Policy Papers
Why Britain’s Immigration System is not Fairer, Firmer and Faster: From the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 to the Emergency Visa Brake 2026
Nilakshi Das argues that the Home Office’s latest ’emergency brake’ on immigration shares the administrative logic of earlier legislation from the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act onwards, based as it is on notions of legitimacy, and organised around categories of race/ethnicity, class, nationality and descent. We need to rethink the principles behind UK immigration policy.
Two Speeches, Two Eras: Labour’s Quest for National Cohesion. From Wilson in 1968 to Starmer in 2026, a deep dive on two major area-based strategy announcements.
In comparing two major speeches 58 years apart, the first by Harold Wilson and the second by Keir Starmer, this policy paper by Camille Perbost identifies echoes between the attempts of these Labour prime ministers to ensure that regional inequalities and deprivation did not fuel populist extremism, and suggests some lessons from the way in which the Wilson government confronted this challenge.
Opinion Articles
‘Children couldn’t have been treated like that.’ But we were. What a Survivor of Childhood Tuberculosis Can Teach Today’s Policymakers
Drawing on the experiences of her father, Harry Drabble, a survivor of childhood bovine tuberculosis, Helen Parker-Drabble argues that the long-term psychological and developmental impact of prolonged hospitalisation in childhood is a neglected aspect of today’s policy discussions.
The long history of debates about gun control
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.
News
Holocaust Memorial Day 2026
Registration is still open for Professor David Feldman’s lecture ‘Mourning, memory and politics: memorialization of the Holocaust in Britain from the 1940s to the present day’.
Article to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act
Hilary Cooper publishes article to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act becoming law.
History & Policy By Numbers
Policy Papers
Opinion Articles
Historians
Founded
Remembering the General Strike, 100 years on



