A History of England

The Middle East seems to be forever a flashpoint for instability in the whole of the world. Much of its instability is down to the presence in the region of the state of Israel. It has been for a long time the target of terrorist outrages, including what is possibly the worst in history, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. But it is also itself a regional superpower ready repeatedly to wreak terri...

Well, we’re living in curious times. For the first time in four centuries, a member of the British royal family has been arrested in connection with a criminal investigation. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the previous Prince Andrew, was already a marginalised member of the family, as result of his association with the American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but now that association has led to his pot...

This is the last episode in this main series of A History of England. I may add others on specific topics – by all means use the comments to suggest any you’d like me to examine – or in response to interesting new developments. This episode looks at what has happened since the 2024 election. There’s been a rise in xenophobia that sometimes shades into outright racism. A party of the hard right, Re...

Following the rather grim comedy of Boris Johnson, the Conservatives gave Britain the even more ridiculous spectacle of Liz Truss. She proceeded to push the British economy to the edge of the abyss, aided and abetted by her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi ‘Kamikwasi’ Kwarteng. Fortunately, her colleagues realised what a disastrous mess the Tory membership had made electing Truss leader, and chuc...

It’s the time of Boris. This episode tracks Boris Johnson’s character, starting with a less than complimentary report from his housemaster at Eton to this parents, through his time in the rich kids’ Bullingdon Club in Oxford, followed by some disreputable incidents when he was Mayor of London, to his endorsing of claims he must have known were false in the Brexit campaign. This period is capped by...

In 2015, Cameron returned to office with a majority of his own even if it wasn’t particularly huge. At least it meant he no longer needed to be in a coalition with the Lib Dems, who’d taken a terrible beating. Labour too had done badly, losing further parliamentary seats. Cameron’s government still had to deal with two foreign wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, though both now involved far smaller num...

It’s 2007, and Tony Blair is out. In his place is Gordon Brown, who’d proved his capacity as a Chancellor. Sadly, he was now to show that promotion to Prime Minister was one step too many , since he simply didn’t have the skills needed for the top job. He might have won an election in the autumn of 2007, when he had a small poll lead. Instead, his nerve failed him and he called off the election th...

As the title of this episode suggests, this is where we look at how Tony Blair’s reputation was wrecked by the growing awareness that he’d produced infamously bad justifications to launch Britain into war in Iraq. Many people now reversed the vowels in his name, making Blair into Bliar. For a man who’d once assured Britain that he was a ‘straight sort of guy’, being seen as a liar was quite a fall...

When Tony Blair took Britain to war in Iraq in 2003, as part of a US-led and rather limited coalition of nations, it was against the will of large numbers of Brits expressed in possibly the biggest demonstration in British history. He’d also decided to hold a vote in parliament as to whether to go into the war, something he didn’t strictly have to do since it was a so-called ‘prerogative power’, o...

By the latter part of the twentieth century, the world had become unipolar. The Soviet Empire collapsed even more rapidly than the British one had after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. China was not yet the force it is today. The US was at the pinnacle of its global power. That made it all the more unbearable that it came under assault within its own borders by the terrorists of the 9/11 attack in 2...

We saw in the last episode, that Britain’s involvement in the NATO intervention in Kosovo could be regarded as part of an ‘ethical foreign policy’, since its objective, many felt, was humanitarian, though others disagreed. Another military action, to support the government of Sierra Leone against rebellion, was more clearly humanitarian rather than self-serving, and so easier still to defend on et...

Divorce, contrary to what many believe, was not permitted by the Church of England. Henry VIII didn’t divorce two wives, he had the marriages annulled, declaring in effect that they’d never happened. The Church itself remained as opposed to divorce as the Catholics. That’s why Edward VIII had abdicated in the 1930s, so he could marry the divorcee he loved. It’s also why Queen Elizabeth II, as head...

In the early years of Blair’s premiership, his supporters liked to refer to Britain as ‘Cool Britannia’, in a play on the title of the song ‘Rule Britannia’. Last week, we talked about some of the cooler things the Blair government did at this time, including the breakthrough in the Northern Irish peace process, specifically the Good Friday Agreement. This week, we look at some of the distinctly u...

The Blair government threw itself into action as soon as it was formed. Rather confirming the existence of a deal between them, something they’ve never confirmed, Blair quickly appointed Gordon Brown Chancellor. As well as steps, such as making the Bank of England independent and introducing a minimum wage, on which they fully agreed, there’s also evidence that, as suspected, Blair had promised Br...

It was a new dawn. Or at least so Tony Blair said, as he emerged from his landslide victory in the 1997 General Election. It’s what he would say, isn’t it? Still, there was some truth to the claim. It was the end of eighteen years of Conservative rule. Eleven of them had been under the Iron lady, Maggie Thatcher. And whatever her achievements, she had certainly been the most divisive leader since...

We’re just about ready to move on from John Major but, before we do, we need to spend a few moments on two major events of his second premiership. One was a significant breakthrough, in Ireland, even if it didn’t go to completion under his administration; the second, his back-to-basics campaign, was an unqualified disaster. The first of the two problems with ‘back-to-basics’ is that going backward...

By winning the 1992 general election, John Major had gained his own mandate to form a government, instead of imply inheriting Margaret Thatcher’s. He’d shown himself capable of leading the Conservative Party to success, as he led it to a fourth successive election win. He’d emerged somewhat from the shadow of his Iron Lady predecessor. And then things immediately started going wrong. Black Wednesd...

With the poll tax, Thatcher took one bad decision to many. From the point of view of orthodox Thatcherite thought, it sounded like a good idea. She’d been working for years to shrink the state but, while she could herself cut public spending at national level, local government could keep racking it up if it so chose. She’d introduced rate capping to limit how far local councils could raise local t...

Having looked last week at how Maggie Thatcher was running out of options for how to carve out a new role for Britain on the world stage, this week we look at how things were going at home. After all, she’d won a second landslide Commons majority in 1987, and that ought to be enough for anyone to shape politics to their wishes. Well, it turned out not be that easy. Though it didn’t go far at this...

Maggie Thatcher in 1987 pulled off a trick that had eluded all other British Prime Ministers of the twentieth century: she won three general elections in a row. Even more, she won a second Commons landslide down from the 144 seats in 1983, but still massive at 102 seats. It was a remarkable feat, to set alongside her being the first woman Prime Minister of Britain, though she always preferred to p...

Thatcher’s victories, including a general election landslide and breaking the miners’ strike, emboldened her to launch another phase in the reduction of the role of the state in the British economy. Nationalised industries were privatised, with encouragement given to individuals to buy the shares, which they did with enthusiasm. This came on top of the continuing success of council house sales und...

What had converted Maggie Thatcher from something of a lame duck into a front runner for the next British general election? While the economy had begun to pick up, that had been patchy at best, with some parts of Britain suffering badly while the general picture was improving. That’s what made me feel then, and leaves me feeling now, that it was the victory in the Falklands that made her more or l...

Mrs Thatcher’s first term in office was one of the great get out of jail events. She came into office intent on braking with the Keynesianism and social democracy of the postwar consensus. She drew on the ideas of the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (both briefly discussed in this episode), with their championing of the free-market and, in Friedman’s case, of monetarism. Initially,...

In 1976, Jim Callaghan took over from Harold Wilson as leader of the Labour Party and British Prime Minister. He was a competent politician, though not an outstanding one. He did his job well, but he was far from up to taking on an adversary as forceful as the leader of the Conservative Party, Maggie Thatcher. Callaghan’s was the last government of the post-war consensus, based on a belief in a ge...

When Harold Wilson formed his second government, he immediately faced a major crisis inherited from Heath’s administration: the coalminers were on strike, a state of Emergency (Heath’s fifth in four years) was in place and Britain was on a three-day week. That gave Wilson some quick wins as he dealt with all three. Other things proved less straightforward. Heath had brought in a power-sharing arra...