The cultural politics of being a knob

This chapter is a meditation on the popularity of the BBC TV motoring show Top Gear. Contrary to analyses that read Top Gear as a straightforward expression of casual sexism, it argues that the show (and the culture it exemplifies) can alternatively be read as having been modified in important ways by feminist critique. The chapter argues that feminism’s influence has changed the character of the phallus, that symbolic manifestation of masculinist authority, but that it nevertheless survives and is reinvigorated in our contemporary culture by masquerading as a ‘knob’.

Unnoticed apocalypse: the science fiction politics of urban crisis

The slogan ‘capitalism is crisis’ is one that has recently circulated swiftly around the global Occupy movement. From Schumpeter to Marx himself, the notion that the economic cycles instituted by capitalism require periodic crises as a condition of renewed capital accumulation is a commonplace. However, in a number of recent texts, this conception of crisis as constituting the very form of urban capitalist development itself has taken on a more explicitly apocalyptic tone, exemplified by the Invisible Committee's influential 2007 book The Coming Insurrection, and its account of what it calls simply ‘the metropolis’. ‘It is useless to wait’, write the text's anonymous authors, ‘for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement.… The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.’ In considering such an apocalyptic tone, this paper thus situates and interrogates the text in terms both of its vision of the metropolis as a terrain of total urbanization and its effective spatialization of the present as itself a kind of ‘unnoticed’ apocalypse: the catastrophe which is already here. It does so by approaching this not only apropos its place within contemporary debates surrounding leftist politics and crisis theory but also via its imaginative intersection with certain post-1960s science fiction apocalyptic motifs. What, the paper asks, does it mean to think apocalypse as the ongoing condition of the urban present itself, as well as the opening up of political and cultural opportunity for some speculative exit from its supposedly endless terrain?

Morality and politics: the free churches and the Labour Party between the wars

The inter-war period saw the decline of the Liberal party, the traditional political ally of the free churches, and the rise of the Labour party. This article traces the responses of the free churches to these developments. The relationship of the free churches with the Labour party in this period is examined at three different levels; that of the free church leadership, that of the chapels and the ordinary people in the pews and that of the nonconformists who became active in the Labour party. Whilst attitudes towards the Labour party changed within free church institutions during the inter-war years they did not become important supporters of the party, or greatly influence it. The number and proportion of individual nonconformists who were active and influential in the party in this period was however considerable. In the process not only did Labour M.P.s become the main carriers of the nonconformist conscience on issues such as drink and gambling. They also made a distinctive and important contribution to the development and ideals of the Labour party.

Labour and the politics of alcohol: the decline of a cause

This paper shows that, contrary to existing historiography, the politics of alcohol remained important within the Labour party. It explains how and why the party thereafter moved away from this issue and the consequences in terms of party policy up to the 2003 Licensing Act.

How can economic and political liberalisation improve financial development in African countries?

The objective of this paper is to study the interactions between Economic liberalisation, Political liberalisation and Financial development in African countries. More specifically, we seek to establish the impact of Economic, Political and institutional openness on financial deepening. The empirical approach will be two-step procedure, first using a difference in difference method to show the various aspect of financial liberalisation on economic and political freedom while the second step will be using panel data techniques from period 1990 to 2005. The estimation results can be summarised as the following, first, Economic and financial liberalisation did account significantly for the financial development performance. While political stability show a positive overall effect on financial development, the association with Political freedom is consistent only after controlling the endogeneity of Political freedom on financial development. This result indicates that the transformation of the political and economic environment has improved the performance of the financial sector.

Testing the weak-form market efficiency and the day of the week effects of some African countries

The aims of this work are twofold. On the one hand, it aims to find evidence supporting the presence of the weak form efficiency of several emerging African stock markets by using both parametric as well as non parametric tests. The results indicate that none of the markets are characterised by random walks with the exception of the South African stock market. On the other hand, this study aims to detect the presence of the day of the week effects of these African stock markets. Results show the existence of day of the week effects, that is the typical negative Monday and Friday positive effects in several stock markets.

Financial development and income inequality: evidence from African countries

This paper present empirical evidence on how financial development is related to income distribution in a panel data set covering 22 African countries for the period between 1990 to 2004. A dynamic panel estimation technique (GMM) is employ and the findings indicate that income inequality decrease as economies develop their financial sector, which is consistent with the bulk of theoretical and empirical research. The result also confirm that educational attainment play a significant role in making income distribution more equal. We also find no evidence supporting the Greenwood-Jovanovic hypothesis of an inverted-U- shaped relationship between financial sector development and inequality.