Doctor Who and the constitution

The BBC’s longest-running drama series Doctor Who might seem rather distant from matters of constitution and law.  In fact questions of politics, law and the constitution continually arise in Doctor Who stories.    Each new planet on which the Doctor’s time-and-space machine, the Tardis, materialises, has a different constitutional story to tell.  And a series which purports to be about distant epochs, far-flung planets and bizarre monsters, is often really about Britain, its politics and its law.

To instance a few issues constantly raised in the show:

• The question of constitutional globalisation looms large.  At one stage – the late 1960s and early 1970s – Doctor Who’s writers assumed that a shift from national to supranational governance would be fundamentally progressive.  Accordingly Doctor Who stories constantly denigrated the British state and upheld international endeavour as the way forward.  The show deployed intergalactic law as an extended metaphor to the same effect.   This position radically shifted in the post-2005 show, abandoning the knee-jerk hostility to national institutions and displaying a constitutional patriotism borne of disillusionment with supranational governance.

• The issue of war crimes and their relationship to British foreign policy also features prominently.  The legitimacy of the Doctor’s interference on other planets is always in question, but this questioning intensifies markedly in the post-2005 “new show”.  Time and again the Doctor’s right to judge between good and evil is challenged.  This coincides with Britain’s intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and the seeming immunity of British and American leaders from prosecution for war crimes.      

• The programme engages repeatedly with the issue of corporate power.  The power of private companies was strikingly ignored in the programme’s early years.  Later, however, the theme became pervasive.  Again, this reflected change in Britain, where the neoliberal nature of globalisation has fostered the development of the transnational corporation and has handed constitutional-law rights to corporations.  Critiquing Britain’s relentless shift towards privatisation and contracting-out, Doctor Who frequently imagines situations in which powerful private companies go beyond their business role and essentially become the State itself, infringing the most basic rights of the individual.  The show also persistently links such “corporation-states” with imperial expansion.

The Doctor poised to fall out with British Prime Minister Harriet Jones

In the interdisciplinary spirit of the age, the Doctor’s adventures merit academic attention, including from scholars in the fields of law and politics.  To this end, Westminster Law School is organising a symposium on the programme’s legal and political aspects:

http://www.westminster.ac.uk/law-society-popular-culture/news/symposium-announcement-and-call-for-papers-the-politics-and-law-of-doctor-who

The Doctor meets Queen Elizabeth the Tenth of the United Kingdom (Liz 10)

Through allegory, Doctor Who provides not only a reading of the state of Britain but an underlying normative critique of the country’s governance. This is a good thing, because we live in an era of political convergence in which differences between the British political parties have significantly narrowed. This has contributed to a lack of incisive critique of the political and legal status quo outside the academy. The same spirit has to some extent seeped into academia, leading to a “flattening” of criticism. Against this backdrop, thoughtfully-written, multi-authored programmes such as Doctor Who can contribute to providing the more critical voices presently lacking. It is to be hoped that Doctor Who – besides entertaining millions of people in Britain and worldwide – continues for years to come to contribute to the political and legal controversies surrounding our permanently-contested national identity.

Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture

Westminster Law School

The politics and law of Doctor Who

Symposium Announcement and First Call for Papers

Friday 5^th September 2014

University of Westminster

Doctor Who is the BBC’s longest-running drama television series and the world’s longest-running science fiction series.  The massive public attention devoted to the show’s 50^th anniversary and to its choice of new lead actor confirms that the programme merits serious academic attention.  Politics, law and constitutional questions often feature prominently in Doctor Who stories, whether in the form of the Time Lords’ guardianship of the universe, the Doctor’s encounters with British Prime Ministers, or the array of governance arrangements in Dalek society.   The show’s politics is also an adventure through time, from the internationalising moralism of the Barry Letts-Terrance Dicks years, the dark satire of Andrew Cartmel’s period as script editor and the egalitarianism of the Russell T. Davies era.  Yet the politics and law of Doctor Who have yet to be the subject of wide-ranging scholarship.  Proposals for 20 minute papers are therefore invited for a symposium on 5^th September 2014, to be held in the University of Westminster’s historic Regent Street building just metres away from BBC headquarters.  Possible subjects for papers might include, but are by no means limited to:

• Doctor Who’s ideology
• The Doctor’s political morality
• Comparison of politics of Doctor Who with politics of other science fiction
• The merits/demerits of Harriet Jones as Prime Minister
• Doctor Who and devolution
• Portrayals of British sovereigns in Doctor Who
• Doctor Who’s politics of class, gender and sexuality
• Fan responses to “political” Doctor Who stories
• International law, intergalactic law and non-interference
• Globalisation and corporate domination
• Satire in Doctor Who
• Politics and law in audio adventures, comic books and novels
• War crimes and genocide
• The politics of UNIT and Torchwood
• The will of villains to secure power
• Political history and political nostalgia in Doctor Who
• Doctor Who’s construction of British national identity

Abstracts should be 250 words in length, and should be accompanied by a 100-word biography of the author.  Abstracts should be sent to nicold@wmin.ac.uk – deadline for receipt of abstracts 17 January 2014.