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.


‘History suggests “boom and bust” won’t go away’

David Hall-Matthews
April 2010

On the Today programme on Thursday 8 April, Gordon Brown was challenged by John Humphreys over his oft-repeated claim as Chancellor of the Exchequer that he had “put an end to boom and bust” in the UK economy. From a man once hailed as a brilliant economist, this was always an astonishingly naive, ahistorical assertion. […]

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A return to Victorian levels of railway building?

Colin Divall
April 2010

The Liberal Democrats argue that investing in Britain's railways should mean more than building new high-speed lines. By spending 'nearly £3 billion' to reopen 'thousands of miles of track' closed in the 1960s and earlier, they want to promote the 'biggest expansion' of the network since the Victorian age' to 'make our railway great again'. […]

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Historians respond to the Budget 2010

Glen O'Hara, Ronen Palan, Hugh Pemberton, Noel Whiteside
March 2010

Glen O'Hara of Oxford Brookes University, puts the public debt in historical perspective “During the budget debate, the Leader of the Opposition said that the £167 billion being borrowed by the government this year is 'more than every single Labour Government in history ever borrowed, added up together'. The key here, of course, is that […]

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Choosing your history: Wave energy development in the UK

Campbell Wilson
March 2010

Last week the news headlines were dominated by the Crown Estates' announcement of the winning bidders for a selection of wave and tidal energy sites in the Pentland Firth. Undoubtedly, most people would have been blissfully unaware that such an auction was even taking place. However, the stirring sight of the swelling seas around Orkney, […]

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Cameron and the renewal of the ‘property-owning democracy’

Matthew Francis
February 2010

The Conservative Party has recently won considerable publicity by renewing a pledge to allow workers' co-operatives to own and run public services. In so doing, the party has been accused of 'stealing political clothes that will never fit them'. Co-operatives, it is alleged, are an intrinsically left-wing concept and will never be natural Conservative terrain […]

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Recreating our political history

Steven Fielding
February 2010

If journalism is the first draft of history the biopic is now a close second, having become the staple output of many television drama departments. Recently figures as diverse as the Queen, Margaret Thatcher and Winnie Mandela have been given the treatment. Historians undoubtedly ground their teeth as these accounts gave the protagonist undue importance […]

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Political posters in history

Christopher Burgess
January 2010

Why does a huge image of David Cameron dominate the Conservative's new election poster? Is it because, with his shirt-unbuttoned, this Man of Action is telling us that he personally will crack the deficit problem? Or is this just another example of Cameron aping the former Labour leader Tony Blair, another instance in which he […]

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Slavery and climate change: lessons to be learned

Jean-Francois Mouhot
December 2009

In a recent interview with the Guardian, James Hansen, one of the world's best-known climate scientist suggested that it would be better for the planet and for future generations if the Copenhagen climate change summit ended in collapse, rather than a flawed deal. Hansen claimed that dealing with climate change, 'is analogous to the issue […]

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‘Hijacking’ history

Ivan Pregnolato
December 2009

'Given that the Second World War was fuelled by the need to disarm oppressive and racist regimes, is it fair that the BNP has hijacked Churchill as its own?' Such was the first question posed to the panellists gathered for the BBC's Question Time transmitted on the 22 October 2009. Because of the furore caused […]

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More sex, lies and trafficking

Jane Berney
December 2009

The Guardian's headline of 20 October 2009 announcing that the UK's 'Biggest Sex slavery inquiry failed to net single trafficker' was certainly designed to surprise if not shock the paper's readership. Journalist Nick Davies argues that there is something familiar in the 'sexing up' (to excuse the pun) of the evidence on sex trafficking and […]

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