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 342 Opinion Articles listed by date and they are all freely searchable by theme, author or keyword.
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.
Since 2012, thousands of previously open documents have been removed from public access under the Reclosure Policy of the National Archives (TNA). The full extent of this withdrawal of previously decalssified material is not apparent from TNA's annual reports on reclosure. The process itself is extremely opaque and appears to involve the application of the exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act in ways that run contrary to the spirit of that legislation. Historians should be concerned by this development.
Absconds from prison are at a historic low. The prison system in England and Wales does not offer an ‘open prison’ sentence, but individuals may be transferred to one of the 12 open prisons as part of their preparation for release. Since its inception, the open prison has been at the mercy of capricious policy. This tension is still apparent today. Events in 2022 led to the Justice Secretary imposing stricter transfer criteria; since then, the policy has been abandoned.
Recent controversies over whether protest is permissible on ‘Remembrance Weekend’ have rested on an oversimplified view of Remembrance as an unchanging, sacralised and outside politics. In fact the commemoration of war in twentieth and twenty first century Britian has continuously evolved, subtly and sometimes unsubtly influenced by contemporary politics. The continued relevance of Remembrance can only be ensured by such adaptation, and is threatened by heavy-handed attempts to impose a unitary meaning.
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