The numbers of people who are physically impaired, neurodivergent, chronically sick or experiencing mental distress have increased to around one in four of the UK population. Government ministers have announced an independent review in 2025 into possible over-diagnosis. There is a long history of unchallenged, casually reproduced stigma against sick and disabled people, and repeated episodes of it being fanned for political purposes. It will be crucial to the success of any policies arising from the latest review that they acknowledge and address this issue.

Women and men gained formal workplace equality on 29 December 1975 when the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts came into force. Incremental change has been achieved slowly across the subsequent 50 years, and continued gender segregation within sectors and occupations, combined with intersectional disadvantage, has made it difficult to close the gender wage gap.

The tragic shootings at Bondi Beach and Brown University have put questions of gun control back in the spotlight. These debates are almost as old as guns themselves and they point to the extent to which cultural attitudes to firearms are deeply embedded.

The team of historians behind an AHRC-funded research project reflect on the fracturing of Conservatism and Unionism in the the UK in the final third of the twentieth century, and the insights into that process provided by a witness seminar hosted by History & Policy in June 2025.

As the Labour Government’s Employment Bill neared the end of its passage through Parliament, History & Policy’s Trades Union and Employment Forum organized a special conference examining the history of Employment Tribunals.

A collection of papers based on our seminar series in partnership with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Historians on official history has been published in a special edition of the refereed journal ‘Diplomacy and Statecraft’.