David Owen, Human Rights and the Remaking of British Foreign Policy, by David Grealy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
David Owen unexpectedly became Foreign Secretary on the death of Tony Crosland in March 1977, one of the many twists and turns in a career that would see him play a leading role in the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 1980s and become an international diplomat in the 1990s. David Grealy has sought to rescue Owen from his sardonic Spitting Image caricature, emphasising instead his principled, meditative character and ability to influence British foreign policy long beyond his relatively short spell at the helm of the Foreign Office. This thoroughly researched and well-written book builds on Grealy’s Ph.D. thesis, and is based on a close reading of Owen’s extensive private papers at the University of Liverpool. The book opens with a fascinating account of Owen’s early life and influences. He was an apolitical medical student who turned to politics after the Suez crisis, joining the Labour party in response to Hugh Gaitskell’s appeal to the ‘armchair socialists’. From the start Owen espoused Christian Socialism and fell under the spell of Mervyn Stockwood at Cambridge. Elected MP for Plymouth Sutton in 1966, Owen was initially a strong supporter of Harold Wilson, but soon turned against what he saw as Wilson’s abandonment of radical, moral policies for ‘hollow managerialism’. (Given that the book chronicles Owen’s own discovery of the virtues of compromise while at the Foreign Office, one hopes that he came to a better appreciation of the problems that Wilson faced in office). In the rapidly changing politics of the late 1960s, Owen came to see a commitment to human rights as the best way for Labour to connect with the new currents of extra-parliamentary activism. Human rights, he later wrote, must be a ‘natural policy for socialists to champion’.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".