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Lecturer Zone - The philosophy of the book

I have taught British politics for close on forty years: I began working as a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Essex in 1968; taught introductory and advanced British courses throughout the 1970s at the (then) Manchester Polytechnic; and when I moved to Manchester University I spent a decade lecturing on Britain to the 'Government 1' course, at that time the largest campus based course in Britain, with over 700 students. I also wrote extensively at introductory level, notably in contributing to the pioneering Politics UK developed by Bill Jones in successive editions throughout the 1990s.

In all those years the nature of British politics changed fundamentally, and the manner of both its teaching, and of writing about it for beginning students, fundamentally altered. In essence I wrote Politics and Governance in the UK because I wanted, under the control of one author (myself), to integrate new ways of speaking about British politics, and new ways of communicating with students, into a single text. (Anyone interested in what lay behind these ambitions can read my article 'The perfect textbook', Parliamentary Affairs, 54:3 (2001) 526-36, written when I was just starting work on this text.)

When I first started teaching British politics, university education was a small-scale affair, reserved for a tiny elite. The usual way of teaching a course was to provide students with a huge reading list. The (often unrealistic) assumption was that they would just disappear to the library: we used to reflect this in speaking of 'reading' for a degree. A textbook, if recommended at all, was just back up. 

This book reflects new realities.

• Students now need the essential 'core' of their course gathered in one package. A textbook is not the only reading, but it needs to be comprehensive enough to provide both the basic evidence, and to 'sample' the reality of British politics for the beginner. 
• That explains the range of 'visual' features in the book. Some, like the briefing boxes, compress hard information which would break the continuity of exposition if incorporated in the text. Some, like 'documenting politics', and the photo images, are designed to confront students with the everyday reality of British politics. Thus the 'visuals' as a whole are designed to give the beginner a comprehensive 'feel' for the living experience of British politics.
• Text and 'visual' material are closely integrated. I do not regard the 'visuals' as supplementary. I have tried to exploit the breakthroughs in design which have revolutionised text book presentation in the last couple of decades to write a new kind of introductory book on Britain: one where the visual material is as important as the conventional text. 
• As well as writing a book which is innovative in presentation, I have also tried to write one which is innovative in content. Any textbook worth its salt of course has to be up to date. But in recent years I concluded that this means something more fundamental than keeping up to date with current events, important though that is. It requires a shift in mind set. The way we think about British politics has changed, and the way we teach it needs to change correspondingly.

In the Introduction to the text I have laid out some of these changes in the substance and framework of British politics and there is no need to do more than summarise them here. In essence, they require us to do four things. 

• Take territorial decentralisation seriously: above all, this means adapting to the reality of devolved, multi-level governance in Britain.
• Take Europe seriously: this means a shift in mind set that views the British system as itself part of a system of multi-level governance in the European Union.
• Take institutions seriously: this means adapting to the biggest change over the least two decades in the way political science thinks: the rediscovery of institutions after a generation in which politics was largely pictured as the product of wider social forces.
• Take democracy seriously: this means taking into account the rise of a much more questioning attitude, both among the public at large, and among those actively concerned with British politics, to the claims of Britain to be a democratic political system. 

I try not to adopt any partisan positions on all these features. Of course I have my own private prejudices, and no doubt they often unconsciously seep through. That may not in itself be a bad thing: after all, students should realise that a textbook is written by a real live human being. But politics is usually an intensely contested affair; students are entitled to at least one area where a conscious attempt at balance is on offer, and a textbook seems the right place to attempt that.

No doubt I have not always succeeded in the objectives I have set myself. To improve things in subsequent editions I will welcome the friendly criticism of teachers, who are invited to e-mail me. Click here to e-mail the author