discrepancy between social isolation and loneliness as a clinically meaningful metric: findings from the Irish and English longitudinal studies of ageing (TILDA and ELSA)

Objective
Scant evidence is available on the discordance between loneliness and social isolation among older adults. We aimed to investigate this discordance and any health implications that it may have.

Method
Using nationally representative datasets from ageing cohorts in Ireland (TILDA) and England (ELSA), we created a metric of discordance between loneliness and social isolation, to which we refer as Social Asymmetry. This metric was the categorised difference between standardised scores on a scale of loneliness and a scale of social isolation, giving categories of: Concordantly Lonely and Isolated, Discordant: Robust to Loneliness, or Discordant: Susceptible to Loneliness. We used regression and multilevel modelling to identify potential relationships between Social Asymmetry and cognitive outcomes.

Results
Social Asymmetry predicted cognitive outcomes cross-sectionally and at a two-year follow-up, such that Discordant: Robust to Loneliness individuals were superior performers, but we failed to find evidence for Social Asymmetry as a predictor of cognitive trajectory over time.

Conclusions
We present a new metric and preliminary evidence of a relationship with clinical outcomes. Further research validating this metric in different populations, and evaluating its relationship with other outcomes, is warranted.

Renaissance Humanism and Ethnicity before Race:The Irish and the English in the Seventeenth Century

Inspired both by debates about the origins of the modern ideology of race and also by controversy over the place of Ireland and the Irish in theories of empire in the early modern Atlantic world, Renaissance Humanism and Ethnicity before Race argues that ethnic discourse among the elite in early modern Ireland was grounded firmly in the Renaissance Humanism and Aristotelianism which dominated all the European universities before the Enlightenment. Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant, all employed theories of human society based on Aristotle’s Politics and the natural law of the medieval universities to construct or dismantle the categories of civility and barbarism. The elites operating in Ireland also shared common resources, taught in the universities, for arguing about the human body and its ability to transmit hereditary characteristics. Both in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe, these theories of human society and the human body underwent violent changes in the late seventeenth century under the impact of the early Enlightenment. These changes were vital to the development of race as we know it.

"It's just not cricket". Or is it?

Considers the Wolverhampton County Court decision in Bartlett v English Cricket Board Association of Cricket Officials on whether cricket umpires at an amateur match were liable for injuries to a player based on their inspection of the condition of the cricket ground after heavy rain and their decision to allow play to proceed. Comments on the approach to the umpires' standard of care.

"IT'S JUST NOT CRICKET": ANALYZING SPORTS NEGLIGENCE IN THE UK

This presentation is about the law of professional negligence as it applies to sport. The presentation asks, paradoxically, if the skills you have as a sports coach or official might ever, on not being reasonably applied, leave you or your sport vulnerable to a claim in negligence. To inform this debate, the recent judgment in Bartlett v English Cricket Board Association of Cricket Officials (unreported, County Court (Birmingham), 27 August 2015) is critically considered. Arguably, this case is indicative of the extension of tortious liability in the UK, most notably, for officials and coaches in the context of amateur sport, essentially requiring HHJ Lopez to determine what might be termed the ‘professional liability of an amateur’.

The Dynamics of Quadropoly: League Position in English Football between 1888 and 2010

The paper explores competitive balance in top tier English league football from its inception in 1888. It examines the extent to which finishing in the top four positions in successive seasons is the preserve of a small number of clubs. Using a range of statistical measures, the analysis shows that the current high levels of competitive imbalance are not new phenomena. The overall pattern approximates a ‘U curve’: current patterns parallel those in the 1890s. In the early years of English league football, differences in resources between clubs soon became apparent. Clubs from the larger conurbations generated consistently larger revenues than their counterparts in the smaller industrial towns. This was primarily the result of the larger crowds that they could attract to their home games. This enabled them to entice the best players to their clubs away from their smaller rivals. The introduction of the maximum wage in 1901 and the transfer system helped to stem these increasing inequalities between clubs. This coincided with a massive wave of new stadia construction which enabled all the clubs to compete on an increasingly level playing field. These conjunctural changes to English football before 1915 produced the era of relatively competitive football during the inter-war years. This continued until the abolition of the maximum wage in 1961. Since that time, competitive balance has reversed and become increasingly restricted. English top-tier football has re-entered an era of extreme competitive imbalance.