This post was contributed by Dr Ben Winyard, Digital Publications Officer in Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations

Birkbeck offers a comprehensive range of services, to give our diverse student community the support and assistance it needs. These services are open to all and almost all of them are free to access. Our students consistently tell us that it is the human touch – meeting an academic at an Open Evening, emailing a Programme Administrator for assistance, seeking professional advice from our Careers and Employability Service, speaking to a counsellor about emotional issues – that makes Birkbeck so special. We are very proud of the willingness of our staff to go the extra mile: we’ve been helping students use their evenings to transform their lives for nearly 200 years now, so we know the challenges and obstacles they face – and the life changing opportunities we offer.

But how best to present over a dozen varied and distinct services on our website has been a particular challenge. In 2009, we launched My Birkbeck, a bespoke, specially designed website that presented these services in one place for the first time, to make reading about, and accessing, them more straightforward. However, in the intervening years, the design began to look antiquated – the pace of digital change is so breakneck that nothing ages more quickly and dramatically than a website – and the content became outdated, repetitive and progressively difficult to navigate. Increasingly, prospective and current students, as well as Birkbeck staff, have become frustrated with the outmoded design and the challenges of finding important and up-to-date information.

The My Birkbeck site was suffering from a proliferation of pages and files, an overload of content and a breakdown in user friendliness. We discovered that the site contained over 1100 content pages, of which 85% attracted fewer than 1000 views in the whole academic year – this is a very low number for a university with nearly 20,000 students. Moreover, well over 30% of the site had not been edited or updated in the past year, while 27% had not been updated for more than two years and 10% had last been updated three years ago. There were even pages that hadn’t been updated since the site launched in 2009. There was also excessive duplication of files: we found 1093 Word, Excel and PDF files on the My Birkbeck site, but the majority of them were copies or new versions of existing files that had already been uploaded – in one case, we found 25 published versions of the same file.

This confirmed that there was too much content and that the majority of it was out-of-date, underutilised and unloved. Although the original site had been impressive, user friendly and well designed, the intervening years had been unkind and, despite the valiant efforts of staff across Birkbeck, the site had become frustrating to navigate and off-putting to staff and students alike.

User feedback commissioned before Christmas confirmed that our students found accessing information about our services confusing and discouraging. They were aware that the My Birkbeck site was separate – in look and feel – from the main Birkbeck website, but they were critical of the site’s multiple failings. Although their perseverance and investigative prowess were impressive, our students shouldn’t have to expend lots of time tracking down information to access vital services.

In 2016 we launched a project to replace the My Birkbeck site, with the following objectives:

• reduce the number of overall pages to make the site more navigable and user friendly
• delete duplicate and out-of-date content
• draw everything together into a single, definitive source of information
• apply our new House Style and a consistent tone of voice
• improve content to make it easy to scan and to make the key information, especially contact details, more prominent
• optimise the content for search, to make it easier to find information via Google and other search engines
• make it easy to login to online student services, such as our online learning environment, Moodle.

The first step was to meet with all of the key staff who run the services, to listen to their particular concerns and frustrations with the My Birkbeck site, and to work together to present the information in new, user friendly ways. We utilised high-tech tools – post-it notes and felt-tip pens – and asked staff to think about the key questions that a visitor to their services would have in mind. This helped us more intuitively structure the content on the site, giving priority to the most important and urgent questions and tasks. We also asked staff to consider the emotions that students might be experiencing when visiting the site – which ranged enormously, from excitement, optimism and determination to confusion, anxiety and frustration – which helped us adopt the most appropriate and helpful tone of voice when rewriting content. The focus throughout has been on meeting the needs of users and giving them the information they want, quickly and clearly.

The new Student Services site has reduced over 1000 webpages to just 100 – a tenth of the original size. The layout is brighter and easier to navigate, with more images and new, distinctive sections for each service. The content has been completely rewritten, following our new House Style, with an awareness of tone of voice and an emphasis on usability. Key pages from other areas of the Birkbeck website have been incorporated into the new Student Services section, to bring everything students need together in one place. As 30% of all visitors to the old My Birkbeck site were solely using it to access Moodle and other password protected areas for current students, we have improved access to those login areas by making them more prominent.

Overall, our ambitions have been to create a well-designed, user friendly and useful new area of the website, to bring together and re-present information about our impressive range of student services, and to make those services as open, welcoming and accessible online as befits Birkbeck’s ethos.

Mark Panton, researcher in the Department of Management, is currently investigating sport as a key agent for urban regeneration. Here, he considers the issues in the context of the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games, as well as developments closer to home.

“It’s just a Trojan horse for gentrification” is a phrase I have heard frequently during my PhD research into stadium-led regeneration in Tottenham. With the Olympic Games as a “catalyst”, rebirth and regeneration was the message behind the Opening Ceremony that heralded the start of the Rio 2016 Olympics.  Where does the balance lie?

The estimated total Olympic spend in Rio is US$ 9.75 Billion[1] according to the Plan of Public Policies – Legacy report presented at the 2016 Play the Game international conference. Undoubtedly sporting facilities can have longevity and value – as can improvements in transport infrastructure tied to Olympic projects. However, they are costly and there is growing concern about “Cathedrals in the desert”; abandoned facilities that deliver little value after the event.

Transportation infrastructure is emphasised by Rio as the most substantial Olympic legacy.  Projects have included construction of two substantial museums, revamping of several public spaces and incentivized building construction. There has been urban renewal around the Maracanã stadium, but this has led to communities being evicted from surrounding areas and a public athletics centre closed without warning in 2013. None of the major environmental projects linked to the Olympics were completed before the Games and Mario Moscatelli, a biologist, who has campaigned for decades to clean-up Rio’s water, says he “only sees things getting worse”.

There is also recognition that in property terms, hosting the games creates winners and losers.  With Rio’s Games closely following the Brazil World Cup in 2014 there have been many losers. It is estimated that all over Brazil, families in their several tens of thousands have been moved.  This process has been described as “social cleansing rationalised as instrument of ‘slash and burn’ planning,” (Lawrence & Wishart Blog, 2016). For many who remain in areas of Olympic-linked reconstruction there is the fear of the effects of gentrification such as the displacement of lower-income families and small businesses – as there is in the stadium-led regeneration of Tottenham.

However, there has been an unplanned but similar legacy from these developments in Rio and Tottenham. This is the growth in community networks that have been mobilised, aided by increased access to new technologies. As RioOnWatch points out, this may be scant consolation for many of those whose lives have been harmed by the Olympic dream (or demolitions in Tottenham), but these connections may represent the real regeneration for communities wanting to influence future policy decisions.

[1] This figure used an undervalued exchange rate of US$1 = R$ 4.00.  If the exchange rate used in the dossier of the application of US$ 1.00 = R$ 2.00 had been maintained, the total cost would be US$ 19.5 billion.

Baroness Bakewell, President of Birkbeck, spoke during Graduation Week at ceremonies to congratulate the College’s newest graduates.

Here, she explains the importance of the skills graduates from Birkbeck learn in the course of their studies and how it is vital, now more than ever, that the use of language needs to be reasoned to foster democratic debate  

You have all been studying hard to earn the degrees you have received today.  In so doing you have come to appreciate the important of being correct in how you express yourself:  mathematicians will appreciate that a digit out of place; a miscalculation can destroy chapters of effort.

Those of you studying social sciences, history and law will be finely tuned to the need for a precise and consistent pursuit of what is exact.  Those of you graduating in philosophy will have tangled directly with the nature of truth itself and when and how to present a statement – and to refute it.

I hope you excuse my telling you what you already know: because this matter of language is playing an important role in the life of not only our country, but in the world at large.  In two major arenas of public activity – the American election and the Brexit situation – language and how it is used is coming under great strain, not to say misuse and deliberation falsification.

Does it matter? It is only politics after all; it is only election rhetoric.  My case is that it matters very much – and that now, more than ever, the nature of language needs to be safeguarded by those trained in analysis, logic and deduction; that is, people such as yourselves.  I encourage you to welcome and uphold that responsibility.  Here’s why.

We have lived through an American election that insults the reputation of that great country and the foresight and shrewdness of its founding fathers.  When one candidate can insult and distort the role of the other with such impunity – speaking of Hillary Clinton as a criminal, deserving of prison, even a possibly target for direct violence – then civilised language has reached its limit.

When there is nowhere else to go with language then strong feeling gets expressed in action – often violent action. What is significant is that the strong statement itself – eye-catching  but wrong and  taken up by the media – is unyielding to correction.

It is no good to say, ‘she isn’t a criminal’, or more challengingly ask, ‘where’s the evidence?’ Damage has already been done.  Damage in public life is what we seek to avoid.  Damage – harm to our civil life and to our political institutions – can be long term and permanently undermining. That is why respect for language and the delicacy which it can express subtle ideas needs to be part of all our – of all your – lives.

The situation with Brexit is equally alarming.  It is one of the most serious changes to our constitution in more than 50 years. Unfortunately it has been  subjected to what many of us recognised as extravagant exaggeration: quite  separate from the very important issues that deserve thoughtful  assessment and judgement.  “Come out of the EU and the NHS can get the millions saved”; “Turkey is joining the EU so soon millions of Turks will be coming to Britain” – these  widely publicized slogans were to distort the very sound case to be made for leaving the EU and damage the reputation of  leading politicians  for the foreseeable future.

Well, OK, they’re politicians and they can be expected to be casual with language. Then last week a national newspaper accused three High Court judges, ruling on the rights of Parliament to discuss Brexit or not of being ‘enemies of the people’. Historically enemies of the people have been subject to charges of treason, to Star Chamber trials, to torture and execution.  It is a use of language that is well beyond any civilised exchange of opinions. It is of course, quite correct to challenge judgements made by the courts – there are checks and balances that allow us to do so – and such a challenge will indeed take place.

My point is that the use of such emotive and irrational language drives out the more subtle arguments that are the nature of democratic exchange and leads to a gross distortion of what is actually the intended case.

While we all digest the prospect of Brexit let me address some of the crucial issues close to the heart of Birkbeck.  We are an open society:  look around at the diversity by age, gender, ethnicity and faith of those around you.  This is society as we want it to be.  We at Birkbeck know it works:  it brings happiness and fulfilment into many lives. It promotes discourse, harmony, tolerance and civic responsibility among those who come here.

We rejoice that you too have been and I hope will remain part of such a society and take into your homes, your jobs and your communities the values we all share.  Do not let false and damaged language persuade you otherwise. The society of learning is global, interconnected and mutually respectful:  you are all welcome to its ranks.

This article was contributed by Dr Frederick Cowell from the Birkbeck School of Law’s Department of Law.

The High Court today handed down their judgment in the case brought by Gina Miller and Deir Dos Santos against the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union.

Billed as the ‘Brexit’ litigation, what was at issue was whether the Prime Minister had to go to parliament before triggering Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union (also known as the Lisbon Treaty), which would set in motion Britain’s exit from the European Union.  The judgment was first and foremost a question of resolving a basic legal question; is it the government or parliament that has the power in these matters?

The court were, in fact, keen to cut out the party political question altogether, declaring that they were “dealing with a pure question of law”. The judgment is, however, likely to become the ultimate political football and within half an hour the Government had announced that intended to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court on the 7^th of December.

The core issue was the scope of prerogative powers relating to foreign policy, which are held by the Prime Minister and other government ministers. Historically, treaties were signed between monarchs by their representatives and, as the UK’s constitution became more democratic in the nineteenth century, prerogative powers were delegated to government ministers.

Many prerogative powers are now governed by legislation – for example, the 2010 Constitutional Reform and Governance Act put the power to manage the Civil Service onto statute governed by clearly definable legal powers. Prerogative powers are not easy to control as they can be exercised by ministers without the approval of parliament – for example Margaret Thatcher’s decision to ban trade unions from GCHQ (the secret service signal intelligence headquarters) did not require an Act of Parliament in the way that her other restrictions on trade unions did.  They are also difficult to control through the courts, which are often reluctant to intervene in areas where these powers are exercised, especially when it comes to foreign policy. On the eve of the Iraq war the High Court held that they could not hear a case from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, who were asking for Tony Blair to seek a resolution from the UN Security Council authorising the use of force.

Shortly after becoming Prime Minister, Theresa May took the position that she didn’t need parliament’s approval to activate Article 50 and she could exercise her prerogative powers to take the UK out of the EU. In fact, she went so far as to guarantee in October that Article 50 would be activated by the end of March.  In 1971 the question of whether the government should accede to the European Economic Community (as it then was called) was debated in the House of Commons, even though technically, under the UK’s constitutional system, the Prime Minister of the day Edward Heath did not need an Act of Parliament to accede to the EEC.

What he did need parliament’s approval for, and what was at the heart of the Brexit litigation, was the 1972 European Communities Act which brought EEC law (later EU law) into UK law. This took nearly 300 hours of debate to pass, with Labour and Conservative MPs voting against their own party line repeatedly in an early indication of how divided the two main political parties were on this issue.

The 1972 Act – as the High Court Judgment noted – created rights for individuals as well as empowering the lawmaking institutions of the EU (paragraph 37 R(on application of Miller) v Secretary of State of Exiting the European Union). There were three kinds of right created under the 1972 Act; rights the EU had created and could be incorporated into UK law (such as the 48 hour working week and the right to cheap data roaming), rights enjoyed by citizens of other EU member states in the UK (the right to work) and rights enjoyed by UK citizens in other EU member states (the right live in other EU states).

The big issue was whether the loss of rights conferred by the 1972 Act could not sanctioned by the Government acting without parliamentary authority.  The Court noted that the lawyers for the Secretary of State had effectively conceded that some rights would be lost were this to happen (para 63). Therefore, the question was who should make the decision. In deciding this, the High Court noted that since the English Civil War in the seventeenth century the basic proposition was that the Crown (the executive branch of government) could not override parliament.

It is noteworthy that when the courts have previously reined-in abuse of ministerial power they have pointed out that one of the founding principles of Britain’s unwritten constitution was parliament’s supremacy over the executive.  The Secretary of State’s lawyers relied heavily on an earlier court ruling at the time of Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s which held that ratifying a new treaty was within the government’s prerogative powers. But this was a different question all together as Paragraph 94 of the judgment made clear, as the government’s actions on an “international plane” (i.e. activating Article 50) would remove rights granted via a domestic statute (the 1972 Act): therefore they needed the approval of parliament.

What this means is difficult to say at this point, although the Government’s strategy – and possibly its timetable for leaving the EU – have been dealt a significant blow. Whilst there are potentially points of law to appeal in the judgment, it is difficult to see some of the core conclusions reached by the High Court being overturned by the Supreme Court as they follow a century of established case law on the subject.

The real danger for the Government is that it will be very difficult to get their version of Brexit in a statute through both the House of Commons and the Lords, as Jolyon Maugham QC explains here. This is why political commentators are speculating heavily on the possibility of an election next year which would give the government the political mandate, and the Commons majority to push exit legislation through the House of Commons. Although the status of the June 23^rd referendum was only advisory, were a Government to be elected in a General Election on a pro-Brexit manifesto there would be no way of stopping that in parliament.