The Campaign for Control

: Immigration and Ideology in the UK Parliament 1961-2016

Abstract

Unlike much previous scholarship, this thesis examines how parliamentary discourse plays a decisive role in shaping migration policy. For reasons not fully known, mainstream political ideology has been virtually ignored by both conventional and radical political science. The academic literature on migration politics is characteristically anti parliamentarian and, in some cases, tends to treat establishment parties as “minor characters with undefined roles” (Triadafilopoulos and Zaslove 2006, p.176). To fill this gap in the academic literature, the thesis has undertaken a content analysis of speeches in the Commons Chamber. Using a range of case studies from 1961 to the present day, the dissertation shows how recent large-scale immigration is the result of a bipartisan ideological commitment: the attachment of the Conservative and Labour parties to ‘managed migration’, mapped on to selective Cabinet-level opposition to immigration quotas.

Date of Award	13 Feb 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Nicholas Startin (Supervisor) & David Moon (Supervisor)