Opinion Articles

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.


Open diplomacy? New embassies and old on the Thames

Carl Bridge, Eileen Chanin
December 2017

As the new US embassy is unveiled in London, Carl Bridge and Eileen Chanin look at a historical example of a truly “open” embassy building.

Read More

Are employment rates of disabled people “at the highest level since records began”?

Lucy Delap
December 2017

Lucy Delap shows that the history of disabled employment may not be the steady upward progression the government would like to suggest

Read More

Brexit and the great British breakfast

James P. Bowen, John Martin
October 2017

James P. Bowen and John Martin identify the agricultural sector's challenges – seasonal fruit-pickers are the best publicised part of the problem, but the permanent workforce will be affected too.

Read More

Britain’s hundred-year housing crisis: a century of uneven spending

Peter Shapely
October 2017

Peter Shapely shows how housing policy initiatives since 1919 have been sunk by the same problem of investment disappearing in lean periods, and suggests housing should be a basic constant spending priority alongside health.

Read More

The 2017 General Election in history

Martin Farr
July 2017

As the dust settles on the outcome of the 2017 General Election, Martin Farr looks at other key moments of electoral uncertainty and uneasy coalition.

Read More

After Grenfell, what can we learn from the housing policies of the 1970s?

David Ellis
June 2017

David Ellis suggests the 30-year-old consensus on what makes for politically acceptable housing policy may be breaking down in the way of the Grenfell disaster – opening the door to policies last employed in the 1970s.

Read More

Lessons from the Grenfell Tower disaster: the historic failures of the state in fire safety

Shane Ewen
June 2017

The role of the state in fire safety is not a settled matter – Shane Ewen shows how improved fire safety has tended to follow a preventable disaster in the past, so the lessons for policy makers, following a recent period of deregulation, should be clear.

Read More

The Blitz can show us how to respond to a tragedy

Henry Irving
June 2017

Henry Irving shows that government was willing to learn lessons in 1940 about its own unprepared response to destruction and homelessness – can the government of today learn the same lessons when responding to tragedy?

Read More

The Grenfell fire and the destruction of the British council estate

Sam Wetherell
June 2017

Sam Wetherell shows how the original unified vision of council estate architects was picked apart by housing legislation in the 1980s and 1990s, resulting in the patchwork of managing bodies we see today.

Read More

Prince Harry and the history of mental health stigma policy

Chris Millard
May 2017

Chris Millard traces the history of policy designed to tackle stigma, contextualising both “celebrity” action and the mooted scrapping of the Mental Health Act 1983.

Read More
  • Papers by author

  • The theme

News RSS Feed

How to Use RSS Feeds

To subscribe to the History & Policy News feed in your feed reader, copy the URL and paste it in your RSS Aggregator.

COPY URL TO RSS READER

http://www.historyandpolicy.org/news/rss

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Sign up to receive announcements on events, the latest research and more!

To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.

We will never send spam and you can unsubscribe any time.

About Us


H&P is based at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, University of London.

We are the only project in the UK providing access to an international network of more than 500 historians with a broad range of expertise. H&P offers a range of resources for historians, policy makers and journalists.