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.
Were Victorian bankers really ‘good?’
Coinciding as it did with the Occupy protests, Ian Hislop's recent BBC documentary on the philanthropy of Victorian bankers, When Bankers Were Good, was certainly well timed. But although entertaining and informative, Hislop's programme could also serve as a warning against using history to advance a contemporary policy prescription on the basis of very thin […]
Read MoreThe Chancellor’s Autumn Statement: one step forward
Tuesday's Autumn Statement by the Chancellor contained many welcome measures, and shows he is tiptoeing away from some of his previous mistakes. There is to be more spending on Britain's ageing rail lines, roads and urban infrastructure. There is to be more help for family budgets, though the freezing of many tax credits will more […]
Read MoreOne-size-fits-all reform could strangle British banking
The proposals of the Independent Commission on Banking (The Vickers Commission) have this week been endorsed by the Coalition Government. Implementation is scheduled for 2015 with banks given until 2019 to make all the arrangements required. The Vickers proposals have generated an all-party consensus, with any disagreement being confined to the practical details of how, […]
Read MoreBack to the Future
David Cameron has argued that the Government is determined to 'get to grips' with England's 'most troubled families', the relatively small number of families that he claims cause many of the problems in society. They are characterised by seven criteria – worklessness; poor housing; no qualifications; mental health problems; longstanding illness or disability; low income; […]
Read MoreFixing the General Election date
The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 represents the greatest change to our electoral system since universal suffrage was adopted in 1918. It abolishes our traditional system of general election timing based on the Crown's common law power to dissolve and summon Parliament: no longer will a Prime Minister be able to call an election at a […]
Read MoreCan the Great Depression help us fight the Great Recession?
Wobbly banks. Doubts about government credit. Chronic and rising unemployment, engendering a sense of hopelessness among the young. A second wave of economic crisis on the horizon. This litany of woes would have been familiar in 1931. At that stage of what we now term the Great Depression, there were hopes that the worst was […]
Read MoreUnionist secession? Scottish Tories looking for a role
In a recent speech launching his bid to lead the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, Murdo Fraser purposefully drew on the party's history to justify his radical proposals to disband the party and start again with a new name. 'For those people who think this is a leap in the dark,' he said, 'let us […]
Read MoreTripoli, the American national anthem and an old drinking song
Libyan rebels are finally taking Tripoli and have reached Gaddafi's own compound, two months after US lawmakers rebuked and filed a lawsuit against President Obama for not seeking congressional authorization for military involvement in Libya. Now comes the 'reflection' phase of the operation. Despite the press coverage and analysis of this conflict, the ironic history […]
Read MoreGet local: riots, youth and community
The disturbances of August 2011 do not easily lend themselves to comparisons with protests in British history. Most obviously, there is no 'overt' cause that can be identified: it is not the death of Mark Duggan that resonates around the urban landscape of Britain, but rather a sense of people taking the opportunity to violently […]
Read MoreFire and fear: rioting in Georgian London and contemporary Britain
'The most common image of the riots, both in witness statements and in pictures of the events, was of fire. London was burning. People could see the fires from far away and this spread fear. The whole of London was scared'. This was how I described the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, on 'Voices from […]
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