H&P encourages historians to use their expertise to shed light on issues of the day. If you are interested in submitting an opinion piece for publication, please see our editorial guidelines. We currently have 335 Opinion Articles listed by date and they are all freely searchable by theme, author or keyword.
Earlier this year, Alison McClean and Andrew Lownie used separate History & Policy opinion articles to raise concerns about the reclosure of files in the National Archives (TNA). In this update of the situation, Alison suggests that the TNA has been unwilling to engage with its critics and notes a worrying trend to remove from the online catalogue the titles and descriptions of reclosed files, making it difficult to trace what has been removed from public access.
An unexpected feature of the 2024 general election has been the scandal around political betting. As Laura Beers explains, however, betting on political outcomes is hardly a new phenomenon. Indeed, in the early decades of the twentieth century it was even a feature of some transactions in the London Stock Exchange.
The 2024 general election campaign has seen Labour revive the idea of worker representation as a means of making business more productive and responsive. Sophia Friedel notes that a similar agenda was advanced by Theresa May in 2016 in the wake of the Brexit referendum. The debate over May's proposals, and her subsequent partial retreat from them, points to the continued sensitivities around ideas of democracy in the workplace.
In May 2024, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Birth Trauma published their report, ‘Listen to Mums: Ending the Postcode Lottery on Perinatal Care’. It raised concerns about a range of issues including inadequate resourcing of midwifery, maternal mental health, and post-natal services, racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes and the economic costs of birth injuries. This policy article notes there have been complaints about maternity care since the inception of the NHS. It suggests we need to think about birth trauma in the broadest possible terms: as reflecting issues with culture, relationships, and power, as well as related issues of understaffing and underfunding.
In a letter in the current edition of the satirical magazine Private Eye, the director of History & Policy, Philip Murphy, suggests that Buckingham Palace should create its own constitution unit to advise the King. In this new opinion article, Murphy explains why.
Ahead of tonight's BBC 1 Question Time Leaders' special, Professor Jon Lawrence suggests the frequency and significance of leaders' debates are bringing Britain closer to a US model of head-to-head presidential showdowns.
Rishi Sunak's mishandling of the 80th anniversary of D-Day commemorations brings to mind his predecessor, John Major's, far more assured negotiation of the probllem of having to be absent from the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday 1995. More broadly both incidents illustrate the imporance of the symbolic in politics and the growing significance over the previous three dacades of the memory of the two World Wars as a focus for British national identity.
The policies of the major parties on health are likely to be fiercely debated in the course of the current general election. But what can be learned from British health policy in the past for those trying to improve it in the present? Two of the editors of a recent report for the British Academy, Lessons from the History of British Health Policy offer some answers.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has regularly been labelled 'boring' by satirists and by more flamboyant political opponents. As the 2024 general election campaign begins in earnest, we can expect to hear more of this. But, Professor Simon Szreter argues,genuinely transformative British politicians have been distinguished by their capacity to master the tough challenges of government rather than by their personal charisma.
Inspired by our recent opinion article by Alison McClean, historian and royal biographer Andrew Lownie writes about his own experience of the reclosure of files on the royal family at the National Archives and poses some urgent questions for the Keeper of TNA. We need to know on whose authority these reclosures are being made and why there is not greater transparency and accountability regarding this process.
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