What does it mean to be Welsh? The writer Jan Morris said Wales was ‘a distinctly separate and often vehement idea’. But what is that idea? Do you need to understand Welsh to grasp it? How is Wales … different? And is it going to become even more unlike England? Ros Taylor talks to Swansea University professor Martin Johnes and Plaid Cymru Senedd member Heledd Fychan about the history of the Welsh nationalist movement and the future of the Welsh language. ‘There’s lots of angst with being Welsh....
Oct 15, 2024•47 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast The expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 was brutal. Twenty eight thousand refugees arrived in Britain. The government scrambled to find homes and jobs for them. Not everyone was pleased about it. But if Ugandan Asians held British passports they had the right to come here — and most of them thrived. Why did they do well — and can it teach us anything about how we treat refugees? Neena Lakhani was 14 when she was forced to leave Uganda. She tells Ros Taylor what it was like to start a new lif...
Oct 01, 2024•43 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast In 1969, three kilometres under the North Sea, drillers found something that would change Britain completely. It would transform us into an oil-producing nation, fuel Thatcherism in the 1980s, feed resentment in Scotland — and yet all of it happened largely out of sight of most Britons. How did North Sea oil and gas change us? What’s life like for the dwindling group of people who work in the industry? And can drilled-out fields actually help to combat global heating? “At peak production, the re...
Sep 17, 2024•46 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast The Lionesses’ Euro victory captivated English football fans – but this success was once unimaginable. In 1921, the English Football Association banned women from playing on any of its pitches, a ban that would remain in place for 50 years. Who were the women who fought back? How did they defy all odds to get the women’s game to where it is today? In for Ros Taylor, Jade Bailey talks to Jean Williams, visiting professor at the University of Reading, about the early pioneers of women’s football, ...
Sep 03, 2024•33 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Mock cream. Lord Woolton Pie. For 14 years the government put draconian restrictions on how much Britons could eat. Each meal had to be carefully planned and every scrap of food eked out to avoid waste. But at the end of it, Britons were healthier than ever before. Was it the best of times or the worst of times? Turned out it could be both — depending on who you were. And the rationing that kept Britons fed played a part in the deaths of millions of colonial subjects in India. Ros Taylor talks t...
Aug 13, 2024•41 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Some say it was the greatest ever feat of European engineering. A few even think that we wouldn’t have joined the European Economic Community without it. Others complained it ate up ten times as much as its original budget, and no-one else wanted it. Why did we decide to build Concorde? Why did we almost abandon it? And how did it become both an object of national pride and an albatross around the neck of British Airways? Ros Taylor talks to Concorde pilot John Tye and visiting fellow of King’s ...
Jul 30, 2024•39 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast The Green Belt is a powerful symbol of rural England — and Labour knows it. The new government says it wants to build on unlovely bits of green belts. A lot of people don’t like that. Who decided there should be Green Belts? What are they really for? How did they get so big? And how is the government ever going to overcome the opposition of homeowners who treasure their views and have absolutely no personal interest in house prices falling? Ros Taylor talks to LSE professor Paul Cheshire and jou...
Jul 16, 2024•44 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast In their heyday women’s magazines sold 12 million copies a week. And at their best, these magazines changed women’s lives. They advised, they inspired, they gave us a glimpse of a different way of being — and that was as true of Cosmopolitan as it was of the feminist magazine Spare Rib. In our Season 2 finale, Ros Taylor talks to Sam Baker, who edited Just Seventeen, Company, Cosmopolitan and Red, about what it was like to play such a big role in teenage girls’ lives, and Roisin Boyd, a member o...
May 14, 2024•48 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast When it comes to intervention in the Middle East, there is one word that sums up British hubris. And that word is Suez. But did Britain learn from one of our most infamous mistakes in the Middle East? Far from it. From opposing the construction of the Suez Canal, then repeatedly going to war to defend it, and most recently bombing Houthi rebels trying to disrupt Red Sea trade, Britain is preoccupied with this vital shipping route — and convinced it can change the course of history in the Middle ...
Apr 30, 2024•30 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast In our latest look into postwar history: decriminalising homosexuality. In 1967 — for the first time in more than 400 years — two men over 21 were legally allowed to have sex, in private, with each other. But the fight for equality was very far from won. Campaigner Peter Tatchell and Hugo Greenhalgh, whose book The Diaries of Mr Lucas: Notes from a Lost Gay Life is published this month, tell Ros Taylor what life was like for gay men in the late 20th century. It’s a story of pickups in Marble Arc...
Apr 16, 2024•43 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Coal: filthy, dangerous, and vital to Britain’s economy — but not any more. What did coal mining really mean to people? And why is coal so key to the biggest issues in politics — from the founding of the NHS, to Thatcherism, and even the issue of who should take the blame for the climate emergency? Ros Taylor talks to Joerg Arnold, a historian at the University of Nottingham, and Ian Winwood, whose family were coal miners in Yorkshire, about why you have to understand the black stuff to understa...
Apr 02, 2024•45 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast National service has become part of the mythology of a braver, stronger Britain, where young men did their duty for their country and ended up having a damn good time doing it. But did they? What did people really think of National Service — and why were so many of them utterly relieved when it came to an end? Ros Taylor talks to Richard Vinen, a historian at King’s College London and author of National Service: A Generation in Uniform, and Martin Stone, who joined the RAF in 1950. • “I did have...
Mar 19, 2024•41 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Swish… thwack. After the war, one British tradition continued unabated: beating children in schools. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that it was completely outlawed. Why was the UK so attached to corporal punishment and what it did it take to change the law? Ros Taylor talks to journalist Andrew Brown, who was beaten as a boy, and University of Sheffield historian Heather Ellis about why beatings were seen as an important preparation for life — especially life defending the remains of the Britis...
Mar 05, 2024•33 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast After the War, Britain was broke and broken – even broker than France. America was faced with a stark choice: invest billions in a shattered Europe or watch its citizens go hungry, or worse, Communist. So how did the Marshall Plan come to be? And what sort of Britain did it rebuild beyond the Welfare State? Ros Taylor talks to Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and military historian Dr. Steph Hinnershitz about the aid package Britain...
Feb 20, 2024•39 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Ros Taylor’s exploration of Britain’s postwar identity crisis continues. After the War, Britain was broke and broken. Between 1947 and 1981 over a million Britons left for a new life in Australia, some for just £10 passage. Ros looks at the lives of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’, their conflicted identities, the legacy of the racist ‘White Australia’ policy… and how a country that was once desperate for (white) migrants became a role model for immigration hardliners who wanted a points-based system in th...
Feb 06, 2024•33 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast A new fortnightly series of Ros Taylor’s exploration of the post-War promises Britain made to itself… and whether they were kept. In this edition: the quest for cheap, easy-to-access, stigma-free contraception wasn’t the simple progression to female freedom that you might think. The wartime emancipation of women – not just into work but into “fraternisation” with American servicemen – created a stereotype of “loose” women and racist judgment against Black GIs. Birth control in the 50s was danger...
Jan 23, 2024•44 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast From the producers of Jam Tomorrow - a brand new show looking at the tectonic shifts in global power occurring right before our eyes, called This Is Not A Drill. Presented by ex-BBC News host and Washington correspondent Gavin Esler with a series of co-hosts including Oz Katerji, This Is Not A Drill takes a look at the expanding threats to global stability from Ukraine to the Middle East to China; exploring the dangers, corruption, conflicts and power struggles happening around the world. New ep...
Dec 01, 2023•10 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast A Jam Tomorrow special: Identity cards. What happens when principles come up against panic? When a high minded determination not to collect private info runs up against a society which depends on data? Ros Taylor charts the history of “show us your papers” from wartime security concerns to football hooliganism, benefit fraud crackdowns, Blairite control freakery and our modern obsession with asylum seekers. Speaking to experts including New Labour ID card advocate Liam Byrne she finds that this ...
Jun 21, 2023•40 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Season finale: Since the War, Britons experienced an explosion of choice in food, services, work, utilities, even belief and sexuality. But did ever-increasing choices really lead us to the promised land? Why are we lost in a maze of competing phone contracts, train fares, and “options” from schools and hospitals – where choice is bewildering and meaningless? In the last episode of this season, Ros Taylor finds out how choice and competition shaped the post-privatisation world from rail to energ...
Feb 20, 2023•39 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast The post-war dream was anchored in ideas of Britain as a Christian nation. Now we’re a polyglot country of different faiths and none. Can religious belief still tie Britain together? Should we want it to? Ros Taylor looks at the Church of England’s journey from its unifying role in the Second World War to its search for a new identity in a world of charismatic evangelicals, shifting sexualities and new ethnic communities. Does the CofE have to change or disappear? • “Donating to the church colle...
Feb 13, 2023•40 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Britain’s class system is rigid and incomprehensible – and education keeps it that way. Why do so many of us think we’re working class when we’re not? Why do we still believe in making it through hard work, yet hate social climbers? After the War, we told ourselves we were on the way towards a classless society. Ros Taylor talks to people as diverse as campaigner and educationalist Melissa Benn and class commentator Peter York to find that decades of meddling with education and work only entrenc...
Feb 06, 2023•43 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast How the housing dream was betrayed, and how to fix it. Council houses fit for the wartime generation gave way to a “home-owning democracy”, but we priced the young out of home ownership and refused to build the properties they need. How did Britain screw up housing so badly? From prefabs to Poulson to Thatcher’s Right to Buy and NIMBYism, Ros Taylor finds out how Britain’s approach to housing went so very wrong. Along the way, Neil Kinnock remembers the cockroaches that infested his childhood ho...
Jan 30, 2023•39 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast How Britain’s postwar dreams were stolen… and how to win them back. This time: The NHS was the prize for all the pain and sacrifice of the Second World War. When did we accept that it would be a service in perpetual decline? Ros Taylor talks to experts from senior policy planners to Casualty scriptwriters to discover how the NHS became a huge entity in permanent crisis – why it holds such a grip on our collective imagination – and how to rescue it. “I have never seen NHS morale lower than it is ...
Jan 21, 2023•52 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast How did Britain’s dreams of a new postwar world go unfulfilled? And what does that mean for us today? In the first of a new documentary series from the makers of Oh God, What Now?, Ros Taylor looks at the legacy of the War itself. Ιdeals of the Blitz Spirit and dreams of wartime heroism still shape everything from pop culture and entertainment to the Brexit debate. But the truth of the War is more complex and less comforting. What will it take for us to see the Second World War – and ourselves –...
Jan 16, 2023•58 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Out of the ruins of the Second World War, the British people were promised a better world of free healthcare, quality housing and good schools. What happened to these promises of Jam Tomorrow? In a new series from the makers of Oh God, What Now?, Ros Taylor explores how the postwar dream was betrayed – and how we can win it back. Follow Jam Tomorrow on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Jan 13, 2023•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
