A History of England

How did Heath end up calling an election on the question of who governed the country? Especially as the choice he seemed to be offering was between him and the minders. This episode traces the impact of two major shocks, the ending of Bretton Woods in 1971 and the oil shock of 1973, combined with the inflation that followed a last Tory attempt to manufacture a boom from Keynesian economics, that d...

Ted Heath’s government had to deal with two problems drawn from Britain’s postimperial standing: • adapting to its loss of global status, by negotiating, at the third time of asking and for the first time successfully, Britain’s entry to the European Economic Community, which happened on 1 January 1973 • dealing with a hangover from the imperial past, as violence surged in Northern Ireland, addres...

After talking last week about his government’s achievements in the social sphere, this episode looks at the difficulties Wilson faced in economics and foreign affairs. One way Wilson explored to address economic problems was to make a second application for Britain’s entry to the Common market, then called the European Economic Community and now the European Union. However, like Macmillan before h...

According to the English poet Philip Larkin, the sixties saw the invention of sexual intercourse. While that may not be quite the case, it was certainly a time when a lot of people decided that it was time to revolutionise the way society dealt with sex. The Wilson government saw in a lot of reforms in this direction. There was a partial decriminalisation of gay sex. Abortion was legalised. Divorc...

The Wilson government got off to a pretty sticky start, with the new Prime Minister learning, more or less as he arrived at Downing Street in October 1964, that the trade deficit for the year was likely to be twice as bad as he’d expected. One option to deal with the problem was devaluation, but that Wilson ruled out: he remembered how it had been when the Attlee government had devalued, and he di...

Here we’re focusing on the changes that took place in Britain after Supermac (Harold Macmillan) stood down as Prime Minister. A lot of how that went depended on the Opposition formed by the Labour Party. Initially it was led by Hugh Gaitskell from the right of the party, with Aneurin Bevan giving him a bad time from the left, while a serious threat was growing from Harold Wilson, formerly of the l...

Last time we looked at the continuing disintegration of the British Empire. In this episode we look at two other key aspects of Macmillan’s foreign policy, Britain’s relations with the US and with potential European partners. Towards the US, what the experience confirmed is Britain’s declining influence and its increasing dependence on, and even subordination to, American policies. Towards Europe,...

‘The wind of change’ was the other famous phrase of Harold Macmillan’s, along with ‘You’ve never had it so good’. It came in a speech in which he talked about how a movement had grown up in many countries, and particularly in Asia, for nations previously dependent on others to break free and become self-governing. Now, he told an audience in South Africa, a wind of change was blowing through Afric...

Macmillan overcame the terrible legacy of the Suez catastrophe and, running an economy focused on growth to fund increasing living standards, giving him the opportunity to annouce that people had never had it so good. That reflect both a genuine concern with eliminating poverty and as an effective electoral strategy, pulled off the trick by increasing the Conservative majority in its third consecu...

Anthony Eden started his premiership well, chalking up a general election win and the lowest level of unemployment Britain has seen at any time since the Second World War. Little else went well, however. His Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan made a statement to the House of Commons exonerating Kim Philby from suspicion of being a Soviet spy. That was a statement he would live to regret. Far wors...

The old man was back. The Conservatives won the 1951 election and Winston Churchill returned to Downing Street. And he really was an old man – nearly 77 when he took office. To many, he it seemed increasingly clear that he was unfit for office, but he wouldn’t leave, clinging on, in the end, for three and a half years. He did get various things done. He presided over the ending of rationing. He al...

Circumstances seemed unfavourable for a Labour victory in a 1950 election but, when it was held, Attlee managed to lead his party to the second win in its history. It took a majority of the popular vote, and even a majority of parliamentary seats, though way down from its previous landslide to a mere five. With that small majority, it was poorly placed to deal with the continuing financial difficu...

What Attlee’s government had shown was that, though it regarded itself as Socialist, it was a very distinctive kind of Socialism and heavily influenced by Liberal thinking. Where a more Marxist Socialist would take a class-based approach to politics, for Attlee the central figure was the Citizen and Citizens inhabited every class. Hence his universalist approach to social services, available to an...

Of the five ‘giant evils’ William Beveridge identified, the Attlee government set out to deal with want through social security, squalor through better housing, ignorance through more schooling and disease through the National Health Service. When it came to the fifth giant, idleness, the government’s tackeld unemployment by setting out to rebuild the British economy and, overall, that didn’t go t...

In the July 1945 general election, the British public offered Winston Churchill, as he put it himself, the ‘order of the boot’. A victorious war Prime Minister was kicked out. In his place, his deputy, the Labour leader Clem Attlee became Prime Minister. There was massive enthusiasm for the Attlee government in the working class, which extended to many soldiers. These were the people let down afte...

It was a strange world that emerged from the Second World War. Both genocide and the mass killing of civilians, above all through bombing, culminating with the A-bombs dropped on Japan, had become somehow normalised. They rather weaken the case of the developed nations, which made these things happen, denouncing ethnic cleansing and terrorist bombs when they happen again today. The Soviet Union ha...

Following the German surrender in May 1945, the ‘Big Three’ – the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain – met for the third and last time in conference. And this time, appropriately, they met on German territory, in Potsdam near Berlin. It was Soviet-held territory too, perhaps significant given the power with which the Soviet Union was emerging from the war. Indeed, its delegation was the o...

At the Yalta conference, between the US, the Soviet Union and Britain, the tensions between the Allies became increasingly obvious. Representing Britain, Churchill wanted the Allies’ war effort to be directed in such a way as to limit Soviet control over Central and Eastern Europe. The Soviets wanted to make sure they maximised the area they controlled. And given how powerfully they were surging t...

By the time of the Yalta conference in February 1945, between the USA, Soviet Union and Britain, the latter still being treated as a great power though its decline was already clear, there could be little doubt that the war in the west, at least, was heading towards victory for the Allies. The Soviets were sweeping through eastern Europe and were only 65 km from Berlin. The D-day landings had gone...

In 1943, Britain didn’t feel the Western Allies were ready yet for an invasion of France, and with its influence at the highest point it ever reached, it was able to persuade the Americans reluctantly to postpone it for the moment. Instead, they went for an invasion of Sicily, which went well overall, though with significant casualties. Bertram Ramsay, who’d handled the Dunkirk Evacuation so well,...

The tide turned against the Axis and in favour of the Allies in the course of 1943. Victories at Stalingrad in Russia, in the Battle of the Atlantic, and in North Africa, came on top of American advances in the Pacific, from island to island towards Japan. That relieved some of the pressure on the British government, that had been coming under fire for the all the disasters of 1942: the shipping l...

This is an episode for turning points. The year’s 1943. The Battle of Stalingrad, where the unstoppable German offensive into Russia was finally stopped and turned around, with Soviet forces essentially fighting forwards to the two remaining, and grim years, of their war with the Nazis. The Battle of the Atlantic reached a peak where Britain looked as though it might actually lose not just that ba...

The years 1941 and 1942 were tough ones… Things were going badly in the Battle of the Atlantic, with Germany threatening to strangle Britain by sinking more merchant ships than the British could bear to lose. In the Far East, the Japanese were giving the British, and indeed several other of the western nations previously seen as unbeatable, that they could be beaten by an Asian power. But by takin...

Hitler, feeling himself obliged to help out his inept ally Mussolini, was dragged into two wars the Italian dictator had started but lacked the resources to prosecute to victory: in North Africa and in Greece. Where the Italians had failed, the Germans moved in with lightning speed, overrunning Yugoslavia and Greece, and driving the hitherto triumphant British into retreat in Libya. Britain meanwh...

Following the Battle of France, came the Battle of Britain. Thanks, though, above all to the fighter pilots of the RAF – 20% of them from other countries, led by Poland and New Zealand – Britain weathered that storm, where France had been overcome by it. There’d been fewer than 3000 of those airmen but Britain owed its survival in the war to them so, as Churchill put it, never ‘was so much owed by...