Political events in the interwar years must always be seen in the context of the Great Depression, which set in internationally after the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929. In Britain, in addition to disruption to the financial system and the stability of sterling, there was a rapid acceleration in unemployment from the late 1920s, so that by the spring of 1931, 25 percent of the workforce was unemployed. The country was still in the aftermath of economic depression when, in June 1935, Baldwin rather abruptly took over the prime ministership from MacDonald, whose health was clearly failing. A general election followed on November 14, in which the Conservatives returned 432 members to Parliament to Labour’s 154. But because the so-called National Liberals and a few remaining National Labour members still participated in the government, it was technically a coalition. With the onset of World War II in 1939, this election was to be the last British general election for nearly a decade. Hence, Baldwin, in his final 18 months of office, presided over the beginnings of Britain’s appeasement policy and over the more spectacular but less important abdication of the new king, Edward VIII, who had ascended the throne on January 20, 1936, upon the death of his father, George V.
In the quarter century since his father’s accession, Edward, as prince of Wales, had become the most public and best-known heir to the throne since his grandfather, Edward VII. But, unknown to the British public, some years before his accession he had fallen in love with an American, Wallis Simpson, who was then married to a British subject, Ernest Simpson. Edward decided to marry her, and in 1936, after his accession, Wallis Simpson began divorce proceedings against her husband. Baldwin, well before his actual confrontations with the king, had determined that Edward could not marry Mrs. Simpson and remain monarch. He warned the king not to attempt to influence public opinion or to try to remain on the throne. The temper of the people and of Parliament was against Edward. Eventually, on December 11, 1936, he announced his abdication in a poignant radio broadcast and left Great Britain. Baldwin had triumphed. The king was succeeded by his younger brother, who became George VI and who had an eminently suitable family, including two young daughters. After George VI’s coronation on May 12, 1937, Baldwin resigned, amid every sign of popular affection; he was succeeded on May 28 by Neville Chamberlain.
The duke of Windsor (formerly Edward VIII) and duchess of Windsor on their wedding day, June 3, 1937; photograph by Cecil Beaton.Camera Press/Globe Photos Foreign policy and appeasement
Chamberlain, rather than Baldwin, has always been regarded as the man of appeasement. Historically this is correct only in the sense that Chamberlain formulated a policy of accommodation with Germany and Italy. But Chamberlain was also the man who began British rearmament, pronounced appeasement a failure, and declared war upon Germany. Baldwin was equally zealous to avoid any sort of confrontation with the European dictators while doing as little as possible to strengthen Britain’s armed forces.
Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in Germany on January 30, 1933, occasioned only the slightest interest in Britain. Little was known of him. It was usually assumed that he was a tool of the right or the army and in any case would not remain in office long. This illusion began to shatter in January 1935, when Germany overwhelmingly won a plebiscite in the Saar River basin; the Saarlanders voted to return their area to Germany, from which it had been separated by the Treaty of Versailles as part of German reparations, rather than remaining with France. This was an enormous boost to Hitler’s prestige, as well as a confirmation of the attraction of Nazi Germany and, by the same token, a setback for France and the idea of democracy.
On the wave of popularity the plebiscite brought, Hitler reintroduced military conscription in Germany and announced the creation of the Luftwaffe (the German air force), both in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. In response, the former wartime allies and guarantors of the peace treaty, Britain, France, and Italy, met at Stresa, Italy, in April and there discussed collective action to uphold the disarmament terms of the treaty; this understanding became known as the Stresa Front. Its maintenance, specifically the challenge of keeping Italy a foe of Germany, formed the motivation for Britain’s foreign policy for the next 18 months; in effect it was the beginnings of appeasement. In August 1935 Italy attacked the empire of Ethiopia in Africa, announcing that it had apprised Britain and France at Stresa of its intentions of doing so. British public opinion was torn between a desire to avoid war and an unwillingness to sanction unprovoked aggression. The compromise was a retreat to the fiction of “collective security,” which meant a dependence upon action by the League of Nations in Geneva. Support for the League of Nations became the Conservative position on foreign policy in the general election of November 1935.
Britain at this time remained interested in pursuing friendship with Italy. Immediately after the election the British foreign secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, and the French premier, Pierre Laval, put together a plan for the rescue of part of Ethiopia that required the cession of certain areas to Italy. This plan found its way into the press, provoking a general denunciation of compromise with evil. Hoare had to resign, and the first attempt at appeasement failed. By the spring of 1936, with the League of Nations still debating what to do about Italian aggression—specifically, whether to impose sanctions on oil—resistance in Ethiopia collapsed. Meanwhile, on March 7, Hitler took advantage of the disarray in the west and broke the first of the territorial clauses of the Treaty of Versailles by sending troops into the Rhineland, the German territory to the west of the Rhine River bordering on Belgium and the Netherlands.
The Rhineland occupation turned the balance of power in Europe toward Germany and against the west. Although in Britain there was virtually no reaction—after all, it was German territory—the effect on France, particularly on the French army command, was devastating. As a consequence, France virtually gave up the unilateral direction of its foreign affairs. Diplomatic initiative rested entirely in London. Now that it was too late, the 15-year rupture between Britain and France came to an end.
In July 1936 revolution against the Republican government of Spain broke out, led by conservative forces within the Spanish army under the command of Gen. Francisco Franco. It quickly became apparent that the revolutionaries were supported by Italy and, to a lesser extent, Germany, not only with money and arms but also with men. The British reaction, adopted also by the French, was peculiar. Although, according to public opinion polls begun in 1937, less than 3 percent of the British population favoured a Francoist victory, British policy was to forbid the supply of arms to either side. By this policy of nonintervention the British and the French avoided involvement in war against Franco and by implication against the Italian government. The pursuit of friendship with Italy could continue. Meanwhile, the democratic Spanish government was unable to buy arms from the Western democracies. Franco eventually triumphed in the spring of 1939. (See also Spanish Civil War.)
Chamberlain was determined to continue the policy of accommodation with Italy. He was convinced that at some point it could be reunited with the Western allies and the Stresa Front could be recreated. Italian leader Benito Mussolini and officials of his government gave many private intimations that this might be possible. But at the same time Chamberlain was determined to pursue a general policy of European settlement that would include Germany. The prime minister and many Britons felt that Germany had been badly treated by the Treaty of Versailles and that the principle of self-determination dictated that German minorities in other countries should not be prevented from joining Germany if they clearly chose to do so. Hence, when Germany overran the Austrian republic in March 1938 and incorporated the small state into the Reich (see Anschluss), Britain took no action. Similarly, when almost immediately Hitler began to denounce what he characterized as the Czech persecutions of the militant German minority in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain searched for a means not to prevent the Czech borderland from being transferred to Germany but to ensure that it was accomplished peacefully. Because Czechoslovakia had a military alliance with France, war would surely result if it resisted the Germans and called upon French aid.
The attempted settlement of the Sudeten crisis, culminating in the Munich Agreement, was the climax of the appeasement policy. Between September 15 and 30, 1938, Chamberlain traveled to Germany three times to meet Hitler. From the last meeting, held at Munich on September 30, he took back what he believed to be an agreement that the German portions of Czechoslovakia constituted Hitler’s last territorial claim in Europe and that Germany, as well as Britain, would renounce war as a means of settling international claims. He had, he said with some pride, brought “peace for our time.”
Chamberlain’s policy failed because he believed that Hitler sincerely aimed only at reuniting Germans, whereas in fact Hitler’s appetite for territory, particularly to the east, was unlimited. On March 15, 1939, the German army, virtually without warning, occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia, even though it was not inhabited by Germans. On March 18 Chamberlain, distinctly angry, made an announcement that amounted to the end of appeasement; in the following weeks Britain offered a guarantee of Polish territory (where Hitler would clearly be looking next), signed a military alliance with Poland, and undertook serious preparation for war, including the first peacetime military conscription. World War II
The Polish crisis precipitated the war. Through the summer of 1939, German propaganda grew more strident, demanding cession to Germany of the city of Gdańsk (Danzig) while gradually escalating demands for special rights in, and finally annexation of, the Polish corridor. Because the only country able to defend Poland was the Soviet Union, a British-French mission in the summer of 1939 began negotiations for a treaty with Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin. Poland, however, announced that it would not allow Soviet troops to enter Polish territory, even for the purpose of defending the country against Germany. Hitler put a stop to these negotiations on August 23 when he announced the Nonaggression Pact" class="md-crosslink">German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. On September 1 German troops invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3. The phases of war
From the British perspective, World War II fell readily into three distinct phases. The first, the so-called phony war and the period of German victories in the west, ended with the decision of France on June 18, 1940, to ask for an armistice with Germany. The second, heroic phase, when Britain stood alone, began with the battle for survival in the air over the British Isles and ended in the first week of December 1941 with the successful Soviet defense of Moscow after Hitler’s attack on June 22 and with the Japanese declaration of war on the United States and the British Empire on December 7. Then followed what Churchill termed the period of the Grand Alliance, lasting from December 1941 until Germany’s capitulation in May 1945.
Perhaps the most important event of the first phase was the announcement on September 3, 1939, that Churchill, assumed to have reached the end of his career in 1936 as a result of his having embraced the king’s cause during the abdication crisis, would reenter the government as first lord of the admiralty. Churchill thus was in charge of the Royal Navy on April 9 and 10, 1940, when Hitler without warning overran Denmark and Norway, greatly extending his northern flank and virtually destroying the naval blockade of Germany that had been established at the beginning of the war.
The Norwegian campaign destroyed the Chamberlain government. The obviously poor planning and the incapacity of the British forces in an area where the Germans were at a serious disadvantage caused a rebellion within the Conservative Party. A bitter debate lasting from May 7 to May 9, 1940, resulted in Chamberlain’s resignation the next day. Although Churchill himself, as first lord of the admiralty, was heavily involved and did not attempt to deny his responsibility, Chamberlain quickly discovered that the coalition government he hoped to establish with either himself or Lord Halifax as prime minister could, at the insistence of the Labour Party, be headed only by Churchill. Thus, on May 10 Churchill was announced as prime minister. Chamberlain, to his immense credit, consented to remain in the cabinet and to control, on Churchill’s behalf, the Conservative Party.
Churchill, WinstonWinston Churchill, photographed by Yousuf Karsh, 1941.Karsh/Woodfin Camp and Associates
On the same day, May 10, 1940, the German army struck in the west against the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. France held out for just 38 days. (Listen to an excerpt of Churchill’s first address to the House of Commons as prime minister, on May 13, 1940.) When on June 18 the French government resolved to ask for an armistice, Churchill announced on the radio that Britain would fight on alone; it would be the nation’s “finest hour.” So began the second phase of World War II for Britain. Through August and September 1940 Britain’s fate depended upon 800 fighter airplanes and upon Churchill’s resolution during the terrific bombardment that became the Battle of Britain. In the last six months of 1940, some 23,000 civilians were killed, and yet the country held on. (For contemporary descriptions of the devastation of London, see BTW: London Classics: London in World War II.)
Perhaps the important political lesson of World War II lay in the realization that a democratic country, with a centuries-old tradition of individual liberty, could with popular consent be mobilized for a gigantic national effort. The compulsory employment of labour became universal for both men and women. In 1943 Britain was devoting 54 percent of its gross national product to the war. Medical services were vastly extended. Civilian consumption was reduced to 80 percent of the prewar level. Yet by and large the political tensions that had accompanied an equally desperate war 25 years before did not appear. Politics, as opposed to the direction of the war, certainly for the voters, became almost irrelevant. There was some parliamentary criticism of Churchill’s leadership, but public approval, at least as measured by repeated opinion polls, hardly wavered. Nonetheless, the idea of a “united” country was overplayed then, and, in the eyes of some, has been overplayed since. The old divisions of class and gender were never far below the surface, and it is only with considerable qualification that World War II can be called the People’s War. Political developments
German hostilities in the west ended at midnight on May 8, 1945. Six months earlier Churchill had promised in the House of Commons that he would ask the king to dissolve the sitting Parliament, elected in 1935, soon after the German surrender unless the Labour and Liberal parties seriously desired to continue the coalition government. Accordingly, he began conversations with Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, in the middle of May, proposing that Labour remain in the coalition until Japan surrendered, an event he estimated to be at least 18 months away. Churchill believed Attlee to have been initially sympathetic, but other members of the Labour Party pressed for departure. As a result, Churchill dissolved the government on May 23, appointed a new, single-party Conservative government, and set election day for July 5. Because it was necessary to count the military vote, the results could not be announced until July 26.
Attlee, ClementClement Attlee.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Considering that the leading figures in each party had been cabinet colleagues only a few weeks before, the electoral campaign was remarkably bitter. Largely on the advice of William Maxwell Aitken, Baron Beaverbrook, the Conservatives focused chiefly on Churchill himself as the man who had won the war. Churchill denounced Labour as the party of socialism and perhaps of totalitarianism while promising strong leadership and grand but unspecific measures of social reform. Labour, even though the war in the Pacific continued, concentrated on peacetime reconstruction and fair shares for all.
Quite clearly, Churchill’s rhetoric and his attacks on former comrades angered many voters. But the mood in the country that gave Labour its overwhelming victory was obviously determined by the recollection of the hardships of the 1920s and ’30s; Britons voted against Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. In the end Labour won 393 seats, almost double the Conservative total of 213 and far more than it had expected. On July 26, 1945, as soon as the results were clear, Churchill resigned and Attlee became prime minister. Britain since 1945 Labour and the welfare state (1945–51)
Labour rejoiced at its political triumph, the first independent parliamentary majority in the party’s history, but it faced grave problems. The war had stripped Britain of virtually all its foreign financial resources, and the country had built up “sterling credits”—debts owed to other countries that would have to be paid in foreign currencies—amounting to several billion pounds. Moreover, the economy was in disarray. Some industries, such as aircraft manufacture, were far larger than was now needed, while others, such as railways and coal mines, were desperately short of new equipment and in bad repair. With nothing to export, Britain had no way to pay for imports or even for food. To make matters worse, within a few weeks of the surrender of Japan, on September 2, 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman, as he was required to do by law, ended lend-lease, upon which Britain had depended for its necessities as well as its arms. John Maynard Keynes, as his last service to Great Britain, had to negotiate a $3.75 billion loan from the United States and a smaller one from Canada. In international terms, Britain was bankrupt.
Labour, nonetheless, set about enacting the measures that in some cases had been its program since the beginning of the century. Nationalization of railroads and coal mines, which were in any case so run down that any government would have had to bring them under state control, and of the Bank of England began immediately. In addition, road transport, docks and harbours, and the production of electrical power were nationalized. There was little debate. The Conservatives could hardly argue that any of these industries, barring electric power, was flourishing or that they could have done much differently.
More debate came over Labour’s social welfare legislation, which created the “welfare state.” Labour enacted a comprehensive program of national insurance, based upon the Beveridge Report (prepared by economist William Beveridge and advocating state action to control unemployment, along with the introduction of free health insurance and contributory social insurance) but differing from it in important ways. It regularized the de facto nationalization of public assistance, the old Poor Law, in the National Assistance Act of 1946, and in its most controversial move it established the gigantic framework of the National Health Service, which provided free comprehensive medical care for every citizen, rich or poor. The pugnacious temper of the minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, and the insistence of radical elements in the Labour Party upon the nationalization of all hospitals provoked the only serious debate accompanying the enactment of this immense legislative program, most of which went into force within two years of Labour’s accession to office. Bevan emerged at this time as an important figure on the Labour left and would remain its leader until his death in 1960.
Aneurin Bevan, c. 1950.ANL/REX/Shutterstock.com Economic crisis and relief (1947)
Labour’s record in its first 18 months of office was distinguished. In terms of sheer legislative bulk, the government accomplished more than any other government in the 20th century save perhaps Asquith’s pre-World War I administration or the administration of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90). Yet by 1947 it had been overtaken by the economic crisis, which had not abated. The loan from the United States that was supposed to last four years was nearly gone. Imports were cut to the bone. Bread, never rationed during the war, had to be controlled. Britain had to withdraw support from Greece and Turkey, reversing a policy more than a century old, and call upon the United States to take its place. Thus, at Britain’s initiative, the Truman Doctrine came into existence.
Relief came with U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s announcement that the United States would undertake a massive program of financial aid to the European continent. Any country in the Eastern or Western bloc was entitled to take part. Although the Soviet Union immediately denounced the Marshall Plan as the beginning of a division between the East and the West, all western European countries, including Britain, hastened to participate. It can be argued that the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine represent the permanent involvement of the United States in Europe. Withdrawal from the empire
Britain, not entirely by coincidence, was also beginning its withdrawal from the empire. Most insistent in its demand for self-government was India. The Indian independence movement had come of age during World War I and had gained momentum with the Massacre of Amritsar of 1919. The All-India Congress Party, headed by Mohandas K. Gandhi, evoked sympathy throughout the world with its policy of nonviolent resistance, forcing Baldwin’s government in the late 1920s to seek compromise. The eventual solution, embodied in the Government of India Act of 1935, provided responsible government for the Indian provinces, the Indianization of the civil service, and an Indian parliament, but it made clear that the Westminster Parliament would continue to legislate for the subcontinent. The act pleased no one, neither the Indians, the Labour Party, which considered it a weak compromise, nor a substantial section of the Conservative Party headed by Churchill, which thought it went too far. Agitation in India continued.
Further British compromise became inevitable when the Japanese in the spring of 1942 swept through Burma to the eastern borders of India while also organizing in Singapore a large Indian National Army and issuing appeals to Asian nationalism. During the war, Churchill reluctantly offered increasing installments of independence amounting to dominion status in return for all-out Indian support for the conflict. These offers were rejected by both the Muslim minority and the Hindu majority.
The election of a Labour government at the end of World War II coincided with the rise of sectarian strife within India. The new administration determined with unduly urgent haste that Britain would have to leave India. This decision was announced on June 3, 1947, and British administration in India ended 10 weeks later, on August 15. Burma (now Myanmar) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) received independence by early 1948. Britain, in effect, had no choice but to withdraw from colonial territories it no longer had the military and economic power to control.
The same circumstances that dictated the withdrawal from India required, at almost the same time, the termination of the mandate in Trans-Jordan, the evacuation of all of Egypt except the Suez Canal territory, and in 1948 the withdrawal from Palestine, which coincided with the proclamation of the State of Israel. It has been argued that the orderly and dignified ending of the British Empire, beginning in the 1940s and stretching into the 1960s, was Britain’s greatest international achievement. However, like the notion of national unity during World War II, this interpretation can also be seen largely as a myth produced by politicians and the press at the time and perpetuated since. The ending of empire was calculated upon the basis of Britain’s interests rather than those of its colonies. National interest was framed in terms of the postwar situation—that is, of an economically exhausted, dependent Britain, now increasingly caught up in the international politics of the Cold War. What later became known as “decolonization” was very often shortsighted, self-interested, and not infrequently bloody, as was especially the case in Malaysia (where the politics of anticommunism played a central role) and in Kenya. Conservative government (1951–64)
The last years of Attlee’s administration were troubled by economic stringency and inflation. The pound was sharply devalued in 1949, and a general election on February 23, 1950, reduced Labour’s majority over the Conservative and Liberal parties to only five seats. Attlee himself was in poor health, and Ernest Bevin, formerly the most politically powerful man in the cabinet, had died. More-radical members of the party, led by Aneurin Bevan, were growing impatient with the increasingly moderate temper of the leadership. On October 25, 1951, a second general election in a House of Commons not yet two years old returned the Conservatives under Churchill to power with a majority of 17 seats.
The Conservatives remained in power for the next 13 years, from October 1951 until October 1964, first under Churchill—who presided over the accession of the new monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, on February 6, 1952, but was forced to resign on account of age and health on April 5, 1955—and then under Churchill’s longtime lieutenant and foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Eden resigned in January 1957, partly because of ill health but chiefly because of his failed attempt to roll back the retreat from empire by a reoccupation of the Suez Canal Zone after the nationalization of the canal by the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in the summer of 1956. This belated experiment in imperial adventure drew wide criticism from the United States, the British dominions, and indeed within Britain itself. Although it was cut short in December 1956, when UN emergency units supplanted British (and French) troops, the Suez intervention divided British politics as few foreign issues have done since. Eden was succeeded by his chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan. Macmillan remained in office until October 1963, when he too retired because of ill health, to be succeeded by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, then foreign secretary. In this period of single-party government, the themes were economic change and the continued retreat from colonialism.
Queen Elizabeth IIQueen Elizabeth II reading a speech from the throne at the state opening of Parliament, 1958.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Labour interlude (1964–70)
The long Conservative tenure came to an end on October 16, 1964, with the appointment of a Labour administration headed by Harold Wilson, who had been Labour leader only a little more than a year and a half—since the death of the widely admired Hugh Gaitskell. Gaitskell and prominent Conservative R.A. Butler had been the principal figures in the politics of moderation known as “Butskellism” (derived by combining their last names), a slightly left-of-centre consensus predicated on the recognition of the power of trade unionism, the importance of addressing the needs of the working class, and the necessity of collaboration between social classes. Although Wilson was thought to be a Labour radical and had attracted a substantial party following on this account, he was in fact a moderate. His government inherited the problems that had accumulated during the long period of Conservative prosperity: poor labour productivity, a shaky pound, and trade union unrest. His prescription for improvement included not only a widely heralded economic development plan, to be pursued with the introduction of the most modern technology, but also stern and unpopular controls on imports, the devaluation of the pound, wage restraint, and an attempt, in the event these measures proved unsuccessful, to reduce the power of the trade unions. Eventually the Wilson government became unpopular and was kept in power primarily by weakness and division in the Conservative Party. Finally, in 1968, Wilson was confronted with an outbreak of civil rights agitation in Northern Ireland that quickly degenerated into armed violence. The return of the Conservatives (1970–74)
The Conservatives returned in a general election on June 18, 1970, with a majority of 32. The new prime minister, Edward Heath, set three goals: to take Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC; ultimately succeeded by the European Union [EU]), to restore economic growth, and to break the power of the trade unions. In his short term in office he succeeded only in negotiating Britain’s entry into the EEC, in 1973. In fact, Heath was defeated by the trade unions, which simply boycotted his industrial legislation, and by the Arab oil embargo, which began in 1973 and which made a national coal miners’ strike in the winter of 1973–74 particularly effective. Heath used the strongest weapon available to a prime minister—a general election, on February 28, 1974—to settle the issue of who governed Britain. The election, held when factories were in operation only three days a week and civilian Britain was periodically reduced to candlelight, was a repudiation of the policy of confrontation with labour.
Edward Heath giving a victory wave after receiving his seal of office from the queen.Frank Barratt/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Labour back in power (1974–79)
Despite losing by more than 200,000 votes to the Conservatives, Labour and Wilson returned as a minority government and promptly made peace by granting the miners’ demands. Wilson’s policies were confirmed on October 10, 1974, in a second election, when his tiny majority, based upon cooperation from the Scottish National Party and the Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist Party) as well as the Liberals, was increased to an almost workable margin of 20. The Labour government faced severe economic challenges—including post-World War II record levels of unemployment and inflation—yet Wilson was able to renegotiate British membership in the EEC, which was confirmed in a referendum in June 1975. However, neither Wilson nor James Callaghan, who succeeded him on April 5, 1976, was able to come to terms with the labour unions, which were as willing to embarrass a Labour government as a Conservative one. Labour’s parliamentary position was precarious, and the party lost its governing majority through a series of by-election defeats and defections. Labour survived through what became known as the “Lib-Lab Pact,” an agreement between Callaghan and Liberal Party leader David Steel, which lasted until August 1978. Union unrest, induced by rapidly increasing prices, made the late 1970s a period of almost endless industrial conflict, culminating at the end of 1978 in the “Winter of Discontent,” a series of bitter disputes, which the government seemed unable to control and which angered the voters. Meanwhile, Labour’s slender majority in the House of Commons eroded with the defection of the Liberal and nationalist parties following the defeat of referenda in Wales and Scotland that would have created devolved assemblies. On March 28, 1979, Callaghan was forced from office after losing a vote of confidence in the House of Commons by a single vote (310–311), the first such dismissal of a prime minister since MacDonald in 1924. Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert Patrick Joyce The Margaret Thatcher government (1979–90) The Falkland Islands War, the 1983 election, and privatization
In the subsequent election, in May 1979, the Conservatives under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher were swept into power with the largest electoral swing since 1945, securing a 43-seat majority. After an extremely shaky start to her administration, Thatcher achieved popularity by sending the armed forces to expel an Argentine force from the Falkland Islands (see Falkland Islands War) in the spring of 1982, on the strength of which she won triumphant reelection in June 1983, her party capturing nearly 400 seats in the House of Commons and a 144-seat majority. The opposition Labour Party suffered its worst performance since 1918, winning only 27.6 percent of the vote—only 2.2 percent more than an alliance of the Liberals and the Social Democratic Party, a party formed by Labour defectors.
Margaret Thatcher, 1983.AP
Riding this wave of success, the Thatcher government proceeded with a thoroughgoing privatization of the economy, most notably the railway system. Like the accompanying deindustrialization of what had been a manufacturing Britain, this transformation of the transportation infrastructure had immense consequences, resulting in a public transport system that was widely perceived as chaotic and inefficient, as well as in a great increase in private automobile use and in road building. Thatcher’s advocacy of what eventually became known as neoliberalism was in fact part of a similar international response to changes in the global economy driven by the United States during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (predicated on the free market and supply-side economics), with whom Thatcher formed a strong personal alliance. Deindustrialization and privatization began to change the face of Britain, one fairly immediate outcome being mass unemployment.
Reagan, Ronald; Thatcher, MargaretRonald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at the White House, Washington, D.C., July 17, 1987.Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library Racial discrimination and the 1981 England riots
Partly in response to this development but also prompted by long-simmering tensions, a series of disturbances broke out in British cities in 1981, particularly in Liverpool and London, when an endemically unprivileged young black urban population turned its sense of alienation from much of British society against the police. Since the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 in London, the integration of the immigrant West Indian community into British society had been a major problem. This problem worsened with the arrival, beginning in the 1960s, of South Asian immigrants from East Africa and the Indian subcontinent, who, like the Caribbean population, were highly concentrated in particular areas of the country and of cities. Elements in the Conservative Party, led by Enoch Powell, were not averse to creating political capital out of this situation, though Powell’s English patriotism was more complex than most Conservative gut reactions. His liberal economics, along with the advocacy of the free market by Keith Joseph, was very influential on the party, especially on Thatcher. Despite promises to alleviate the urban poverty of immigrant communities, little was done in the 1980s, and in the 1990s the exclusion of blacks and to a lesser extent South Asians from an equal share in the benefits of British society continued to be a critical problem, one which politicians confronted reluctantly and to limited effect. The 2001 England riots
This was evident earlier in the very limited nature of the Race Relations Act of 1965, itself fiercely opposed by the Conservatives. A subsequent amendment, in 1968, outlawed discrimination in areas such as employment and the provision of goods and services. However, it was not until the Race Relations Act of 1976 that any real change was evident. This act made both direct and indirect discrimination an offense and provided legal redress for those discriminated against through employment tribunals and the courts. Yet another amendment to the act, in 2001, included public bodies, particularly local authorities and the police, whose role in black communities continued to be a considerable source of tension. This unease was compounded by endemic inequality and deprivation in ethnic (especially Asian) communities. In 2001 the result was a wave of public disturbances across the north of England, in which disaffected youth once again played a leading role. In Britain, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the United States, the advent of the so-called “war on terror” served to deepen existing divisions by giving “racial” tensions a new form, that of “Islamophobia.” The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland
A considerable degree of reluctance also characterized the other great problem of the Thatcher administrations, namely the conflict in Northern Ireland. Since 1945 successive British governments failed to address discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. The international civil rights current of the late 1960s triggered a new and intensive wave of protest in Northern Ireland, which was met by a continuing reluctance to reform and by police overreaction. Into this increasingly explosive situation stepped the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), which had separated from the long-established “Official” IRA in 1969 and which gained support after 13 Roman Catholic civil rights demonstrators were killed by British troops in Londonderry on January 30, 1972, an event that became known as Bloody Sunday. The IRA mounted an increasingly violent campaign against the British Army in Ulster, taking their activity to the British mainland with increasing effect in the 1970s. The so-called “Troubles” ensued for the better part of three decades, with the British Army and the IRA fighting to a vicious draw in the end. The Troubles also took the form of sectarian strife in Northern Ireland, polarizing the Protestant and Catholic communities, each of which had its own paramilitary organizations. The IRA “hunger strikers” of the early 1980s failed to move Thatcher, a resistance that probably ultimately harmed her by producing great sympathy for the republican cause in Northern Ireland. Nor did she appear to be moved by the bombing at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1984, an attempt on her own life that resulted in the deaths of several of her friends and colleagues within the party. Nonetheless, even at this parlous time, unofficial and secret contacts were being established with the IRA. These led to the very long and tortuous process of negotiation that eventually became known as the “peace process.” “Thatcherism”
Despite being unable to resolve the Irish problem, Thatcher succeeded in 1987 in winning an unprecedented third general election, and in January 1988 she surpassed Asquith as the longest continually serving prime minister since Lord Liverpool (1812–27). Thatcher’s electoral success came from her extraordinary capacity for leadership and the development of “Thatcherism.” Responding to widespread disillusionment with Labour government and the state, Thatcher was able to tap into, and give leadership to, a politics of freedom and choice that expressed the desires of many people in the 1980s. In the wake of the debacle that the 1970s had been for the political left and trade union movement, Thatcherism’s variant of contemporary free-market neoliberalism gained increasing momentum. It effectively ended the postwar accommodation sometimes referred to as the corporate state, through which government, the unions, and business enabled a form of state-managed capitalism to develop. In its movement away from that accord, Britain foreshadowed developments in central and eastern Europe after the demise of communism there in 1989.
Thatcher’s premiership, however, did not survive her third term. She alienated even fellow Conservatives with her insistence on replacing local property taxes with a uniform poll tax and with her unwillingness to fully integrate the pound into a common European currency. By the end of 1989, voter discontent was manifest in by-elections, and in November 1990 Thatcher faced serious opposition for the first time in the Conservative party’s annual vote for selection of a leader. When she did not receive the required majority, she withdrew, and John Major, the chancellor of the Exchequer since October 1989, was chosen on November 27. Thatcher resigned as prime minister the following day and was replaced by Major. The government of John Major (1990–97) “Black Wednesday,” epidemic scandals, and Major’s “Citizens Charter”
Despite having presided over the country’s longest recession since the 1930s and owing partly to the Labour Party’s overconfidence, the Conservatives won their fourth consecutive election in April 1992, albeit with a diminished majority of 21 in Parliament. That they did so was largely a result of the ongoing conflict within Labour as it continued to undergo “modernization.” As the recession lingered, the popularity of Major—and of the Conservatives—plummeted, and the party fared poorly in by-elections and in local elections. Major’s economic policies were questioned after the “Black Wednesday” fiasco of September 16, 1992, when he was forced to withdraw Britain from the European exchange-rate mechanism and devalue the pound. Despite having pledged not to increase taxes during the 1992 campaign, Major supported a series of increases to restore Britain’s financial equilibrium. When he sought to secure passage of the Treaty on European Union in 1993, his grip on power was challenged. Twenty-three Conservatives voted against a government resolution on the treaty, causing the government’s defeat and compelling Major to call a vote of confidence to pass the treaty.
Tory troubles mounted with scandals in local governments, particularly in Westminster in 1994, and thereafter Major was seemingly unable to shake off the growing reputation of his government not only for economic mismanagement but also for corruption and moral hypocrisy. A seemingly unending series of financial and sexual scandals took their toll, and paper offensives like Major’s “Citizens Charter,” attempting to stop the growing rot of concern about the efficiency and responsibility of privatized industry by laying down citizens’ rights, made little impact. “Mad cow disease”
As criticism of his leadership mounted within the Conservative Party, Major resigned as party leader in June 1995. In the ensuing leadership election, Major solidified his position—though 89 Conservative members of Parliament voted for his opponent and 22 others abstained or spoiled their ballots. Major’s government was also severely criticized for its handling of the crisis involving “mad cow disease,” in which it was discovered that large numbers of cattle in the human food supply in Britain were infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Facing a rejuvenated Labour Party under the leadership of Tony Blair, the Conservatives suffered a crushing defeat in the general election of 1997, winning only 165 seats, their fewest since 1906. Labour’s 419 seats and its 179-seat majority were its largest in British history. The Tony Blair government (1997–2007) The struggle for control of Labour
During its years out of power, the Labour Party had undergone a gradual transformation as it attempted to distance itself from the power of the unions on the one hand and the power of the membership on the other, in the guise of the traditional role of the Labour Party Conference. This process had been started before 1992 by Neil Kinnock, who led the party from 1983 to 1992, and it was continued by his successors, first John Smith and then Blair. The need for fundamental reappraisal had been urged as early as 1981, with the founding of the Social Democratic Party, when prominent Labour Party politicians, led by Roy Jenkins, seceded from the party in an attempt to “break the mould” of British politics. Divisions not only between the right and left in the party but also within the left of the party itself added to the chaos that was the British left in the 1980s; the insistence of the radical leftist and former Labour minister Tony Benn on running against the former Labour chancellor Denis Healey in the party election for deputy leadership in 1981 effectively split the radical democratic left and disabled the possibility of an early riposte to Thatcher. It also, ironically enough, contributed to what became known as “New Labour,” rather than a more left-wing variant of labourism eventually replacing the Conservatives.
Tony Blair, 2005.© Crown copyright/Andy Paradise New Labour, the repeal of Clause IV, and the “third way”
The understanding that the party would have to rethink the market (not only in economic but in social terms), embracing it in a way foreign to many of the unions and the traditional Labour left, grew increasingly after 1992, until, after the Labour victory of 1997, there was a clearly marked path for New Labour. The most symbolically important marker of the change from old to New Labour was the repeal of the party’s Clause IV, engineered by Blair in 1995. The replacement of old Clause IV, which had committed the party to the “common ownership of the means of production,” ended almost 80 years of dedication to that goal. The new path of the party was to be a middle one, in the phraseology of New Labour, a “third way,” supposedly embracing both social justice and the market.
Not only in rhetoric but in reality, New Labour was to be different from the old. There was also to be increasing attention to the importance of the media, an attention that the Tories had developed into something of a fine art under Thatcher, with her press secretary Bernard Ingham. Given the increasing role of the media in the presentation of politics and indeed the almost wholesale integration of political substance and political style through the media, this mastery of the art of “spin” was to become a political necessity. Therefore, art for art’s sake (spin for spin’s sake) was to become a feature of Labour government after 1997. This approach was ultimately to rebound upon the party and, indeed, upon the political process in general during the next decade with the emergence of widespread disillusionment with politics in British society, especially among young people. Navigating the European monetary system and the EU Social Chapter
Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, which undoubtedly benefited from the inspirational leadership Blair seemed to offer, nevertheless may have been less the result of an unbounded belief in New Labour than of the discrediting of the Conservative Party. It is certain that Blair was helped into power by the parlous state into which the Conservative Party had fallen under Major after 1992. Promising that “we ran for office as New Labour, and we shall govern as New Labour,” the Blair government in fact began in a rather conservative fashion, by accepting existing government spending limitations. Nonetheless, the difficult and what came to be the increasingly troubled task of combining aspects of Thatcherism with the idea of a “social market” gathered momentum. Certainly, through much of Blair’s tenure a buoyant economy, well managed by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, did a great deal to ease the passage of New Labour and the third way. In his first major initiative and one of his boldest moves, Blair, abetted by Brown, granted the Bank of England the power to determine interest rate policy without government consultation. This was a major move in the disengagement of financial markets from the state.
Blair’s government was also more and more taken up with the question of whether Britain should stay in or remain outside the European monetary union. At stake were fundamental ideas about British sovereignty and whether, in a progressively globalized world in which some claimed that the individual nation-state was becoming unviable, sovereignty in its existing forms could remain intact. For the Conservative Party, ever more hostile to the EU, this question was central to its attempts to fight back against the Labour Party. Blair’s government did sign the Treaty on European Union’s Social Chapter—which sought to harmonize European social policies on issues such as working conditions, equality in the workplace, and worker health and safety—despite Major’s earlier negotiation of an “opt out” mechanism to placate the treaty’s Conservative opponents. However, the Labour Party’s implementation of the Social Chapter was at best halfhearted, and its goal became to influence as much as possible the EU itself to moderate the operations of the chapter. As with financial deregulation, the emphasis in labour affairs was on the market. The Good Friday Agreement
Conspicuous progress was also made in solving the problem of Northern Ireland. Under Major, in 1994, the IRA declared a cease-fire, the Protestant paramilitaries followed suit soon after, and talks between the British government, the Irish government, and Sinn Féin began. The IRA cease-fire secured a long and involved series of negotiations, in which the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement) of 1998 seemed to have at last brought peace to Northern Ireland. Unionist suspicion and concern about fundamental reforms to the traditional power structure of the province meant, however, that the implementation of the agreement became a tortuous business. Indeed, it took almost another decade to arrive at what looked like a final resolution, when in 2007 the Northern Ireland Assembly was restored on the basis of power sharing between what had erstwhile been bitter enemies, Sinn Féin and the Ian Paisley-led Democratic Unionist Party. London’s local government, House of Lords reform, and devolution for Scotland and Wales
In May 1998 voters in London overwhelmingly approved the government’s plan for a new assembly for the city and for its first directly elected mayor, resulting in the capital’s first citywide government since the abolition of the Greater London Council by Thatcher in 1986. However, the precedent of an elected mayor in London was not subsequently followed by similar action in other major British cities.
In the late 1990s the Labour government also carried out several other constitutional reforms. The House of Lords, previously dominated by hereditary peers (nobles), was reconstituted as an assembly composed primarily of appointive life peers, with only limited representation of hereditary peers. Nonetheless, the striking contradiction of an unelected legislative assembly in a country that prided itself on its traditions of liberal democracy was apparent.
Following referenda in Wales and Scotland, the National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Parliament were established in 1999 and granted powers previously reserved for the central government. Yet, with the exception of political devolution to the component states of the United Kingdom, the Labour Party remained reluctant to reform the constitution, so that at the beginning of the 21st century it was still the revered mysteries of the uncodified British constitution by which the British were governed. The royal family’s “annus horribilis,” the death of Princess Diana, and the Millennium Dome
The 1990s were a period of transition and controversy for the monarchy. In 1992, during what Queen Elizabeth II referred to as the royal family’s “annus horribilis,” Charles, prince of Wales, heir to the British throne, and his wife, Diana, princess of Wales, separated, as did Elizabeth’s son Andrew, duke of York, and his wife, Sarah, duchess of York. Moreover, Elizabeth’s daughter, Anne, divorced, and a fire gutted the royal residence of Windsor Castle. After details of extramarital affairs by Charles and Diana surfaced and the couple divorced, observers openly questioned Charles’s fitness to succeed his mother as sovereign, and public support for the monarchy ebbed.
The immensely popular Diana (dubbed the “People’s Princess”) died in an automobile accident in Paris in 1997, prompting an outpouring of grief, or at least hysteria, throughout the world. The British royal family came under scrutiny for its handling of the matter—especially the queen’s reluctance, because of tradition, to allow the national flag to fly at half-staff over Buckingham Palace. With the queen celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary, the queen mother, Elizabeth, celebrating her 100th birthday, and Charles working hard to improve his public image, the fortunes of the monarchy improved by the end of the 1990s. Nevertheless, the established institutions of the British state had been called into question in an unprecedented way. If the popularity of the monarchy survived, it was largely the result of the queen’s persona; the royal family as a whole—itself the idealized media creation of late Victorian times—frequently had become the object of ridicule. The transformation of the monarchy was indeed emblematic of the very unevenly progressing severance of the British from the long-lived institutions and culture of the 19th century.
To celebrate the new millennium, the monumental Millennium Dome, the largest structure of its kind in the world, and the Millennium Bridge were opened in London. It was perhaps symbolic of the contradictions of this modernity that the dome was dogged by controversy regarding its cost and design and the bridge by the fiasco of its opening, when it was found to move alarmingly above the waters of the Thames when in public use. The battle for the soul of the Conservative Party
In June 2001 Blair’s government was reelected with a 167-seat majority in the House of Commons—the largest majority ever won by a second-term British government. With the question of European integration continuing to be of great significance in British politics, the new Labour administration chose not to adopt the common European currency, the euro, partly because of a fear of popular response. However, it was on the Conservative side that Britain’s relationship with Europe was most urgently a party issue. It continued to divide a party riven by differences, a party that looked more and more like the Labour Party of the 1980s and early ’90s. Indeed, there is a direct parallel between the recent histories of the two parties: the traditional left of the Labour Party corresponded to the traditional right of the Conservative Party, as both fought hard to stem the tide of party modernization. The battle for the soul of the Conservative Party was joined with growing fervour with the election of David Cameron in December 2005 as its modernizing leader. His subsequent attempt to steer the party back to the political centre, and away from the old order of the Thatcherite legacy, was every bit as difficult as the redirection undertaken by Labour modernizers. In addition to Europe and economic policy, the issue of increased levels of immigration into Britain after 2000 further divided the Conservatives.
Indeed, Britain as a whole became divided on this issue. Large bodies of opinion, stirred up by xenophobia in the popular press, responded with fear and anxiety to increased levels of immigration from central and eastern Europe that were a consequence of European integration. In a more globalized and war-ridden world, the burgeoning flow of asylum seekers into Britain added to this climate, as did the “war on terror.” Asian Muslims, many of them long-standing British citizens and British-born, were nonetheless frequently lumped with immigrants and asylum seekers as part of an undifferentiated external threat to Britishness. Response to the September 11 attacks
Following the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, global terrorism dominated the political agenda in Britain, and Blair closely allied himself with the administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush. Britain contributed troops to the military effort to oust Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which was charged with harbouring Osama bin Laden, who had founded al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization linked to the September 11 attacks. Although Blair received strong support for his antiterrorist strategy from the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons, a small minority of Labour members of Parliament opposed military action. The Blair government also faced a slowing economy and a widespread perception that public services such as health, education, and transportation had not improved. Although large amounts of public money had been spent, particularly on the health service, much of this went into elaborating the new and highly evolved structures of management that came to characterize Labour administration of the state. However, it was the subject of the Iraq War, and Britain’s support for the U.S. position on it, that did most to undermine the standing of Blair. Weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq War
From late 2002, politics in Britain was dominated by Blair’s decision to support military action to oust from power the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, which was alleged to either possess or be developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that might either be used against Iraq’s neighbours or find their way into the hands of international terrorists. Notwithstanding widespread and enormous public protests against war, the resignation of several government ministers, and the support of some one-third of the parliamentary Labour Party for a motion opposing the government’s policy, Blair remained steadfast in his conviction that Saddam was an imminent threat that had to be removed.
Following Saddam’s ouster, however, British and American intelligence was found to have been faulty. When no WMD were found, critics of the government charged that it had distorted (“sexed up”) intelligence to solidify its claims against the Iraqis. Nevertheless, in May 2005 Blair won another term as prime minister—albeit with a significantly reduced parliamentary majority—as Labour won its third consecutive general election for the first time in the party’s history. The fallout from the Iraq War—initially the controversy over the decision to go to war in the first place and then the protracted involvement in a conflict that began to look more and more like a civil war—sapped public and political support for Blair. But, ever the consummate politician, he held on for two years after his reelection despite the friction between himself and his appointed successor, Gordon Brown, who became the new prime minister in June 2007. Patrick Joyce The Gordon Brown government (2007–10)
Brown’s hold on power was threatened in spring 2009. With the British economy already shaken by the spreading worldwide recession engendered by the financial crisis of late 2008, a scandal broke involving many dozens of members of Parliament who had extravagantly abused their government expense accounts, including members of Brown’s cabinet. The scandal and the troubled economy contributed to anemic performances by the Labour Party in local elections in Britain and in those for the European Parliament. Brown responded with a thorough reshuffle of his cabinet and withstood a challenge to his leadership from within the party in early June by promising to change his leadership style. Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition rule (2010–15) The U.K. general election of 2010
Nevertheless, Brown’s popularity and that of his party continued to wane as a general election, called for May 6, 2010, approached. The campaign brought a novelty to the British general election campaign—televised debates between the leaders of the three main parties: Brown of the Labour Party, David Cameron of the Conservative Party, and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats. Clegg’s outstanding performance in the first debate resulted in a surge in the preelection polls for the Liberal Democrats—who passed Labour to challenge the Conservative lead and to create both unprecedentedly high expectations for the Liberal Democrats and doubt as to whether any party would be able to secure enough seats to form a majority government.
British general election of 2005Results of the British general election held May 5, 2005.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
In the event, the Liberal Democrats actually obtained fewer seats in 2010 than in the 2005 election. The Conservatives finished as the largest party, winning 306 seats, but they finished 20 seats shy of a majority. The resulting “hung parliament” ironically placed the Liberal Democrats as potentially holding the balance of power. Labour finished with 258 seats, a fall of 91 seats over the 2005 election. When negotiations to form a Liberal Democratic–Labour coalition failed, the Liberal Democrats joined the Conservatives in a coalition government led by Cameron, who became prime minister on May 11, and Clegg, who became deputy prime minister. First-past-the-post referendum
In October the government announced a five-year austerity plan aimed at reducing the country’s massive deficit, which had been fueled by bank bailouts and stimulus spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and resultant recession. The plan incorporated some of the British government’s deepest spending cuts since World War II, including reductions to welfare entitlements and the dismissal of up to 500,000 public-sector employees, as well as phasing in a pension eligibility age increase from 65 to 66 four years earlier than had been planned. In December Parliament voted to raise the ceiling on university tuition from the existing cap of £3,290 (about $5,200) to £9,000 (about $14,000), prompting a series of demonstrations and causing dissension in the coalition government. The Liberal Democrats had campaigned against the tuition hike during the general election, and some Liberal Democrat MPs continued to oppose it when it came to a vote. The rift in the coalition widened following Conservative opposition to the Liberal-Democrat-supported referendum on a proposal to replace the country’s first-past-the-post election method with the alternative vote. The vote on the referendum, which was soundly rejected by the British public, was taken as part of local elections in May 2011, in which the Conservatives’ share of English council constituencies increased moderately but that of the Liberal Democrats plummeted, to the benefit of Labour. Although there were some calls for Clegg to step down, support for him among Liberal Democrats generally remained strong. The election also resulted in a sweeping victory for the Scottish National Party, which secured the first majority government in the history of the Scottish Parliament, emboldening First Minister Alex Salmond to announce that he would seek to hold a referendum on independence.
Clegg, Nick; Cameron, DavidDeputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (left) with Prime Minister David Cameron, May 12, 2010.Prime Minister's Office, Crown copyright Intervention in Libya
As the outbreak of popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring unfolded in early 2011, the revolt in Libya and Libyan ruler Muammar al-Qaddafi’s brutal repression of it became a particular focus of British attention. Although Cameron was criticized for the less-than-efficient removal of British nationals from Libya and for a botched effort by British special forces to contact the anti-Qaddafi rebels, he remained adamant in his criticism of Qaddafi and in his call for foreign intervention to protect the rebels from the Qaddafi regime’s superior forces, most notably with the enforcement of a no-fly zone. Cameron and French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy were instrumental in steering the UN Security Council to authorize military action on March 17. Beginning March 19, a coalition of U.S. and European forces with warplanes and cruise missiles attacked targets in Libya in an effort to disable Libya’s air force and air defense systems so that the UN-authorized no-fly zone could be imposed. On March 27 NATO officially took command of military operations in Libya previously directed by the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. News of the World hacking scandal
In April 2011 much of the world’s attention was directed at Britain for the wedding in London of Prince William (the grandson of Queen Elizabeth and second in line to the throne after his father, Prince Charles) to Catherine Middleton (see Prince William and Catherine Middleton: The Royal Wedding of 2011).
Prince William and Catherine, duke and duchess of CambridgePrince William and his bride, Catherine, leaving Westminster Abbey after their wedding, April 29, 2011.Tom Hevezi/AP
In July a scandal that had been smoldering since 2005 broke out in full flame when the News of the World" class="md-crosslink">News of the World, one of the flagship newspapers of Rupert Murdoch’s News International media empire, ceased publication after it became clear that a number of the paper’s reporters and editors had engaged in or condoned the illegal hacking of telephone voice mails of some 4,000 Britons, including a child murder victim, the families of soldiers killed while serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, celebrities, politicians, and the British royal family. An earlier investigation had failed to reveal the extent of these violations of privacy (prompting later charges of law enforcement ineptitude and corruption) but led to the resignation of the editor of News of the World, Andy Coulson, in 2007. It did not prevent him from becoming the communications chief for Cameron when he took office, however. When the scandal began to grow, in January 2011 Coulson stepped down. By the middle of July, in addition to the shuttering of News of the World, the scandal had resulted in the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, the politically powerful chief executive officer of News International, and in the withdrawal of Murdoch’s bid to buy a controlling share of the BSkyB satellite television channel. It also brought about the convening of a number of special parliamentary hearings and commissions. The 2011 riots, the European sovereign debt crisis, and Cameron’s veto of changes to the Lisbon Treaty
On the night of August 6 a different sort of firestorm broke out when a protest against the killing of a young man by police earlier in the week erupted in widespread rioting in the North London area of Tottenham. In the succeeding days, riots, looting, and arson, mostly by young people, escalated wildly and became the worst rioting that the capital had seen in decades. The riots spread not only to other areas of Greater London but also to other British cities including Liverpool, Birmingham, and Bristol. Largely as a result of the increased deployment of police, however, the riots abated quickly. In the ensuing months, legal authorities used video footage of the events to arrest looters.
London riots of 2011Police engaging rioters and looters in London's Camden borough, 2011.hughepaul
Although the United Kingdom remained outside of the euro zone, it was anything but unaffected by the events of the European sovereign debt crisis triggered by Greece’s financial collapse in 2009. Because many of Britain’s principal trading partners were euro-zone members, their economic woes impacted directly on the already sluggish economy of a Britain struggling mightily to reduce its deficit and combat unemployment.
Cameron created controversy in December 2011 when he effectively vetoed changes to the Lisbon Treaty (negotiated at an EU summit) that would have increased economic integration among the EU countries and imposed sanctions on members that surpassed an agreed-upon deficit limit. His actions strained the Conservatives’ coalition partnership with the Liberal Democrats and were criticized by Deputy Prime Minister Clegg, who called them “bad for Britain,” as well by French President Sarkozy, who said there were now two Europes—one that wanted “more solidarity between its members and more regulation” and another that was “attached only to the logic of the single market.” The 2012 London Olympics, Julian Assange’s embassy refuge, and the emergence of UKIP
Britain was the centre of world pomp and pageantry in 2012 not just because of the festive celebration of the 60th anniversary of Elizabeth II’s ascent to the throne but because of London’s hosting of the Summer Olympic Games, which, despite initial concerns about inadequate security, were widely regarded as a smashing success. Then in mid-August 2012 the British government took issue with Ecuador’s granting of political asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had taken refuge in that country’s embassy in London after exhausting appeals under the British legal system to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.
In spring 2013 the government announced that GDP had grown slightly in the first quarter of the year, thus preventing a slide back into a recession that would have been the third to afflict Britain in five years. Nevertheless, in local elections in parts of England and Wales in May, voters showed their dissatisfaction with the nature of the economic recovery by turning away from Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who together lost 459 seats on English local councils. Labour made significant gains (picking up some 291 seats), but the big story of the election was the tremendous jump in representation by United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which advocates withdrawal from the EU. By gaining 139 seats, UKIP made one of the most impressive showings by a fourth party in recent British electoral history. The birth of George, rejection of intervention in Syria, and regulation of GCHQ
On July 22, 2013, with much of the world’s media on “royal baby watch,” Catherine, duchess of Cambridge, gave birth to a boy, George, who became third in the line of succession to the British throne.
In late August, Cameron was dealt a stunning blow by Parliament’s rejection of his proposed response to events in the Syrian Civil War. Amid reports that hundreds of Syrians had been killed earlier in the month in an alleged chemical attack by the regime of Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad, Cameron asked the House of Commons to endorse in principle British military intervention in Syria. Although approval had been widely expected, MPs rejected the proposed involvement by a vote of 285 to 272—largely, it seemed, as a result of the fear of a rush to judgment regarding the cause of and responsibility for the Syrian deaths and a lack of faith in the certainty of intelligence reports in light of British involvement in the Iraq War.
In October 2013 an impassioned debate arose in the press and in Parliament over whether there was a need for greater regulation of surveillance practices of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the wake of revelations that the agency had far greater eavesdropping capabilities than had previously been acknowledged publicly. Cameron and others condemned the news leaks (originating with former U.S. CIA and National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden) that had led to the revelations and claimed that the activities of the GCHQ were lawful and necessary for national security. The relationship of the government to the press had also been strained by the repercussions of a scandal in 2011 that involved press hacking of private phone calls, led to a public inquiry guided by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, and resulted in the establishment of a new press watchdog system (also in October 2013). Euroskepticism
The British political landscape was shaken again in May 2014, when UKIP not only made more dramatic gains in local council elections (increasing its representation by more than 150 seats) but also finished first in elections for the European Parliament, becoming the first party other than Labour or the Conservatives in more than 100 years to triumph in a British national election. Capitalizing upon a growing wave of Euroskepticism that had a similar impact on elections to the European Parliament elsewhere (most notably in France, Denmark, and Hungary), the virulently anti-EU UKIP won 27 percent of the vote and 24 seats (a gain of 11 seats) to 20 seats for Labour (a gain of 7) and 19 seats for the Conservatives (a loss of 7). The biggest loser in the election was the generally pro-EU Liberal Democratic Party, which fell from 11 seats to a single representative, mirroring the tumble it took in the local elections and prompting some in the party to call for Clegg’s replacement as leader. Scottish independence referendum
On September 18, 2014, a referendum was held in Scotland on independence from the United Kingdom. The referendum, which had been agreed to by Cameron in 2012, asked a single simple question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” Vigorous campaigns had been conducted on both sides of the question, with former prime minister Brown playing a prominent role in opposition to the referendum and proposing a plan that called for codification of the purpose of the United Kingdom, for recognition of the Scottish Parliament as permanent and indissoluble, and for increased income taxing powers for the Scottish government. Although opinion polls had long indicated that a solid majority of Scots opposed independence, as the day of voting approached, the “yes” side had gained tremendous momentum, and polling indicated that the outcome was very much in question, with the “no” side holding a slight edge. With the vote just days off, Cameron, Clegg, and Labour Party leader Ed Miliband had jointly published in the newspaper Daily Record a “vow” to increase powers for Scotland’s government if the referendum was rejected. On the day of the vote, some 85 percent of registered voters went to the polls and convincingly defeated the referendum, with about 55 percent voting “no” and about 45 percent voting “yes.” Following the result, Cameron promised to move swiftly to redeem his promise to devolve more powers to Scotland. He appointed an all-party commission, led by Lord Smith of Kelvin, to consider the details. Economic recovery
The U.K.’s economy grew by about 3 percent in 2014. By the end of the year, it had reversed the decline that it suffered during the recession that started in 2008. Unemployment, which had peaked at 8.5 percent in 2011, fell to 6 percent in the second half of 2014. However, wages continued to rise more slowly than inflation. The combination of low pay raises and the expansion of low-wage jobs meant that tax revenues during the year were lower than expected. That shortfall contributed to a rise in the government’s net deficit, which toward the end of 2014 was running about 10 percent higher than during the same period a year earlier.
On September 26, 2014, MPs voted 524–43 to approve British participation in the U.S.-led air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also called ISIS) insurgents in Iraq. Cameron made clear that the action would be limited to Iraq and that Britain would not attack ISIL in Syria. Further, he emphasized that Britain would not send troops to take part in a ground war. David Cameron on his own (2015–16) The U.K. general election of 2015
Opinion polling right up to the day before voting indicated that the May 2015 U.K. general election might be the closest in recent memory, as a single percentage point separated the Conservative and Labour parties in most polls. Immigration, the government’s austerity policies, the future of the National Health Service, and Britain’s continued membership in the EU were among the key issues in the campaign. Attempting to address Euroskeptics in his own party and the challenge of UKIP, Cameron promised to renegotiate the terms of British participation in the EU and to put continued EU membership to a national referendum by the end of 2017 if he were reelected. The Conservatives also intimated that if Labour were to win with less than a majority, it would likely form a coalition with the Scottish National Party (SNP) that would drive the government’s agenda with its desire for independence.
When the votes were counted, Cameron and the Conservatives defied the pollsters by capturing 331 seats (a gain of 24 over their showing in 2010), enough to form a majority government without the participation of the Liberal Democrats, whose fortunes plummeted as their party’s representation fell from 57 seats to 8, prompting Clegg’s resignation. Labour leader Miliband stepped down too, after his party won only 232 seats (down 26 from 2010), and watched the SNP blow away Labour’s traditional dominance of elections in Scotland for the U.K. Parliament by increasing its representation in Westminster from 6 seats to 56. Although it captured some 13 percent of the total vote, UKIP won only one seat—a consequence of Britain’s winner-take-all election rules—and Farage, who failed to be elected in his constituency, joined the list of resigning party leaders. The “Brexit” referendum
On December 2, 2015, in the wake of the attacks by Islamist terrorists in Paris on November 13, the House of Commons authorized air strikes by the British military on ISIL targets in Syria. The vote on the measure came after some 10 hours of debate. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn freed members of his party to vote their conscience, and dozens of them broke ranks to join the Conservatives and others in voting for authorization, which passed 397–223.
At a summit meeting of the leaders of the member countries of the EU in Brussels in February 2016, the European Council announced agreement on reforms to British membership that had been requested by Cameron in an attempt to forestall British withdrawal (“Brexit”) from the EU. Although Cameron did not get everything that he had asked for in the proposal that he submitted to Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, in November 2015, he won enough concessions to move forward on his promise of a referendum on continued British membership. In the face of considerable support within his own party for Brexit, Cameron nevertheless announced that he would campaign for remaining in the EU and scheduled the referendum for June 23, 2016.
Cameron was joined in the “Remain” effort by Corbyn. The “Leave” campaign was headed by former London mayor Boris Johnson, whom many saw as a rival for Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative Party, and Michael Gove, lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice in Cameron’s cabinet. Opinion polling indicated that the two sides were fairly evenly divided as the referendum approached, but in the event 52 percent of voters opted to leave the EU, making the United Kingdom the first country to ever do so. Cameron announced his intention to resign as prime minister by the time of the Conservative Party conference in October 2016 to allow his successor to negotiate the U.K. withdrawal under the terms of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which, when triggered, would open a two-year window for the exit process.
United Kingdom EU referendumThe majority vote by region in the 2016 referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The premiership of Theresa May (2016– ) The resignation of Cameron, the rise of May, and a challenge to Corbyn’s leadership of Labour
Only days after the Brexit vote, the political drama surrounding Johnson’s pursuit of the Conservative leadership assumed what many observers identified as Shakespearean proportions as Gove removed his prominent support for Johnson’s candidacy, saying that Johnson was “not capable of…leading the party and the country in the way that I would have hoped.” In rapid fashion, a wounded Johnson removed himself from consideration. Gove then threw his hat into the small ring of leadership candidates that was then winnowed by successive votes by parliamentary Conservatives in early July to Home Secretary Theresa May and Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom, whose names were put to a vote by all party members with results due in September. Almost before that process started, Leadsom unexpectedly withdrew her name from consideration, and on July 11 the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee, which had been steering the leadership contest, declared May the new party leader “with immediate effect.” On July 13 Cameron formally resigned, and May became the second woman in British history to serve as prime minister.
Meanwhile, Labour underwent its own leadership controversy as prominent party members, including Blair, took Corbyn to task for not mounting a more vigorous effort on behalf of the “Remain” campaign. No sooner had Blair made his criticism than he found himself in the crosshairs, with the release on July 5 of the so-called Chilcot Report, the findings of a seven-year inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War, which was scathing in its condemnation of Blair’s handling of the war from the initial decision to join the United States in invading Iraq to the Blair government’s failure to plan and prepare for the postwar aftermath in Iraq. Nonetheless, a challenge was mounted to Corbyn’s leadership of the party that eventually resulted in a head-to-head contest between Corbyn and Owen Smith, the former shadow secretary of work and pensions. In an online vote of party faithful in September, Corbyn held on to the leadership by capturing some 62 percent of the vote against about 38 percent for Smith. Triggering Article 50
In the meantime, May, who had opposed Brexit but came into office promising to see it to completion, led her government in cautious movement toward triggering Article 50. Her efforts experienced a setback in January 2017, however, when the Supreme Court upheld a November 2016 High Court ruling that prevented the prime minister from triggering Article 50 without first having gained approval from Parliament to do so. In February 2017 the House of Commons granted May that approval by a 498–114 vote, but the House of Lords created another roadblock in early March by adding a pair of amendments to the bill authorizing May to invoke Article 50. One guaranteed that EU passport holders residing in Britain would be permitted to remain, and the other sought a greater role for Parliament in the negotiations. Both amendments were overturned by the House of Commons later in March, and, before the end of the month, May formally submitted a letter to European Council Pres. Donald Tusk requesting the opening of the two-year window for talks on the details of British separation from the EU.
Against this backdrop, the Scottish Assembly backed First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a new referendum on independence for Scotland to be held before spring 2019 (the majority of Scottish voters had opposed leaving the EU in the Brexit referendum). The Manchester arena bombing and London bridge attacks
In mid-April 2017 May called for a snap parliamentary election, saying that its results would provide stability and certainty for Britain during its Brexit negotiations and transition out of the EU. To hold an election ahead of the 2020 date mandated by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, May needed to win two-thirds majority approval in the House of Commons. Corbyn welcomed a return to the polls, despite opinion polling that predicted big gains for the Conservatives, and, by a vote of 522 to 13 (with SNP members abstaining), the House of Commons approved a snap election for June 8.
The election campaign was temporarily suspended after 22 people were killed and dozens injured in a terrorist attack on the night of May 22 at a 21,000-capacity arena in Manchester following a concert by U.S. singer Ariana Grande. The attacker who detonated the homemade bomb that wrought the destruction also was killed in the blast. ISIL claimed responsibility for the attack, in which many of those who perished or were injured were children—teenaged and younger fans of the American pop star. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in Britain since the London bombings of 2005, in which more than 50 people were killed, and it followed an attack on Westminster Bridge in London on March 22 in which an attacker mowed down pedestrians with a car and then continued his assault on foot with a knife, taking five lives and injuring some 50 people before he was killed outside the Houses of Parliament by a security officer.
On June 3, five days before voters were to go to the polls, yet another terrorist attack unfolded in London. This time it occurred on London Bridge, where three attackers ran down victims with a vehicle before leaving it to menace others in nearby Borough Market with knives. Eight people were killed before police arrived, only eight minutes after the start of the incident, and shot and killed the attackers. The snap election campaign
In addition to using the campaign to sell her version of “hard Brexit,” May sought to frame the election as a choice between her “strong and stable” leadership and that of Corbyn, who was characterized as an unreliable out-of-touch leftist extremist. However, Corbyn, once thought by many observers to be unelectable, proved to be an inspiring campaigner whose message of hope, compassion, and inclusiveness energized a new generation of Labour voters. May, on the other hand, often appeared uncomfortable, stiff, and uncertain on the campaign trail. One element of her manifesto—a proposal to pay for in-home social care of the elderly with government sales of their homes after their deaths, a plan loudly condemned by many as a “dementia tax”—brought widespread outrage that prompted her to quickly alter the proposal. Rather than appearing “strong and stable,” May, in the eyes of some observers, looked to be “weak and wobbly.” The 2017 U.K. general election
When voters had their say on June 8, 2017, they handed the Conservatives a major setback. Rather than securing a mandate, May watched her party’s legislative majority disappear as it lost at least 12 seats in the House of Commons to fall to 318 seats while Labour gained at least 29 seats to surpass 260 seats in total. Both parties garnered more than 40 percent of the popular vote each in an election that witnessed a return to dominance by the two major parties. Led by Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrats, who had fared badly in the 2015 election, sought to reverse their fortunes by advocating another referendum on Brexit, and, while this proposal did not resonate for many voters, the party still gained four seats to reach a total of 12. Support for UKIP largely evaporated. Having nearly realized the goal of Brexit, many of those who had supported UKIP in previous elections were expected to vote for the Conservatives, but, in the event, it appeared that they instead were swayed by Corbyn’s vision. The Conservatives did, however, make big gains in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party fell from 56 seats to 35, in what was widely interpreted as a rebuke to Sturgeon and the SNP’s call for another referendum on Scottish independence.
Arguably the election’s biggest winner was Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Having increased its representation in the House of Commons from 8 to 10 seats, it found itself in the role of kingmaker when May enlisted its support to cling to power by forming a minority government (rather than seeking a formal coalition arrangement). With the support of the DUP on key votes, the Conservatives would be able to just barely surpass the 326-vote bar for a legislative majority.
The central task for May’s government remained arriving at a cohesive approach for its Brexit negotiations with the EU. That task was a daunting one, however, because wide disagreement persisted even within the Conservative Party, not just on a myriad of details related to the British proposal for separation but also on the broader issues involved. The Grenfell Tower fire, a novichok attack in Salisbury, and air strikes on Syria
In June 2017 Brexit was pushed off the front pages by one of the worst disasters in recent British history: a fire in a multistory public housing residence (Grenfell Tower) in London claimed the lives of 72 individuals, many of whom were recent immigrants. The incident prompted a period of national soul-searching after it was revealed that months before the fire the building’s low-income residents had raised concerns about fire safety and complained that they were being treated like second-class citizens.
In March 2018 British national outrage was focused on Russia when a former Russian intelligence officer, who had acted as double agent for Britain, and his daughter were found unconscious in Salisbury, England. It was determined that the pair had been victims of a “novichok,” a complex nerve agent that had been developed by the Soviets. Although the Russian government denied having any involvement with the attack and British investigators were unable to prove that the nerve agent originated in Russia, the May government responded by expelling some two dozen Russian intelligence operatives who had been working in Britain under diplomatic cover.
In April Britain joined France and the United States in launching air strikes against targets in Syria after it was revealed that the regime of Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad had again used chemical weapons on its own people. Corbyn was critical of May for having ordered the strike without first consulting Parliament, but she countered that the action had to be undertaken without seeking parliamentary approval in order to protect the operation’s integrity. May also said that the strike was intended to prevent further suffering, and she characterized the decision as both right and legal. The wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Chequers plan, and Boris Johnson’s resignation
In May 2018 Britain and much of the world stopped for a day to witness the royal wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle—a divorced American actress, daughter of an African American mother and a white father—whose informal approachability and personal warmth recalled the much beloved “People’s Princess” Diana. The newlywed couple’s union reflected the changing social landscape of an increasingly multicultural Britain. Moreover, they seemed determined to modernize the monarchy and to connect it with the lives of everyday Britons.
In early July May summoned her cabinet to the prime minister’s country retreat, Chequers, determined to forge a consensus on the nuts and bolts of the government’s Brexit plan. Despite forceful opposition by the cabinet’s “hard” Brexiters, by the end of the marathon meeting a consensus seemed to have emerged around May’s “softer” approach, grounded in policies aimed at preserving economic ties with the EU. Just two days later, however, the government’s apparent harmony was disrupted by the resignation of Britain’s chief Brexit negotiator, David Davis, who complained that May’s plan gave up too much, too easily. The next day Johnson left his post as foreign secretary, writing in his letter of resignation that the dream of Brexit was dying, “suffocated by needless self-doubt.” Suddenly confronted with the possibility of a vote of confidence on her party leadership, May reportedly cautioned Conservatives to line up behind her Brexit plan or run the risk of losing power to a Corbyn-led Labour government. EU agreement and Parliamentary opposition to May’s Brexit plan
On November 25 the leaders of the EU’s 27 other member countries formally agreed to the terms of a withdrawal deal that May claimed “delivered for the British people” and set the United Kingdom “on course for a prosperous future.” Under the plan Britain was to pay some $50 billion to the EU to satisfy its long-term financial obligations. Britain’s departure from the EU was to come in March 2019, but, according to the agreement, the U.K. would continue to abide by EU rules and regulations until at least December 2020 while negotiations continued on the details of the long-term relationship between the EU and the U.K.
The agreement, which was set to be debated and voted upon by the House of Commons in December, still faced strong opposition in Parliament, not only from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the DUP but also from dozens of Conservatives. At the same time, the call for holding another referendum on Brexit was growing louder, though May remained adamant that the will of the British people had already been expressed. A major sticking point for many of those who opposed the agreement was the so-called Northern Ireland backstop plan. Formulated to help maintain an open border between Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland after Brexit, the “backstop” stipulated that a legally binding customs arrangement between the EU and Northern Ireland would go into effect if the U.K. and the EU could not reach a long-term agreement by December 2020. Opponents of the backstop argued that it set up the potential for regulatory barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., effectively establishing a customs border down the Irish Sea. Objections to the Irish backstop and a challenge to May’s leadership
The issue grew more heated in the first week of December after the government was forced to publish in full Attorney General Geoffrey Cox’s legal advice for the government on the Brexit agreement, which had initially been reported to Parliament in overview only. According to Cox, without agreement between Britain and the EU, the terms of the backstop plan could endure “indefinitely,” with the U.K. legally blocked from terminating the agreement without EU approval. This contentious issue was front and centre as the House of Commons began five days of debate leading up to a vote on the Brexit agreement that was scheduled for December 11. Facing the likelihood of a humiliating rejection of the agreement by the House of Commons, May dramatically interrupted the debate after three days, on December 10, and postponed the vote, pledging to seek new assurances from the EU regarding the backstop. The opposition responded by threatening to hold a vote of confidence and to call for an early election.
A challenge to May’s leadership was quickly mounted within the Conservative Party, and, after more than the required 15 percent of the parliamentary party (48 of 317 MPs) requested a vote on her leadership of the party, a secret ballot vote was held on December 12, 2018. May received the votes of 200 MPs, more than the 159 votes she needed to survive as leader. Although, according to Conservative Party rules, she could not be challenged as leader for another year, it remained to be seen whether May would still face pressure to relinquish power. Parliamentary rejection of May’s plan, May’s survival of a confidence vote, and the Independent Group of breakaway MPs
Responding to May in a joint letter, European Council Pres. Donald Tusk and European Commission Pres. Jean-Claude Juncker indicated that, if the backstop had to be invoked, they would strive to limit its application to the “shortest possible period.” However, this pledge satisfied few of the agreement’s critics. When debate on the agreement resumed on January 9, Corbyn argued not only for rejection of the agreement but also for an early general election. On January 15 the agreement was overwhelmingly rejected by a vote of 432–202 (the worst defeat for a government initiative in modern British parliamentary history), and Corbyn tabled a vote of confidence in the government, which May survived the next day, 325–306, having held onto the support of the DUP and many Conservatives who had deserted her in the agreement vote.
The longer the issue of Brexit remained unsettled, the more it became the fulcrum on which British politics turned. Political pundits began to note that opinions on May’s proposed version of Brexit and Brexit in general cut across ideological lines. Both Labour and the Conservative Party were riven by internecine conflict over Brexit. In February eight MPs withdrew from the Labour Party, citing their disappointment in Corbyn’s leadership on the issue as well as concerns over alleged anti-Semitism within the party, a criticism that was at least partly tied to Corbyn’s sympathy for Palestinian concerns. Only days after their departure, three moderate Tories left the Conservative Party, protesting that it had been hijacked by the European Research Group, a faction of right-wing hard-line Brexiters whom the departing MPs accused of acting as a party within the party. Joining together as the Independent Group, these breakaway MPs from both parties began taking steps toward formally constituting a new political party. Meanwhile, in early March, Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, convened a meeting of Labour MPs and members of the House of Lords—many of whom felt that Corbyn had taken the party too far leftward—to consider an alternative vision for the party. Parliament rejects May’s plan again
Against this backdrop, May continued negotiations with European leaders in an effort to win concessions that would garner wider support within Parliament than the terms of her earlier, shunned Brexit plan did. On the eve of a scheduled meaningful vote in the House of Commons on her revised plan, May secured new promises of cooperation on the backstop plan from EU leaders. A “joint legally binding instrument” was agreed to under which Britain could initiate a “formal dispute” with the EU if the EU were to attempt to keep Britain bound to the backstop plan indefinitely. A “joint statement” was also issued that committed the U.K. and the EU to arriving at a replacement for the backstop plan by December 2020. Finally, the U.K. put forth a “unilateral declaration” stressing that there was nothing to prevent Britain from abandoning the backstop if negotiations on an alternative arrangement with the EU were to collapse without the prospect of resolution.
In advance of the vote in Parliament, Attorney General Cox issued his opinion that while the new assurances reduced the risk of the U.K.’s being indefinitely confined by the backstop agreement, they did not fundamentally change the agreement’s legal status. In the vote on March 12, the House of Commons once again rejected May’s plan, though by a smaller margin than its earlier defeat, 391–242. The next day the House of Commons voted 312–308 against leaving the EU without a deal in place. On March 14, by just two votes, May survived a vote that would have taken control of Brexit away from her and handed it to Parliament. In a letter to EU leaders on March 20, she requested that the date of Britain’s departure from the EU be delayed until June 30. In response the EU announced its willingness to extend the Brexit deadline until May 22 but only if Parliament had accepted May’s withdrawal plan by the week of March 24. “Indicative votes,” May’s pledge to resign, a third defeat for her plan, and a new deadline
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of London on March 23 to demand that another referendum on Brexit be held. On March 25 the House of Commons voted 329–302 to usurp control of Parliament’s agenda from the government in order to hold “indicative votes” on alternative proposals to May’s plan. Eight of those proposals were put to a vote on March 27, but none was able to gain the support of the majority, though a plan to seek to create a “permanent and comprehensive U.K.-wide customs union with the EU” came close, falling sort by just six votes.
Also on March 27, May pledged to resign as party leader and prime minister if the House of Commons were to approve her plan, a gambit that won support from some “hard Brexit” opponents of the plan. On March 29, owing to an antique procedural rule invoked by Speaker of the House John Bercow, only the withdrawal agreement portion of May’s plan was voted upon by the House of Commons (excluded was the “political declaration” that addressed what the U.K. and EU expected of their long-term relationship). Although the vote was closer than the previous two (286 in support, 344 in opposition), the plan once again went down in defeat. The U.K. now had until April 12 to decide whether it would leave the EU without an agreement on that day or request a longer delay that would require it to participate in elections for the European Parliament. May asked the EU to push back the deadline for Brexit until June 30, and on April 11 the European Council announced that it was granting the U.K. a “flexible extension” until October 31.
Shortly thereafter, in response to the Conservative Party’s seeming inability to position the country to leave the EU, Nigel Farage launched the Brexit Party. It proved to be a big winner in the elections for the European Parliament in May, capturing about 31 percent of the vote. The next closest finisher was the Liberal Democrats, with about 20 percent of the vote, while Labour claimed some 14 percent and the Conservatives only about 9 percent.
Having failed to garner sufficient support from Conservatives for her exit plan, May entered discussions with Labour leaders on a possible compromise, but these too proved fruitless. When May responded to that disappointment by proposing a new version of the plan that included a temporary customs relationship with the EU and a pledge to hold a parliamentary vote on whether to stage another referendum on Brexit, her cabinet revolted. Isolated as never before, the prime minister announced on May 24 that she would step down as leader of the Conservative Party on June 7 but would remain as caretaker premier until her party had chosen her successor. After a series of votes by the parliamentary Conservative Party winnowed a list of 10 candidates to two, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt stood in an election in which all of the party’s roughly 160,000 members were eligible to vote. Johnson took some 66 percent of that vote to assume the leadership. He officially replaced May as prime minister on July 24. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Society, state, and economy State and society
Despite the so-called “dismantling of controls” after the end of World War I, government involvement in economic life was to continue, as were increased public expenditure, extensions of social welfare, and a higher degree of administrative rationalization. In the interwar years the level of integration of labour, capital, and the state was more considerable than is often thought. Attempts to organize the market continued up to the beginning of World War II, evident, for example, in government’s financial support for regional development in the late 1930s. Few Britons, however, felt they were living in a period of decreased government power. Nonetheless, attachment to the “impartial state” and to voluntarism was still considerable and exemplified by the popularity of the approved organizations set up to administer health insurance in the interwar years. The governance of society through what were now taken to be the social characteristics of that society itself, for example, family life as well as demographic and economic factors—developed by Liberal administrations before World War I—along with the advent of “planning,” continued to be the direction of change, but the connection back to Victorian notions of moral individualism and the purely regulative, liberal state was still strong. Even the greatest exponent of the move toward economic intervention and social government, John Maynard Keynes, whose General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935–36) provided the major rationale for subsequent state intervention and whose work downgraded the importance of private rationality and private responsibility, nonetheless believed that governmental intervention in one area was necessary to buttress freedom and privacy elsewhere, so that the moral responsibility of the citizen would be forthcoming.
There was, however, only an incremental increase in the level of interest in state involvement in the economy and society in the immediate years before World War II, when the fear of war galvanized politicians and administrators. It was the “total war” of 1939–45 that brought a degree of centralized control of the economy and society that was unparalleled before or indeed since. In some ways this was an expression of prewar developments, but the impetus of the war was enormous and felt in all political quarters. In 1941 it was a Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, who introduced the first Keynesian budget. Cross-party support was also evident in the response to the 1942 Beveridge Report, which became the blueprint of what was later to be called the welfare state. After 1945 a decisive shift had taken place toward the recognition of state intervention and planning as the norm, not the exception, and toward the idea that society could now be molded by political will. Nonetheless, there was much popular dislike of “government controls,” and the familiar rhetoric of the impartial state remained strong, as reflected in Beveridge’s attack in 1948 on the Labour government’s failure to encourage voluntarism. This voluntarism, however, was decidedly different from 19th-century voluntarism in that Beveridge advocated a minister-guardian of voluntary action. So pervasive was the postwar party consensus on the welfare state that the term coined to identify it, “Butskellism,” is at least as well remembered as the successive chancellors of the Exchequer—R.A. Butler and Hugh Gaitskell—from whose amalgamated surnames it was derived.
Lord Beveridge, photograph by Yousuf Karsh.Camera Press/Globe Photos
From the 1960s onward this consensus began to unravel, with the perception of poor economic performance and calls for the modernization of British society and the British economy. The mixed economy came under pressure, as did the institutions of the welfare state, especially the National Health Service (NHS). In the 1970s in particular, older beliefs in constitutional methods came into question—for instance, in the first national Civil Service strike ever, in 1973, and in the strikes and political violence that marked that decade as a whole. The result was a revolution in the relationship between state and society, whereby the market came to replace society as the model of state governance. This did not, however, mean a return to 19th-century models, though the character of this manifestation of the relationship between state and society was clearly liberal, in line with the long British tradition of governance.
Institutionally, this way of governing was pluralistic, but its pluralism was decidedly statist. It was not, as in the 19th century, a private, self-governing voluntarist pluralism but one that was designedly competitive, enlisting quasi-governmental institutions as clients competing with one another in a marketplace. In economic and cultural conditions increasingly shaped by globalization, the economy was exposed to the benign operations of the market not by leaving it alone but by actively intervening in it to create the conditions for entrepreneurship.
Analogously, social life was marketized too, thrown open to the idea that the capacity for self-realization could be obtained only through individual activity, not through society. Institutions like the NHS were reformed as a series of internal markets. These markets were to be governed by what has been called “the new public management.” This involved a focus upon accountability, with explicit standards and measures of performance. The ethical change involved a transition from the idea of public service to one of private management of the self. Parallel to this “culture of accountability” was the emergence of an “audit society,” in which formal and professionally sanctioned monitoring systems replaced the trust that earlier versions of relationship between state and society had invested in professional specialists of all sorts (the professions themselves, such as university teaching, were opened up to this sort of audit, which was all the more onerous because, if directed from above, it was carried out by the professionals themselves, so preserving the fiction of professional freedom).
The social state gave way to a state that was regarded as “enabling,” permitting not only the citizen but also the firm, the locality, and so on to freely choose. This politics of choice was in fact shared by the Thatcher’s Conservative administration and Blair’s Labour one. In both the state was seen as a partner. In the so-called “Third Way” of Blair, one between socialism and the market, the partnership evolved much more in terms of community than in the Conservative case. In Blair’s Labour vision there was a more active concern with creating ethical citizens who would exchange obligations for rights in a new realization of marketized communities. This new relation of state and society involved the decentralization of rule upon the citizen himself and herself, which was reflected in the host of self-help activities to be found in the Britain of the 1990s and 2000s, from the new concern with alternative health therapies to the self-management of schools. Reflecting this decentralization (in which the state itself made the citizen a consumer, for instance, of education and health) was the increasingly important role of the consumption of goods in constructing lifestyles through which individual choice could realize self-expression and self-fulfilment. Economy and society
Economically, Britain had been hurt severely by World War I. The huge balances of credit in foreign currencies that had provided the capital for the City of London’s financial operations for a century were spent. Britain had moved from the position of a creditor to that of a debtor country. Moreover, its industrial infrastructure, already out of date at the start of the war, had been allowed to depreciate and decay further. The industries of the Industrial Revolution, such as coal mining, textile production, and shipbuilding, upon which British prosperity had been built, were now either weakened or redundant. The Japanese had usurped the textile export market. Coal was superseded by other forms of energy. Shipping lost during the war had to be almost fully replaced with more-modern and more-efficient vessels.
Finally, the Treaty of Versailles, particularly its harsh demands on Germany for financial reparations, ensured that foreign markets would remain depressed. Germany had been Britain’s largest foreign customer. The export of German coal to France, as stipulated by the treaty, upset world coal markets for nearly a decade. Depression and unemployment, not prosperity and a better Britain, characterized the interwar years.
The British economy, as well as that of the rest of the world, was devastated by the Great Depression. The post-World War I world of reconstruction became a prewar world of deep depression, radicalism, racism, and violence. Although MacDonald was well-meaning and highly intelligent, he was badly equipped to handle the science of economics and the depression. By the end of 1930, unemployment was nearly double the figure of 1928 and would reach 25 percent of the workforce by the spring of 1931. It was accompanied, after the closing of banks in Germany in May, by a devastating run on gold in British banks that threatened the stability of the pound.
Ramsay MacDonald.Central Press Photos Ltd.
MacDonald’s government fell in August over the protection of the pound; Britain needed to borrow gold, but foreign bankers would lend gold only on the condition that domestic expenditures would be cut, and this meant, among other things, reducing unemployment insurance payments. However, a Labour Party whose central commitment was to the welfare of the working people could not mandate such a course of action even in an economic crisis. Thus, the Labour cabinet resigned. MacDonald with a few colleagues formed a coalition with the Conservative and Liberal opposition on August 24, 1931. This new “national” government, which allowed Britain to go off the gold standard on September 21, was confirmed in office by a general election on October 27, in which 473 Conservatives were returned while the Labour Party in the House of Commons was nearly destroyed, capturing only 52 seats. MacDonald, who was returned to the House of Commons along with 13 so-called National Labour colleagues, remained prime minister nonetheless. The new government was in fact a conservative government, and MacDonald, by consenting to remain prime minister, became and remains in Labour histories a traitor.
Under Neville Chamberlain, who became chancellor of the Exchequer in November 1931, the coalition government pursued a policy of strict economy. Housing subsidies were cut; Britain ended its three-quarter-century devotion to free trade and began import protection; and interest rates were lowered. Manufacturing revived, stimulated particularly by a marked revival in the construction of private housing made possible by reduced interest rates and by a modest growth in exports as a result of the cheaper pound. Similarly, unemployment declined, although it never reached the 10 percent level of the late 1920s until after the outbreak of war.
In terms of the occupational structure of Britain, the aftermath of World War I saw the decline of the great 19th-century staple industries become increasingly sharp, and the interwar experience of textiles was particularly difficult. The great expansion of mining after 1881 became a contraction, particularly from the 1930s, and domestic service, which itself may be termed a staple industry, suffered similarly. In 1911 these sectors accounted for some 20 percent of the British labour force, but by 1961 they accounted for barely 5 percent. Manufacturing continued to be of great importance into the third quarter of the century, when the next great restructuring occurred. After World War I an increasing emphasis on monopoly, scale, and sophisticated labour-management became apparent in British industry, though there was still much of the old “archaicism” of the 19th century to be seen, both in respect to management practices and the entrenched power of certain skilled occupations. Although different from its 19th-century antecedents, a distinct sense of working-class identity, based on manual work—especially in the manufacturing industry and mining—remained strong until about 1960. This was buttressed by a considerable degree of continuity in terms of residential community. After 1960 or so, the wholesale development of slum clearance and relocation to new residential settings was to go far to dissolve this older sense of identity.
From the interwar years automobile manufacture, the manufacture of consumer durables, and light industry, especially along the corridor between London and Birmingham, as well as in the new industrial suburbs of London, announced the economic eclipse of the north by the south, the “south” here including South Wales and industrial Scotland. In the Midlands electrical manufacturing and automobile industries developed. In the south, in addition to construction industries, new service industries such as hotels and the shops of London flourished. These in particular offered employment opportunities for women at a time when the demand for domestic servants was in decline. London grew enormously, and the unemployment rate there was half that of the north of England and of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The effect of these developments was to divide Britain politically and economically into two areas, a division that, with the exception of an interval during World War II and its immediate aftermath, still exists. New, science-based industries (e.g., the electrical and chemical industries) also developed from the interwar period, which together with the multiplication of service industries and the growth of the public sector—despite repeated government attempts to halt this growth—had by 1960 given rise to an occupational structure very different from that of the 19th century.
On the surface the 1950s and early ’60s were years of economic expansion and prosperity. The economic well-being of the average Briton rose dramatically and visibly. But when prosperity created a demand for imports, large-scale buying abroad hurt the value of the pound. A declining pound meant higher interest rates as well as credit and import controls, which in turn caused inflation. Inflation hurt exports and caused strikes. These crises occurred in approximately three-year cycles.
The economic concern then of the British government in the 1950s and ’60s and indeed through the 1970s was to increase productivity and ensure labour peace so that Britain could again become an exporting country able to pay for public expenditure at home while maintaining the value of its currency and its place as a world banker. A drastic run on the pound had been one of the pressing reasons for the quick withdrawal from Suez in 1956, and throughout the 1950s and ’60s Britain’s share of world trade fell with almost perfect consistency by about 1 percent per year. On the other hand, Britain benefited from an unprecedented rise in tourism occasioned mostly by the attraction of “Swinging London.”
All of this made Britain’s decision, after fierce political discussion, not to join the planned EEC, established by the Treaty of Rome on March 25, 1957, an event of signal importance. It meant that although economic conditions in Britain did indeed improve in the last years of the 1950s and through 1960—Prime Minister Harold Macmillan could remark with only slight irony that the British people had never “had it so good”—Britain nevertheless did not share in the astonishing growth in European production and trade led by the “economic miracle” in West Germany. By the mid-1960s there were signs that British prosperity was declining. Increases in productivity were disappearing, and labour unrest was marked. Prime Minister Macmillan quickly realized that it had been a mistake not to join the EEC, and in July 1961 he initiated negotiations to do so. By this time, however, the French government was headed by Charles de Gaulle, and he chose to veto Britain’s entry. Britain did not join the EEC until 1973.
In the aftermath of increasing difficulties for industry and increasing labour conflict, the Thatcher governments after 1979 set about a far-reaching restructuring of the economy, one based less on economic than on political and moral factors. Thatcher set out to end socialism in Britain. Her most dramatic acts consisted of a continuing series of statutes to denationalize nearly every industry that Labour had brought under government control in the previous 40 years as well as some industries, such as telecommunications, that had been in state hands for a century or more. But perhaps her most important achievement, helped by high unemployment in the old heavy industries, was in winning the contest for power with the trade unions. Instead of attempting to put all legislation in one massive bill, as Heath had done, Thatcher proceeded step by step, making secondary strikes and boycotts illegal, providing for fines, as well as allocation of union funds, for the violation of law, and taking measures for ending the closed shop. Finally, in 1984–85, she won a struggle with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), who staged a nationwide strike to prevent the closure of 20 coal mines that the government claimed were unproductive. The walkout, which lasted nearly a year and was accompanied by continuing violence, soon became emblematic of the struggle for power between the Conservative government and the trade unions. After the defeat of the miners, that struggle was essentially over; Thatcher’s victory was aided by divisions within the ranks of the miners themselves, exacerbated by the divisive leadership of the militant NUM leader Arthur Scargill, and by the Conservative government’s use of the police as a national constabulary, one not afraid to employ violence. The miners returned to work without a single concession. In all these efforts, Thatcher was helped by a revival of world prosperity and lessening inflation, by the profits from industries sold to investors, and by the enormous sums realized from the sale abroad of North Sea oil. From 1974 the unexpected windfall of the discovery of large oil reserves under the North Sea, together with the increase in oil prices that year, transformed Britain into a considerable player in the field of oil production (production soared from 87,000 tons in 1974 to 75,000,000 tons five years later). The political use of oil revenues was seen by some as characteristic of the failure of successive British governments to put them to good economic and social use.
The restructuring of the economy away from the manual and industrial sectors, which was a consequence of the rapid decline of manufacturing industry in Britain in the 1990s, also meant the decline of the old, manual working class and the coming of what has been called “postindustrial” or “postmodern” society. Within industry itself, “post-Fordist” (flexible, technologically innovative, and demand-driven) production and new forms of industrial management restructured the labour force in ways that broke up traditional hierarchies and outlooks. Not least among these changes has been the expansion of work, chiefly part-time, for women. There has been a corresponding rise of new, nonmanual employment, primarily in the service sector. In the early phases of these changes, there was much underemployment and unemployment.
The result has been not only the numerical decline of the old working class but the diminishing significance of manual work itself, as well as the growing disappearance of work as a fairly stable, uniform, lifelong experience. The shift in employment and investment from production to consumption industries has paralleled the rise of consumption itself as an arena in which people’s desires and hopes are centred and as the basis of their conceptions of themselves and the social order. However, in the 1990s there was a considerable move back to the workplace as the source of identity and self-value. At the same time, new management practices and ideas developed that were in line with the still generally high level of working hours.
Central to the new economy and new ideas about work has been the staggering growth of information technology. This has been especially evident in the operations of financial markets, contributing hugely to their global integration. One of the great beneficiaries of these changes has been the City of London, which has profited from very light state regulation. The financial sector, in terms of international markets and the domestic provision of financial goods and services, has become a major sector of the new economy. Speculation in markets, with ever-increasing degrees of ingenuity (for example, the phenomenon of hedge fund trading), has helped create a cohort of the newly rich in Britain and elsewhere. It has also led to an increasingly unstable world financial system. The spoils of this new society have been divided between large-scale multinational corporations and new kinds of industrial organizations that are smaller and often more responsive to demand, evident in development of the dot.com and e-commerce phenomena. Internet shopping, along with the unparalleled development of giant supermarket chains, transformed the traditional pattern of retailing and shopping and, with it, patterns of social interaction. This, however, was only one aspect of a general transformation of the economy and society that even as recently as the early 1990s had hardly been glimpsed.
In the conditions of economic stability and prosperity at the turn of the 21st century, a relatively large middle group arose in terms of income, housing, and lifestyle that politicians and others began to refer to as “middle England.” In effect this meant Scotland and Wales as well, although in Britain as a whole the old imbalance between west and east continued, in a similar fashion to that between north and south in England. However, even this middle was exposed to the vagaries of financial markets and an underperforming welfare state. Moreover, the gap between the least well-off and the most well-off widened even further, so that alongside the new rich were the new poor, or underclass. Social mobility either declined or stalled in comparison with the 1960s—in particular, the capacity of the poorest parents to send their children to university. Levels of poverty among children continued to be high. The reborn postindustrial cities of the north and Midlands, such as Manchester, came to symbolize much of the new Britain, with their mixture of revitalized city centres and deprived city perimeters that were home to the new poor. However, as had long been the case, the economic centre of the country remained in London and the southeast. Britain thus became a prosperous but increasingly unequal and divided society. Family and gender
After World War I there was a further decline in the birth rate and a continuing spread of contraception, though contraceptive methods had been known and practiced by all sections of society for a considerable time before this. What was important in the interwar years was a development of contraceptive practices within marriage. The gradual spread and acceptance of “family planning” was also important; however, this acceptance was not usually seen in terms of women’s rights. The birth rate continued to fall through the interwar years, and in the 1920s the two-child pattern of marriage was becoming established. With it came the “nuclear family” structure that was to be characteristic of much of the 20th century, with households predominantly made up of two parents with children who on achieving adulthood will leave the home to establish similar families themselves. Nonetheless, as always, there was considerable variation in practice. Coresident kin and lodgers were still found, particularly in working-class households, where overcrowding was often marked, as it was in London after the disruptions of World War II. There was also a concentration on childbirth within the early years of marriage, as well as longer life expectancy for children themselves.
Marriage was thus becoming a different kind of institution, at once more intimate and private, as well as an arena in which individual self-expression was becoming more possible than previously. In many respects, the privacy that was possible for the better-off in society in the mid- and late 19th century became increasingly possible for those less well-off in the course of the 20th century. However, the privacy that new kinds of family life and new economic possibilities made possible for poorer people differed from middle-class privacy. It was concerned with securing order and control of people’s lives in economic conditions that were still often difficult. As a result, “working-class respectability” differed from the respectability evident further up the social scale. For instance, privacy was evident in the slowly increasing possibility of separate rooms for separate functions (kitchens, sculleries, and bathrooms, for example) and the development of more-private sleeping arrangements. However, the respectability of this private life was also public in that it was on show to neighbours as a living proof of the family’s capacity to create order in difficult lives: the elaborately presented front of the house and the purposefully opened curtains of the “best room” of the home displayed the carefully presented if precarious affluence of the family.
Nonetheless, despite material and cultural class differences, there was a convergence across the social spectrum upon an increasingly common privatized and nucleated family life. This was part of a much more homogeneous life course and set of life experiences, which made the population increasingly uniform, at least compared with that of the 19th century. Age at marriage, the experience of marriage itself and of running one’s own household, household size, and the similarity of the age at which major life-cycle transitions occurred all tended to produce more cultural uniformity than previously; this increasing uniformity was of vast importance for the new consumer and media industries, not to mention the political parties. The political culture was in fact transformed from one based on class to a new sort of populist, demotic politics, shaped at least as much by the mass media, especially the popular press, as by the politicians.
The greater individualism possible within this more-privatized form of marriage received expression in the growing incidence of divorce, even as marriage itself grew greatly in importance in the 20th century. By the 1970s almost every adult female married at least once, though this figure fell considerably beginning in the 1980s. By 1997 one-third of births occurred to parents not formally married; however, more than half of these were to parents residing at the same address. The phenomena of one-parent families, as well as of stable unmarried cohabitation, now became widely apparent. If people married more often, they divorced more frequently too, so that by the 1980s marriage disruption rates by divorce were equal to those caused by death in the 19th century. By this time approximately one out of three marriages ended in divorce. These changes were of profound significance for politics in that they became linked in the public and political mind to the phenomena of antisocial behaviour by youth. Although this link was in reality complex, it did not stop the Blair administration from pursuing a “respect” agenda, which was designed to restore an at least partly imagined former era of civic virtue and public order. The ill-fated ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order), restricting the movement of offenders, was celebrated by some as an appropriately strong response to troublemaking neighbours and gangs but was condemned by others as an attack on civil liberties.
Of course, these social changes also greatly affected the understanding of women’s role in society. They were complemented by the growth of women’s employment, particularly in part-time jobs and most notably in the service sector, so that after 1945 a different life cycle for women evolved that included the return to work after childbirth. These changes did not result in the equality of earnings, however; for example, despite the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, under which the Equal Opportunities Commission was established, women’s pay rates in the 1980s were only about two-thirds of those of men. Still, higher education was increasingly opened to women from the 1960s, so that by 1980 they formed 40 percent of admissions to universities, although, as with male students, they were overwhelmingly from the higher social classes. As part of the widespread movement toward greater liberalization in the 1960s, in part inspired by developments in the United States, women’s liberation also developed in Britain.
In turn, that movement gave rise to a whole range of feminisms, some more radical than others but all aiming at the ingrained assumptions of male superiority in employment practices, in education, and in the understanding of family life itself. Intellectual life became increasingly characterized by an explicitly feminist analysis, which led to some fundamental rethinking in a whole range of academic disciplines, though resistance to this was strong. Changes in patterns of employment challenged stereotyped distinctions between the breadwinner and the housewife, as well as stereotypical notions of life as a married couple being based upon a well-understood division of labour within the household. The phenomena of the “new man” developed, though his progeny of the 1990s, the “new lad,” was not quite what his father had expected. Coined to describe what was in fact a reinvented, consumer-led version of a long-held and ingrained masculine worldview, “laddism” turned out to be a snazzier, more fashion-driven, and above all more unashamed version of the old devotion to “birds” (women), beer, and football (soccer). Mass culture
In terms of popular leisure, music hall declined in popularity in the second quarter of the 20th century, but it left its mark on much of British culture, not least on the motion picture, which hastened its demise, and on television, which followed its end. By 1914 there were 4,000 cinemas in Britain and about 400,000,000 admissions per year. By 1934 this had more than doubled, and admissions continued to rise steadily to reach a peak of 1.6 billion in 1946. This was a particularly popular form of entertainment, especially among the working class: the lower down the social scale one was, the more likely one was to visit the cinema. The suburban middle-class motion picture audience of the 1930s was important but remained a minority. It is difficult to exaggerate the dominance of the cinema as a form of entertainment. In 1950, out of over 1,500,000 admissions to forms of taxable entertainment (and this included horse racing and football matches), cinema made up more than 80 percent. Hollywood films dominated, though until World War II there was a thriving British film industry. This domination continued after the war, although British cinema asserted itself powerfully from time to time; for instance, in the Social Realism of the 1960s, notably in the work of director Lindsay Anderson, and later in the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Parallel to these artful dissections of British life were the less high-minded but extremely successful “Carry On” comedies, which drew on the music hall tradition.
Reading matter continued to be produced within Britain, above all in the form of the newspaper. The British are inveterate newspaper readers, and there was mass consumption of a nationally based daily and Sunday newspaper press as early as the 1920s. This did much to create cultural uniformity, although, as with motion pictures, there were considerable differences of taste and preference regarding newspapers. However, after 1950 the emphasis on uniformity became more marked and was reinforced by the progressive concentration of ownership in the hands of a few proprietors. This circle of ownership became even smaller as time went on, so that at the beginning of the 21st century the empire of the most powerful of these media moguls, Rupert Murdoch, not only dominated much of the popular press and made considerable inroads into the so-called quality press in Britain but was also international in scope. Newspapers, however, were but one component of Murdoch’s and similar empires. The revolution wrought by new information technologies put control of a wide variety of communication forms, most importantly television, in the hands of these powerful individuals. Their political influence swelled as politicians of all persuasions were compelled to accommodate their power and, in a form of spin, play their version of the political game.
The development of a national mass culture seen in the previous period, in which the distinction between “popular” and “high” culture, if still important, was to some extent bridged, was to continue into the 20th and 21st centuries. (Cultural homogeneity was also intensified by increasing social and lifestyle uniformity.) To a considerable extent, from the 1960s, all culture became popular culture, so that differences of gender, class, and ethnicity became if not merged then renegotiated in terms of a mass, “shared” culture. In this process, the older class differences were eroded, in line with other changes in class structure, particularly in the manual working class. At the same time, new differences and solidarities also emerged, particularly around age and levels of consumption.
Popular music—or pop music, as it came to be called from the 1960s—became an important area in which identities were formed. Pop has modulated through many forms since the 1960s, from the punk of the late ’70s and early ’80s to hip-hop and the rave culture of the ’90s, and distinct styles of life have accreted around these musical forms, not only for the youth. The development of a uniform popular culture, at least as expressed through popular music, was greatly beholden to similar developments in the United States, where social identities were explored and developed in terms of black popular music, not just by African Americans but also by young white Americans. Given the great importance of Afro-Caribbean immigration into Britain after 1945, and latterly south Asian immigration, the experience of ethnic minorities in Britain to some degree also paralleled that of the United States. Concerns about national identity, as well as personal and group identity, became more important as Britain became a multicultural society and as the growth of European integration and economic globalization increasingly called British—and English, Welsh, and Scottish—identity into question.
One of Britain's most influential punk rock groups, the Sex Pistols, performing in 1977.© Paul Slattery/Retna Ltd.
The liberalization of the 1960s appears to have been crucial for many of these changes, with shifting gender roles being only one part of a broader international agenda. The civil rights movement in Ireland, student protest, and the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements in the United States were all part of the assault on the still-strong vestiges of Victorianism in British society, as well as, more immediately, a reaction against the austerity of postwar Britain. Change in family life and sexual mores was represented in the 1960s by a range of legislative developments: the Abortion Act of 1967; the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, partially decriminalizing homosexual activity; the 1969 Divorce Reform Act; and the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968. Moreover, debate concerning sexual mores continued in Britain throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, not least regarding the ongoing attempts to change the legal age of consent and the controversial Section 28 Amendment to the Local Government Act in 1988, which prohibited local authorities from promoting homosexuality. Legislation enacted by Parliament in 2004, however, made same-sex civil partnerships (civil unions) legal throughout the United Kingdom by the next year, and in July 2013 Parliament legalized marriage for same-sex couples in England and Wales. While that law generally allowed religious groups to opt in to performing same-sex marriages, prohibitions against same-sex marriage in the Church of England and the Church in Wales remained in force.
Change was also based on the relative economic affluence of the late 1950s and ’60s. The disintegration of older values (including middle class values) was evident in the “rediscovery” of the working class, in which films, novels, plays, and academic works depicted working-class life with unparalleled realism and unparalleled sympathy (including the works of the Angry Young Men). The working class was therefore brought into the cultural mainstream. This was ironic at a time when working-class communities were in fact being broken apart by slum clearance and the relocation of populations away from the geographical locations of their traditional culture.
Changes in higher education, with the development of the polytechnics and the “new universities,” meant that, at least to some extent, higher education was thrown open to children from poorer homes. There was also the liberalization of educational methods in primary and secondary education, along with the emergence of comprehensive schooling, ending the old distinction between the secondary modern and the grammar schools. In practice, many of the old divisions continued and, indeed, increased. However, rather than being accompanied by increasing cultural divisions, the opposite was the case. There was a much more positive understanding of the “popular” than before. A more fluid, open, and commercial popular culture was signalled by the development in the 1950s of commercial television and, with it, the slow decline of the public broadcasting, public service ethic of the BBC. With the explosion of new channels of communication in the 2000s, particularly in television, there was a noted “dumbing down” of all media, which was especially evident in the celebrity culture of the new century and not unique to the United Kingdom. The new television gorged on this, as well as on reality programming and on the enormously increased popularity of professional football. These brought all classes together in a new demotic culture, although at the same time differentiation according to income, taste, and education became increasingly possible because of the technologies of the new media.
The various lifestyles associated with different genres of popular music are one telling indication of the way that lifestyle can determine an individual’s identity in modern society. This development reflects the withdrawal of the state from the direct intervention in social life that was so characteristic of the third quarter of the 20th century. The state’s turn to the market as a model of government has been reproduced in terms of the market’s direct role in the formation of cultural life, so that the relationship between public culture and consumer capitalism has been close, in many ways the one constantly trying to outguess the other. This game of one-upmanship, marked by ironic knowingness, has been labelled “postmodern.” However, this term has come to describe much of late 20th- and early 21st-century international culture and society, not only in Britain. It points to the growing understanding of the relative nature of truth, itself a reaction against the prevailing supposedly “modern” certainties of the 20th century (reason, freedom, humanity, and truth itself), which indeed have often had an appalling outcome. However, it was a sign of the times that these antifundamentalist currents, themselves critical of much of Western culture, emerged at much the same time as new fundamentalisms emerged in the forms of American neoconservatism and certain strains of radical Islam. The ferment of intellectual and cultural changes involved was inextricable from the massive changes under way in the transition to the novel forms of society made possible by new information technologies. Patrick Joyce Sovereigns of Britain
The table provides a chronological list of the sovereigns of Britain.
Sovereigns of Britain Kings of Wessex (West Saxons) name dynasty or house reign 1Athelstan was king of Wessex and the first king of all England. 2James VI of Scotland became also James I of England in 1603. Upon accession to the English throne, he styled himself "King of Great Britain" and was so proclaimed. Legally, however, he and his successors held separate English and Scottish kingships until the Act of Union of 1707, when the two kingdoms were united as the Kingdom of Great Britain. 3The United Kingdom was formed on January 1, 1801, with the union of Great Britain and Ireland. After 1801 George III was styled "King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland." 4Oliver and Richard Cromwell served as lords protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland during the republican Commonwealth. 5William and Mary, as husband and wife, reigned jointly until Mary's death in 1694. William then reigned alone until his own death in 1702. 6George IV was regent from February 5, 1811. 7In 1917, during World War I, George V changed the name of his house from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. 8Edward VIII succeeded upon the death of his father, George V, on January 20, 1936, but abdicated on December 11, 1936, before coronation.
Egbert Saxon 802–839
Aethelwulf (Ethelwulf) Saxon 839–856/858
Aethelbald (Ethelbald) Saxon 855/856–860
Aethelberht (Ethelbert) Saxon 860–865/866
Aethelred I (Ethelred) Saxon 865/866–871
Alfred the Great Saxon 871–899
Edward the Elder Saxon 899–924 Sovereigns of England name dynasty or house reign
Athelstan1 Saxon 925–939
Edmund I Saxon 939–946
Eadred (Edred) Saxon 946–955
Eadwig (Edwy) Saxon 955–959
Edgar Saxon 959–975
Edward the Martyr Saxon 975–978
Ethelred II the Unready (Aethelred) Saxon 978–1013
Sweyn Forkbeard Danish 1013–14
Ethelred II the Unready (restored) Saxon 1014–16
Edmund II Ironside Saxon 1016
Canute Danish 1016–35
Harold I Harefoot Danish 1035–40
Hardecanute Danish 1040–42
Edward the Confessor Saxon 1042–66
Harold II Saxon 1066
William I the Conqueror Norman 1066–87
William II Norman 1087–1100
Henry I Norman 1100–35
Stephen Blois 1135–54
Henry II Plantagenet 1154–89
Richard I Plantagenet 1189–99
John Plantagenet 1199–1216
Henry III Plantagenet 1216–72
Edward I Plantagenet 1272–1307
Edward II Plantagenet 1307–27
Edward III Plantagenet 1327–77
Richard II Plantagenet 1377–99
Henry IV Plantagenet: Lancaster 1399–1413
Henry V Plantagenet: Lancaster 1413–22
Henry VI Plantagenet: Lancaster 1422–61
Edward IV Plantagenet: York 1461–70
Henry VI (restored) Plantagenet: Lancaster 1470–71
Edward IV (restored) Plantagenet: York 1471–83
Edward V Plantagenet: York 1483
Richard III Plantagenet: York 1483–85
Henry VII Tudor 1483–1509
Henry VIII Tudor 1509–47
Edward VI Tudor 1547–53
Mary I Tudor 1553–58
Elizabeth I Tudor 1558–1603 Sovereigns of Great Britain and the United Kingdom2, 3 name dynasty or house reign
James I (VI of Scotland)2 Stuart 1603–25
Charles I Stuart 1625–49 Commonwealth (1653–59)
Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector4 1653–58
Richard Cromwell, Lord Protector4 1658–59
Charles II Stuart 1660–85
James II Stuart 1685–88
William III and Mary II5 Orange/Stuart 1689–1702
Anne Stuart 1702–14
George I Hanover 1714–27
George II Hanover 1727–60
George III3 Hanover 1760–1820
George IV6 Hanover 1820–30
William IV Hanover 1830–37
Victoria Hanover 1837–1901
Edward VII Saxe-Coburg-Gotha 1901–10
George V7 Windsor 1910–36
Edward VIII8 Windsor 1936
George VI Windsor 1936–52
Elizabeth II Windsor 1952– Prime ministers of Great Britain and the United Kingdom
The table provides a chronological list of the prime ministers of Great Britain and the United Kingdom.
Prime ministers of Great Britain and the United Kingdom* name party** term *The origin of the term prime minister and the question of to whom it should originally be applied have long been issues of scholarly and political debate. Although the term was used as early as the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), it acquired wider currency during the reign of George II (1727–60), when it began to be used as a term of reproach toward Sir Robert Walpole. The title of prime minister did not become official until 1905, to refer to the leader of a government. **Before the development of the Conservative and Liberal parties in the mid-19th century, parties in Britain were largely simply alliances of prominent groups or aristocratic families. The designations Whig and Tory tend often to be approximate. In all cases, the party designation is that of the prime minister; he might lead a coalition government, as did David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill (in his first term).
Robert Walpole
(from 1725, Sir Robert Walpole; from 1742, earl of Orford) Whig 1721–42
Spencer Compton,
earl of Wilmington Whig 1742–43
Henry Pelham Whig 1743–54
Thomas Pelham-Holles,
1st duke of Newcastle (1st time) Whig 1754–56
William Cavendish,
4th duke of Devonshire Whig 1756–57
Thomas Pelham-Holles,
1st duke of Newcastle (2nd time) Whig 1757–62
John Stuart,
3rd earl of Bute 1762–63
George Grenville 1763–65
Charles Watson Wentworth,
2nd marquess of Rockingham (1st time) Whig 1765–66
William Pitt,
1st earl of Chatham 1766–68
Augustus Henry Fitzroy,
3rd duke of Grafton 1768–70
Frederick North,
Lord North (from 1790, 2nd earl of Guilford) 1770–82
Charles Watson Wentworth,
2nd marquess of Rockingham (2nd time) Whig 1782
William Petty-Fitzmaurice,
2nd earl of Shelburne (from 1784, 1st marquess of Lansdowne) 1782–83
William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck,
3rd duke of Portland (1st time) Whig 1783
William Pitt, the Younger
(1st time) Tory 1783–1801
Henry Addington
(from 1805, 1st Viscount Sidmouth) Tory 1801–04
William Pitt, the Younger
(2nd time) Tory 1804–06
William Wyndham Grenville,
1st Baron Grenville 1806–07
William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck,
3rd duke of Portland (2nd time) Whig 1807–09
Spencer Perceval Tory 1809–12
Robert Banks Jenkinson,
2nd earl of Liverpool Tory 1812–27
George Canning Tory 1827
Frederick John Robinson,
1st Viscount Goderich (from 1833, 1st earl of Ripon) Tory 1827–28
Arthur Wellesley,
1st duke of Wellington (1st time) Tory 1828–30
Charles Grey,
2nd Earl Grey Whig 1830–34
William Lamb,
2nd Viscount Melbourne (1st time) Whig 1834
Arthur Wellesley,
1st duke of Wellington (2nd time) Tory 1834
Sir Robert Peel,
2nd Baronet (1st time) Tory 1834–35
William Lamb,
2nd Viscount Melbourne (2nd time) Whig 1835–41
Sir Robert Peel,
2nd Baronet (2nd time) Conservative 1841–46
John Russell,
Lord Russell (from 1861, 1st Earl Russell) (1st time) Whig-Liberal 1846–52
Edward Geoffrey Stanley,
14th earl of Derby (1st time) Conservative 1852
George Hamilton-Gordon,
4th earl of Aberdeen 1852–55
Henry John Temple,
3rd Viscount Palmerston (1st time) Liberal 1855–58
Edward Geoffrey Stanley,
14th earl of Derby (2nd time) Conservative 1858–59
Henry John Temple,
3rd Viscount Palmerston (2nd time) Liberal 1859–65
John Russell,
1st Earl Russell (2nd time) Liberal 1865–66
Edward Geoffrey Stanley,
14th earl of Derby (3rd time) Conservative 1866–68
Benjamin Disraeli
(1st time) Conservative 1868
William Ewart Gladstone
(1st time) Liberal 1868–74
Benjamin Disraeli,
(from 1876, earl of Beaconsfield) (2nd time) Conservative 1874–80
William Ewart Gladstone
(2nd time) Liberal 1880–85
Robert Cecil,
3rd marquess of Salisbury (1st time) Conservative 1885–86
William Ewart Gladstone
(3rd time) Liberal 1886
Robert Cecil,
3rd marquess of Salisbury (2nd time) Conservative 1886–92
William Ewart Gladstone
(4th time) Liberal 1892–94
Archibald Philip Primrose,
5th earl of Rosebery Liberal 1894–95
Robert Cecil,
3rd marquess of Salisbury (3rd time) Conservative 1895–1902
Arthur James Balfour,
(from 1922, 1st earl of Balfour) Conservative 1902–05
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman Liberal 1905–08
H.H. Asquith,
(from 1925, 1st earl of Oxford and Asquith) Liberal 1908–16
David Lloyd George,
(from 1945, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor) Liberal 1916–22
Bonar Law Conservative 1922–23
Stanley Baldwin
(1st time) Conservative 1923–24
Ramsay Macdonald
(1st time) Labour 1924
Stanley Baldwin
(2nd time) Conservative 1924–29
Ramsay Macdonald
(2nd time) Labour 1929–35
Stanley Baldwin,
(from 1937, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley) (3rd time) Conservative 1935–37
Neville Chamberlain Conservative 1937–40
Winston Churchill
(1st time) Conservative 1940–45
Clement Attlee,
(from 1955, 1st Earl Attlee) Labour 1945–51
Winston Churchill,
(from 1953, Sir Winston Churchill) (2nd time) Conservative 1951–55
Sir Anthony Eden,
(from 1961, 1st earl of Avon) Conservative 1955–57
Harold Macmillan,
(from 1984, 1st earl of Stockton) Conservative 1957–63
Sir Alec Douglas-Home,
(until 1963, Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, 14th earl of Home; from 1974, Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home) Conservative 1963–64
Harold Wilson
(1st time) Labour 1964–70
Edward Heath Conservative 1970–74
Harold Wilson,
(from 1976, Sir Harold Wilson) (2nd time) Labour 1974–76
James Callaghan Labour 1976–79
Margaret Thatcher Conservative 1979–90
John Major Conservative 1990–97
Tony Blair Labour 1997–2007
Gordon Brown Labour 2007–10
David Cameron Conservative 2010–16
Theresa May Conservative 2016–19
Boris Johnson Conservative 2019–
Citation Information
Article Title: United Kingdom
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 11 August 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom
Access Date: August 12, 2019
Additional Reading Geography Land and people
The Ordnance Survey Motoring Atlas: Britain 2001 (2000) is an authoritative atlas of the United Kingdom. Tony Champion (A.G. Champion) et al., The Population of Britain in the 1990s: A Social and Economic Atlas (1996), provides a detailed social portrait of the nation in map form. Eric H. Brown and Keith Clayton (eds.), The Geomorphology of the British Isles (1976– ), a series arranged by region, explores the evolution of the country’s complex and varied landforms. Changes in the observable landscapes are detailed in several works in the series by Roy Millward and Adrian Robinson, Landscapes of Britain (1971–73). Classic illustrated works on physical geography include L. Dudley Stamp, Britain’s Structure and Scenery, 6th ed. (1967, reprinted 1984); and Gordon Manley, Climate and the British Scene (1952, reissued 1971). A.G. Tansley, The British Islands and Their Vegetation (1939, reissued in 2 vol., 1965), is a monumental classic on the ecology of the British Isles.
Useful sources on the human geography of the United Kingdom include J.W. House (ed.), The UK Space: Resources, Environment, and the Future, 3rd ed. (1982); and Vince Gardiner and Hugh Matthews (eds.), The Changing Geography of the United Kingdom, 3rd ed. (2000). Mohan Luthra, Britain’s Black Population: Social Change, Public Policy, and Agenda (1997), presents a study of the United Kingdom’s ethnic minorities. Information on recent developments in the country’s demography and social conditions appears in Britain (annual), published by the Central Office of Information. William Ravenhill Economy
Historical studies of economic development and growth include R.C.O. Matthews, C.H. Feinstein, and J.C. Odling-Smee, British Economic Growth, 1856–1973 (1982); Rex Pope, The British Economy Since 1914: A Study in Decline? (1998); Roger Middleton, The British Economy Since 1945: Engaging with the Debate (2000); Peter Browning, The Treasury and Economic Policy, 1964–1985 (1986); and Nick Gardner, Decade of Discontent: The Changing British Economy Since 1973 (1987). David Sinclair, The Pound: A Biography (2000), provides a popular history of Britain’s currency. General surveys of the economy by sector include M.H. Peston, The British Economy: An Elementary Macroeconomic Perspective, 2nd ed. (1984); and John Black, The Economics of Modern Britain: An Introduction to Macroeconomics, 4th ed. (1985). J.C.R. Dow and I.D. Saville, A Critique of Monetary Policy: Theory and British Experience (1988, reissued 1990); and C.A.E. Goodhart, Monetary Theory and Practice: The UK Experience (1984), explore monetary issues. Special studies of economic performance and economic conditions include Ben Fine and Laurence Harris, The Peculiarities of the British Economy (1985); John Kay, Colin Mayer, and David Thompson (eds.), Privatization and Regulation: The UK Experience (1986); and Rüdiger Dornbusch and Richard Layard (eds.), The Performance of the British Economy (1987). William Keegan, Mrs. Thatcher’s Economic Experiment (1984); Samuel Brittan, Capitalism with a Human Face (1995); and Will Hutton, The State We’re In, rev. ed. (1996), analyze the influence of government policy on the country’s economy. Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair, rev. ed. (1999), provides an account of the United Kingdom’s relations with the rest of Europe during the second half of the 20th century. Historical and current economic developments are treated in OECD Economic Surveys: United Kingdom (annual), published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; National Institute Economic Review (quarterly); and Economic Outlook (monthly), published by the London Business School Centre for Economic Forecasting. Ulric M. Spencer Administration and social conditions
Discussions of governmental organization and politics include Dennis Kavanagh, British Politics: Continuities and Change, 4th ed. (2000); Ian Budge et al., The New British Politics (1998); Jeremy Paxman, Friends in High Places: Who Runs Britain? (1990); John Mohan (ed.), The Political Geography of Contemporary Britain (1989); David Butler, The Electoral System in Britain Since 1918, 2nd ed. (1963, reprinted 1986); Alan R. Ball, British Political Parties: The Emergence of a Modern Party System, 2nd ed. (1987); and John Kingdom, Government and Politics in Britain, 2nd ed. (1999). Philip Norton, The British Polity, 3rd ed. (1994); Peter Hennessy, Cabinet (1986); and Michael Ryle and Peter G. Richards (eds.), The Commons Under Scrutiny, 3rd rev. ed. (1988), discuss the constitutional framework. Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (1989), provides a detailed history of the civil service. Peter Hennessy, The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution (1995), presents a survey of current governmental and administrative practice.
Sources on the operations of local government include David Wilson and Chris Game, Local Government in the United Kingdom (1994); Tony Travers, The Politics of Local Government Finance (1986); Richard Jackman, Paying for Local Government (1986), a report to Parliament; and Tony Travers, Change for Local Government: A Commentary on the Government’s Proposals for Local Authority Finance (1998).
R.M. Jackson, Jackson’s Machinery of Justice, 8th ed., ed. by J.R. Spencer (1989); and Robert Reiner, The Politics of the Police, new ed. (1999), look at the political aspects of the administration of law and law enforcement. Considerations of education include Keith Evans, The Development and Structure of the English School System (1985), a study of school management and organization; and Roy Lowe, Education in the Post-War Years: A Social History (1988), which explores the change in policies in the mid-20th century that continue to influence the educational system of the United Kingdom. Michael Sanderson, Education and Economic Decline in Britain, 1870 to the 1990s (1999), explores the hypothesis that education policy has contributed to the United Kingdom’s recent economic problems.
Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State, rev. and updated (2001), offers a survey of the evolution of the United Kingdom’s welfare state since the 1940s. Contrasting views on the administration of welfare economics are discussed in Julian Le Grand, The Strategy of Equality: Redistribution and the Social Services (1982); Howard Glennerster, Paying for Welfare: Towards 2000, 3rd ed. (1997); Nicholas Barr, The Economics of the Welfare State, 3rd ed. (1998); and A.B. Atkinson, The Economic Consequences of Rolling Back the Welfare State (1999). Christopher Ham, Health Policy in Britain: The Politics and Organisation of the National Health Service, 4th ed. (1999), examines public policy and the politics of the health care system. Analyses of policies on income maintenance and redistribution and provision of housing include A.B. Atkinson, The Economics of Inequality, 2nd ed. (1983); J.A. Kay, The British Tax System, 5th ed. (1990); A.E. Holmans, Housing Policy in Britain: A History (1987); and Peter Malpass and Alan Murie, Housing Policy and Practice, 5th ed. (1999). Nicholas A. Barr Cultural life
Useful information on all aspects of the cultural and social life of the United Kingdom over the centuries appears in Alan Isaacs and Jennifer Monk (eds.), The Cambridge Illustrated Dictionary of British Heritage (1986), an alphabetically arranged reference work. Historical studies of social and cultural customs include Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution: c. 1780–c. 1880 (1980); and Susan Lasdun, Victorians at Home (1981, reprinted 1985). A good description of the country’s architecture accompanies the excellent maps and photographs in Nigel Saul (ed.), The National Trust Historical Atlas of Britain: Prehistoric to Medieval (1993, reissued 1997). Other analyses of special topics include Alastair Fowler, A History of English Literature (1987, reissued 1991); Ian Ousby (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, new. ed. (1993); David Christopher, British Culture: An Introduction (1999); Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith, Cinema, Literature, & Society: Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain (1987); Colin Seymour-Ure, The British Press and Broadcasting Since 1945, 2nd ed. (1996); and Iain Chambers, Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (1986), which explores the relationship between the development and growth of cities and the complexity of modern popular culture. Richard Hoggart, An English Temper: Essays on Education, Culture, and Communications (1982), offers a wide-reaching examination of intellectual life. A criticism of the commercialization of British culture is found in Richard Hoggart, The Way We Live Now (1995; also published as The Tyranny of Relativism: Culture and Politics in Contemporary English Society, 1998). The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica History General works
The multivolume The Oxford History of England series, with the individual works cited in the appropriate chronological sections below, provides a comprehensive survey and excellent bibliographies. More concise overviews include George Macaulay Trevelyan, History of England, new illustrated ed. (1973); Arvel B. Erickson and Martin J. Havran, England: Prehistory to the Present (1968); Maurice Ashley, Great Britain to 1688: A Modern History (1961); K.B. Smellie, Great Britain Since 1688: A Modern History (1962); and Christopher Hibbert, The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (1986). Christopher Haigh (ed.), The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland (1985); and E.B. Fryde et al. (eds.), Handbook of British Chronology, 3rd ed. (1986), are useful for quick reference. Ancient Britain
Stuart Piggott, Ancient Europe from the Beginnings of Agriculture to Classical Antiquity (1965, reprinted 1980), a survey of the pre-Roman period; and Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain (1987), a systematic account of the same five centuries, are both based on modern archaeological research. Peter Salway, Roman Britain (1981), from the above-mentioned Oxford series; and Sheppard Frere, Britannia: A History of Roman Britain, 3rd rev. ed. (1987), provide detailed analyses. A.L.F. Rivet (ed.), The Roman Villa in Britain (1969), describes various aspects of the Roman villas of Britain and the agricultural system and way of life they represent; Anthony Birley, Life in Roman Britain, new ed. (1981), studies the government, institutions, life, and religions of Roman Britain as they are reflected in archaeological finds and works of the ancient historians; and Eric Birley, Roman Britain and the Roman Army (1953, reprinted 1976), explores the organization of the Roman army through the evidence of inscriptions. The Anglo-Saxon period
A valuable translation of and commentary on essential records and narrative material preserved in primary sources is provided in Dorothy Whitelock (ed.), English Historical Documents, c. 500–1042, 2nd ed. (1979), the first volume of a new edition of the noted multivolume series of sources. Modern general histories include Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (1971, reprinted 1989); Peter Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (2003); D.J.V. Fisher, The Anglo-Saxon Age, c. 400–1042 (1973); Dorothy Whitelock, The Beginning of English Society, 2nd ed. (1954, reprinted 1982); and R.I. Page, Life in Anglo-Saxon England (1970). Special topics are covered in J.N.L. Myres, The English Settlements (1986); Martyn J. Whittock, The Origins of England, 410–600 (1986); J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kinship in England and on the Continent (1971, reprinted 1980); William A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity (1970); Henry Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (1991); John Godfrey, The Church in Anglo-Saxon England (1962); Frank Barlow, The English Church, 1000–1066: A History of the Later Anglo-Saxon Church, 2nd ed. (1979); H.R. Loyn, The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England, 500–1087 (1984), and The Vikings in Britain (1977); Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor (1970, reprinted 1984); James Tait, The Medieval English Borough: Studies on Its Origins and Constitutional History (1936, reprinted 1968); Charles S. Orwin and Christabel S. Orwin, The Open Fields, 3rd ed. (1967); Christine Fell, Cecily Clark, and Elizabeth Williams, Women in Anglo-Saxon England and the Impact of 1066 (1984); and James Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (1986). England from 1066 to 1485
Translation of a wide range of sources, with commentary, can be found in David C. Douglas and George W. Greenaway (eds.), English Historical Documents, 1042–1189 (1953); Harry Rothwell (ed.), English Historical Documents, 1189–1327 (1975); and A.R. Myers (ed.), English Historical Documents, 1327–1485 (1969), all from the above-mentioned series. Other good anthologies are R. Allen Brown, The Norman Conquest (1984); Bertie Wilkinson, The Constitutional History of England, 1216–1399, 3 vol. (1948–58, reprinted as The Constitutional History of Medieval England, 1216–1399, 1965–67), and Constitutional History of England in the Fifteenth Century, 1399–1485 (1964). General works recommended include Helen M. Cam, England Before Elizabeth, 3rd ed. (1967); Austin Lane Poole, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 1087–1216, 2nd ed. (1955, reprinted 1998); Maurice Powicke, The Thirteenth Century, 1216–1307, 2nd ed. (1962); M.T. Clanchy, England and Its Rulers, 1066–1272: Foreign Lordship and National Identity (1983); May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307–1399 (1959, reprinted 1992); Anthony Tuck, Crown and Nobility 1272–1461: Political Conflict in Late Medieval England (1985); Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272–1377 (1980); E.F. Jacob, The Fifteenth Century, 1399–1485 (1961, reprinted 1993); and M.H. Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages: A Political History (1973). Among studies of individual reigns are David C. Douglas, William the Conqueror: The Norman Impact upon England, new ed. (1999); Frank Barlow, William Rufus (1983); R.H.C. Davis, King Stephen, 1135–1154 (1967, reissued 1977); W.L. Warren, Henry II (1973); Michael Prestwich, Edward I (1988); G.L. Harriss (ed.), Henry V: The Practice of Kingship (1985); Bertram Wolffe, Henry VI (1973); Charles Ross, Edward IV (1974, reprinted 1999), and Richard III (1981, reprinted 1988). The history of government and administration are considered in W.L. Warren, The Governance of Norman and Angevin England, 1086–1272 (1987); S.B. Chrimes, An Introduction to the Administrative History of Mediaeval England, 3rd ed. (1966); and T.F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England: The Wardrobe, the Chamber, and the Small Seals, 6 vol. (1920–33, reprinted 1967).
Recommended works on special topics include R. Allen Brown, The Normans and the Norman Conquest, 2nd ed. (1985); V.H. Galbraith, The Making of Domesday Book (1961), superseded in many ways, but a classic; and Peter Sawyer (ed.), Domesday Book: A Reassessment (1985). Feudal society is the subject of Frank Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism, 1066–1166, 2nd ed. (1961, reprinted 1979); Austin Lane Poole, Obligations of Society in the XII and XIII Centuries (1946, reprinted 1984); and J.C. Holt, Magna Carta (1965), the best account of the Great Charter. Also useful is J.C. Holt, Magna Carta and Medieval Government (1985). Studies of the nobility include K.B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (1973, reprinted 1997), a most influential book; and Chris Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth-Century Political Community (1987). Parliament is studied in G.O. Sayles, The King’s Parliament of England (1974); G.L. Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (1975); E.B. Fryde and Edward Miller (ed.), Historical Studies of the English Parliament, 2 vol. (1970); and R.G. Davies and J.H. Denton (eds.), The English Parliament in the Middle Ages (1981). The economy of the period is characterized in J.L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500 (1980); Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change, 1086–1348 (1978); M.M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages (1972); Reginald Lennard, Rural England: 1086–1135: A Study of Social and Agrarian Conditions (1959, reprinted 1966); and John Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (1977). England’s major trade is discussed in Eileen Power, The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (1941, reprinted 1987); and T.H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (1977). Also informative are Susan Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (1977, reprinted 1982); and Maurice Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages: Town Plantation in England, Wales and Gascony (1967, reprinted 1988). Studies of the church include Frank Barlow, The English Church, 1066–1154: A History of the Anglo-Norman Church (1979); David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of Its Development from the Times of St. Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 940–1216, 2nd ed. (1963), and The Religious Orders in England, 3 vol. (1948–59, reprinted 1979); W.A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (1955, reprinted 1980); and C.H. Lawrence (ed.), The English Church and the Papacy in the Middle Ages (1965, reprinted 1984). Studies of the law of the period include Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1898, reissued 1982), still fundamental; Doris M. Stenton, English Justice Between the Norman Conquest and the Great Charter, 1066–1215 (1964); Alan Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (1973); S.F.C. Milsom, The Legal Framework of English Feudalism (1976, reprinted 1986); and John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (1973). England in the 16th century
Collections of documents that address the political and administrative history as well as the legal and constitutional matters include G.R. Elton (ed.), The Tudor Constitution, 2nd ed. (1982); and G. Bray, Documents of the English Reformation 1526–1701 (1994). The best introductory surveys are J.S. Morrill (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (1996); S. Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: Britain 1485–1603 (2000); M. Nicholls, A History of the British Isles 1529–1603: The Two Kingdoms (1998); and (making rather higher demands in terms of foreknowledge) J.A. Guy, Tudor England (1988). K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (2000), supercedes all previous works on economic and social development; although D.C. Coleman, The Economy of England 1450–1750 (1980); and C.G.A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change 1500–1700, 2 vol. (1984), are important supplements. At a more detailed level, G.R. Elton, Reform and Reformation 1509–1558 (1977), is a classic statement of an influential interpretation; and P. Williams, The Later Tudors 1547–1603 (1995), is also informative. The best biographies of the Tudor monarchs are S.B. Chrimes, Henry VII (1972); J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, new ed. (1997); D. Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII (1985), a pitiless dissection of the king; J. Loach, Edward VI (1999); D. Loades, The Reign of Mary Tudor (1979); J. Hurstfield, Elizabeth I and the Unity of England (1960), a short positive account among the hundreds written about the queen; and C. Haigh (ed.), Elizabeth I (1984), a negative view. Books that bring particular periods, events, and subjects to life include B. Thompson (ed.), The Reign of Henry VII (1995); S. Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (1993); J. Guy, Thomas More (2000); D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (1996); E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992); C. Haigh, English Reformations (1993); R. Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (1993); D. MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant (1999); P. Collinson: The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (1982); S. Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis (1999); P. Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (1994); J.A. Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (1995); A. Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (1993); T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety: 1550–1640 (1991); F. Heal and C. Holmes, The Gentry of England and Wales 1500–1700 (1994); J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales (1967); K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971); M. Spufford, The World of Rural Dissenters 1520–1725 (1995); D. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle (1997); B. Bradshaw and J. Morrill (eds.), The British Problem c. 1534–1707 (1996); J. Burns, The Trew Law of Kings: Concepts of Monarchy in Early Modern Scotland (1999); J. Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots (1988); and S.G. Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expanison and the End of Gaelic Rule (1998). Britain in the 17th century
Selections of documents that explore the political and administrative history as well as legal and constitutional history include J.P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution, 2nd ed. (1985); and J. Thirsk and J.P. Cooper, Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (1972). D. Wootton, Divine Right and Democracy (1986), is a thoughtful collection of extracts from a wide range of polemical texts. The best introductory surveys are J.S. Morrill (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (1996); M.A. Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714 (1996); and B. Coward, The Stuart Age: England, 1603–1714, 2nd ed. (1994). D. Hirst, England in Conflict 1603–1660: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (1999); G. Holmes, The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain 1660–1722 (1993); and J. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (2000), are more advanced surveys. C. Hill, The Century of Revolution, rev. ed. (1990); and J. Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (2000), are brilliant and controversial overviews. S.R. Gardiner History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603–1642, rev. ed., 10 vol. (1883–84), History of the Great Civil War, rev. ed., 4 vol. (1893), and History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, new ed., 4 vol. (1903), 18 stellar volumes of narrative written in the second half of the19th century, still provide absolutely fundamental coverage of the years 1603–56 (except for the reign of James I). C.H. Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate 1656–58, 2 vol. (1909), written by a friend of Gardiner’s, continues the narrative to the death of Oliver Cromwell. Thematic books covering the century include M.J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England (2000), and The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State 1558–1714 (1996); D.L. Smith, The Stuart Parliaments 1603–1689 (1999); G. Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (1996); J. Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (1998); J. Ohlmeyer, Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony (2000); K. Brown, Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union 1603–1715 (1992); K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (2000); C.G.A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change 1500–1700, 2 vol. (1984); and J.A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1760 (1987). There are few biographies of Stuart monarchs, but M. Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (1990); C. Carlton, Charles I, the Personal Monarch, 2nd ed. (1995); R. Hutton, Charles II: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1989); F.C. Turner, James II (1948); S.B. Baxter, William III (1966); and Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (1980), have all stood the test of time. In some ways the vignettes in J.P. Kenyon, The Stuarts: A Study in English Kinship (1958), are the most penetrating word portraits of all. The vast array of studies of particular problems and events includes such representative and evocative selections as C. Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (1990); K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992); T. Webster, The Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England (1997); J. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (1993), and Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War 1634–1648 (1999); M. Bennett, The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland (1997); B. Coward, Oliver Cromwell (1991); C. Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1970), and The World Turned Upside Down (1972); T. Harris, Politics Under the Later Stuarts (1993); J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England 1646–1689 (1991); N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (1987); J.R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution: The English State in the 1680s (1972); J.I. Israel, The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact (1991); J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability 1675–1725 (1967); G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688–1730 (1975); P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 3rd ed. (1983); E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England and Wales 1541–1871 (1981); P. Slack, The Impact of Plague (1985); Sara Heller Mendelson and P. Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (1998); K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971); J.A. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750 (1996); D.E. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992), a study of political and religious struggle in Dorchester; and R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (1994). John S. Morrill Britain, 1714–1815
Documentary sources of the period are gathered in D.B. Horn and Mary Ransome (eds.), English Historical Documents, 1714–1783 (1957); and A. Aspinall and E. Anthony Smith (eds.), English Historical Documents, 1783–1832 (1959). The Oxford series offers Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760, 2nd rev. ed., ed. by C.H. Stuart (1962, reprinted 1982); and J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–1815 (1960, reprinted 2004). The most accessible later introductions to the period include Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982); W.A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (1977); Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (1983); Paul Langford, The Eighteenth Century, 1688–1815 (1976); and John Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (1981). Interesting information and strongly opinionated criticism of accepted historiographical and political thought on the period are found in J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (1985). Surveys of Wales and Scotland in this period include Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry, 1640–1790 (1983), a broader study than its title suggests; David J.V. Jones, Before Rebecca: Popular Protests in Wales, 1793–1835 (1973); and Bruce Lenman, Integration, Enlightenment, and Industrialization: Scotland 1746–1832 (1981). The Walpole era is examined in H.T. Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (1973); Jeremy Black (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (1984); and, for the Opposition view, Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–60 (1982); and E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (1975, reissued 1985). The Pelhams are at the centre of John B. Owen, The Rise of the Pelhams (1957, reprinted 1971); and F.J. McLynn, The Jacobite Army in England, 1745: The Final Campaign (1983). Broader developments in British society at this time are explored in John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (1984); G.A. Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper, 1700–1760 (1962, reprinted 1978); P.J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (1982); and Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (1982). The poor and the obscure are treated in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1975); and Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Social and Administrative History (1926, reprinted 1989). Developments after 1754 are studied in Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (1985); Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2nd ed. (1957, reissued 1975); John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (1976, reprinted 1981); John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (1972); and Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence (1982), a detailed analysis of the imperial policy toward the American colonies, with a rather controversial critique of established historiographical views on the subject. Britain’s recovery after the American Revolution is outlined in N.F.R. Crafts, British Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution (1985); Linda Colley, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty, and the British Nation, 1760–1820,” in Past & Present, 102:94–129 (February 1984); and E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 3rd ed. (2000). Britain’s defeat of Napoleon and rise to world dominance is examined in Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (1987); Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793–1815 (1979); Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflection on the British Avoidance of Revolution (1984); and C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (1989). Linda J. Colley Britain, 1815–1914
Documentary sources of the period include G.M. Young and W.D. Handcock (eds.), English Historical Documents, 1833–1874 (1956); and W.D. Handcock (ed.), English Historical Documents, 1874–1914 (1977). Elie Halévy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd rev. ed., 6 vol. in 7 (1949–52; originally published in French, 5 vol., 1912–32), has been extremely influential on subsequent accounts, even though it was written long ago. The major source on most aspects of British history apart from politics is now F.M.L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, 3 vol. (1990). The Oxford series volumes are Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870, 2nd ed. (1962, reprinted 1979); and K. Theodore Hoppen, The New Oxford History of England: The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846–1886 (1998). Other comprehensive histories include Colin Matthew (ed.), The Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Nineteenth Century (2000); G.M. Young, Portrait of an Age: Victorian England, new annotated ed. (1977), a delightful and very influential short work; and Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement (1959, reissued 1979). José Harris, The Penguin Social History of Britain: Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain Taken 1870–1914 (1993), is one of the most interesting of the many surveys of British history published. Patrick Joyce, The Oxford Reader on Class (1995), has much information on the role of class in British history. Also informative are Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–67, rev. ed. (1996), Victorian Cities, new ed. (1968), and Victorian Things, rev. ed. (2003). Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (1957); and Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968), observe cultural and intellectual life. Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851–1875, rev. ed. (1973); and William L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (1964), focus on the middle period of the century. Economic conditions are surveyed in W.H.B. Court, A Concise Economic History of Britain, from 1750 to Recent Times (1954, reprinted 1976). Foreign relations, continental and colonial, and a shift in influence are discussed in R.W. Seton-Watson, Britain in Europe, 1789–1914: A Survey of Foreign Policy (1937, reprinted 1968); C.E. Carrington, The British Overseas: Exploits of a Nation of Shopkeepers, 2nd ed. (1968); Bernard Porter, Britain, Europe, and the World, 1850–1986: Delusions of Grandeur, 2nd ed. (1987); and Keith Robbins, The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain, 1870–1975 (1983). The transition from Victorian Britain to the 20th century is examined in Donald Read, Edwardian England, 1901–15 (1972). Britain since 1914
J.H. Bettey, English Historical Documents, 1906–1939 (1967), offers a selection of documentary sources. Detailed exploration of the first half of the 20th century is presented in A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (1965, reissued 1990), from the Oxford series. Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990 (1996), is a particularly good survey. Social conditions during World War I and its aftermath are examined in Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (1965). Interwar politics are the focus of Charles Loch Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940 (1955, reissued 1971); and Bentley B. Gilbert, Britain Since 1918, 2nd rev. ed. (1980). Social and economic conditions before World War II are observed in Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939 (1940, reissued 1995); and John Stevenson, British Society, 1914–45 (1984). F.S. Northedge, The Troubled Giant: Britain Among the Great Powers, 1916–1939 (1966), is a diplomatic history of the period. Political and social aspects of involvement in the war are analyzed in Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (1975); and Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain, 1939–1945, new ed. (1992). Paul Knaplund, Britain: Commonwealth and Empire, 1901–1955 (1956, reprinted 1974), treats the decline of the empire, including the first decade of postwar developments. Other histories reaching into the postwar years are W.N. Medlicott, British Foreign Policy Since Versailles, 1919–1963, 2nd rev. ed. (1968); Sidney Pollard, The Development of the British Economy, 1914–1980, 4th ed. (1992); and Alfred F. Havighurst, Britain in Transition: The Twentieth Century, 4th ed. (1985). David Butler and Gareth Butler, British Political Facts, 1900–1985, 6th ed. (1986), is an informative reference source. C.J. Bartlett, A History of Postwar Britain, 1945–1974 (1977), is an informative, sustained narrative, and Arthur Marwick, The Penguin Social History of Britain: British Society Since 1945, new ed. (2005), is lively and opinionated. Analyses of the postwar governments include Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (1984); and Peter Hennessy and Anthony Seldon (eds.), Ruling Performance: British Governments from Attlee to Thatcher (1987). Paul R. Josephson
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