Was the US subprime crisis the prime mover? The limits of the ‘critical urbanist’ interpretation of the UK financial crisis

The aim of this chapter is to challenge the argument popular among ‘critical urbanist’ writers that the subprime crisis in the US played a crucial and necessary role in the US and UK financial crisis. It will be argued that this view exaggerates the role of the subprime crisis and of the global interconnections between banks. Instead, it is argued that the banking systems in the US and UK had developed in a fundamentally unstable way and that this was the primary cause of the financial crises in these countries, with the subprime crisis playing at most a contingent contributory role. The focus will be on the structure and operation of the UK banking system and the UK experience of the financial crisis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the very limited reforms that have so far been implemented

Burying the Evidence: How Great Britain is Prolonging the Occupational Cancer Epidemic

The U.K. authorities are failing to acknowledge or deal effectively with an epidemic of work-related cancers. The government’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) underestimates the exposed population, the risks faced as a result of those exposures, and the potential for prevention. The HSE fails to acknowledge the social inequality in occupational cancer risk, which is concentrated in manual workers and lower employment grades, or the greater likelihood these groups will experience multiple exposures to work-related carcinogens. It continues to neglect the largely uninvestigated and unprioritized risk to women and currently has neither a requirement nor a strategy for reducing the numbers and volumes of cancer-causing substances, processes, and environments at work. The result is that the U.K. faces at least 20,000 and possibly in excess of 40,000 new cases of work-related cancer every year, leading to thousands of deaths and an annual cost to the economy of between £29.5bn and £59bn. This paper outlines flaws in the HSE’s approach and makes recommendations to address effectively the U.K.’s occupational cancer crisis

The four varieties of comparative analysis: the case of environmental regulation

The paper develops an argument that the two conventional forms of comparative analysis which seek to explain similar phenomena by similar features, and different phenomena by different features are too restricted. Instead using the idea of plural causation two other possibilities are identified: explaining similar phenomena by different features (e.g. showing how a phenomenon occurs due to one set of causes in one society and another in another) and explaining different phenomena by similar features (e.g. as in functionalist explanations which explain different phenomena as ways of meeting the same societal functions.) The resulting four varieties of comparative analysis are illustrated. The second part of the paper draws on some recent research on environmental regulation in Hungary to address two questions: 1. the similarity in patterns of environmental regulation across nations and 2. inter-locality variation in patterns of environmental regulation in Hungary. In the former case the similarity in the pattern in Hungary to that in North American and western European capitalist countries can usefully be explained as occurring in part through a distinctive set of causes, i.e. socialist legacies

Towards a History of the Origin and Diffusion of a Late Renaissance Chair Design: The Caquetoire or Caquteuse Chair in France, Scotland and England

This article explores the origin and evolution of caquetoire chairs in France and their influence on chairs in Britain. The term caquetoire (or the closely related term, caqueteuse) derives from the French caqueter, meaning to gossip or to prattle. It is applied today in France to tall, narrow-backed, lightly built chairs with open arms and trapezoidal seats; and in eastern Scotland and in the city of Salisbury in Wiltshire to heavily built chairs with many of the same features as the French examples. It is a type well known to students of Renaissance furniture and marked a break with earlier, more heavily built types of chairs. The type is intriguing because it has no obvious antecedents, and because of the differences between the French, Scottish and Salisbury examples. This article discusses the difficulties in identifying caquetoire chairs in the historical record; the range of French, Scottish and Salisbury chairs currently referred to as caquetoires; and the emergence of the French examples. It then considers some possible predecessors to the type, focusing particularly on a chair shown in a tapestry whose significance has not previously been recognised