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 Wednesday, just months after the election, saw a major run on the pound that turned George Soros into ‘the ...
Aug 31, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 258
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 taxes. The poll tax – officially the Community Charge – was the next step. In the old system, with lo...
Aug 24, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 257
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 time, this was when the first stirrings for devolution, and eventually perhaps even independence, be...
Aug 17, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 256
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 present herself as the first scientist. With that huge majority, she seemed well placed to pursue her...
Aug 10, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 255
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 under the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. Extending home and share ownership to far more people, from far more m...
Aug 03, 2025•15 min
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 less unassailable, far more than any economic achievements. The election, when it came, gave her a la...
Jul 27, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 253
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, however, things didn’t go well: unemployment soared, the economy shrank and even inflation, the very...
Jul 20, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 252
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 generalised social democracy, seeking to provide the social services needed to ensure that everyone co...
Jul 13, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 251
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 arrangement in Northern Ireland, under the so-called Sunningdale Agreement, between the Protestant and C...
Jul 06, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 250
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 drove Heath to that decision. It also shows how all this led to the unravelling of the postwar consen...
Jul 05, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 249
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, addressed by direct rule of the province from London, internment without trail and with violent action by ...
Jun 22, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 248
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 him, he ran into the immovable obstacle of de Gaulle, despite believing like Trump that he could over...
Jun 15, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 247
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. Divorce was made easier. And there were reforms too in other fields, such as the abolition of the death pe...
Jun 08, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 246
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 didn’t want to face that loss of national prestige or the resentment devaluation had produced, all ove...
Jun 01, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 245
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 left which he’d deserted, now of the right which wasn’t sure it could trust him. An object of suspici...
May 25, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 244
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, Britain became directly hostile towards the European Economic Community (EEC), trying to build a ri...
May 18, 2025•16 min•Season 1Ep. 243
‘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 Africa as similar, entirely legitimate nationalist aspirations were spreading from country to country in ...
May 04, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 242
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 consecutive general election win in 1959. Meanwhile, in the Labour Party, in opposition, the left-right spl...
Apr 27, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 241
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 worse for Eden was what happened in Egypt. The nationalist Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser nationa...
Apr 20, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 240
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 allowed the British secret service to work with the Americans to bring down the democratically elected...
Apr 13, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 239
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 difficulties of the country. These were made worse by involvement in the Korean War, which meant rearming. ...
Apr 06, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 236
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 anyone who needed them irrespective of status. At the same time, he would not forbid those with the me...
Mar 30, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 237
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 too badly. Unemployment was kept to 2% of the workforce despite the return of two and a half million ...
Mar 23, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 236
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 after the First World War when the promise of a ‘Land fit for Heroes’ was betrayed. They, and the govern...
Mar 16, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 233
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 had massively extended its control of territory and what Churchill called an ‘iron curtain’ had as a r...
Mar 09, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 234
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 only one to keep the same leader, Joseph Stalin, at its head, as he had been at Tehran and Yalta. Roo...
Mar 02, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 233
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 towards Germany, it was hard to see how they could be blocked. Certainly, the Americans saw no way to...
Feb 23, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 232
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 well, in great part thanks to the brilliant planning work of Admiral Bertram Ramsay, and since then...
Feb 16, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 228
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, commanded the naval forces and learned some invaluable lessons about this kind of combined operatio...
Feb 09, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 230
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 losses in the Battle of the Atlantic, the loss of Burma and Malaya culminating in the fall of Singapo...
Feb 02, 2025•15 min•Season 1Ep. 229
