Podcasts about Clement Attlee

In Washington, a rare flicker of institutional resistance is lighting up the political gloom. As the Supreme Court sides 7-2 against mass deportations and Harvard takes legal aim at executive power, Roifield Brown and his panel ask the awkward but necessary question: Is the American Republic finally growing a spine? Panelists Denise Hamilton and Mike Donahue agree that while Trump's pressure tactics aren't new, the scale of legal and educational defiance certainly is. Meanwhile, they also highlight the existential threat: America's fragmented information ecosystems mean citizens no longer even start from the same facts, making any comeback for democratic norms a grinding uphill struggle.Across the Atlantic, a different kind of existential crisis unfolds. Robert Jenrick, already measuring the curtains for Tory leadership, hints at a tactical realignment between the Conservative Party and Reform UK. Cory Bernard and Steve O'Neill dissect the fine line between electoral pragmatism and political self-destruction. They warn that while Britain's political history favours the Conservative Party's survival, wealth inequality and voter volatility could easily tear up the rulebook. Roy Field, clearly unimpressed by complacency, reminds everyone that assuming Britain's institutions are immune to collapse is dangerously naive.The panel closes with a lighter moment: each guest picks a hometown hero worthy of a street name. Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, and Clement Attlee are among the choices, though Steve O'Neill's initial bid for "Roger Federer Street" suggests some people should stay away from naming contests. Throughout the episode, the tone is bracing: whether it's executive overreach in the U.S. or far-right drift in the U.K., democracy's defenders will need a lot more than nostalgia and wishful thinking to hold the line.5 Selected Quotes:“I think what we're seeing is a stiffening of the spine and a bigger commitment to holding up our institutions.” — Denise Hamilton“It's not left versus right anymore — it's institutions versus chaos.” — Roifield Brown“You can't rationalize with people who aren't working with the same facts.” — Mike Donahue“Britain's political history doesn't guarantee immunity from collapse.” — Roifield Brown“One street at a time, we still get to choose who we celebrate.” — Denise Hamilton Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It was a strange world that emerged from the Second World War.Both genocide and the mass killing of civilians, above all through bombing, culminating with the A-bombs dropped on Japan, had become somehow normalised. They rather weaken the case of the developed nations, which made these things happen, denouncing ethnic cleansing and terrorist bombs when they happen again today.The Soviet Union had massively extended its control of territory and what Churchill called an ‘iron curtain' had as a result descended across Europe, dividing the continent in two.As for Britain, it had emerged broke, a condition it might have hoped the US would help with, discovering with some shock that actually the aid that flowed in under lend-lease would be stopping far more quickly than expected. Instead, the British government would have to negotiate a loan, which it finally paid off sixty years later.As for its imperial role, the Empire was beginning to fall apart. The major step was the independence of India, something on which the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had been keen for a long time. Sadly, it was done too quickly and botched, amongst massive violence and bitterness, especially with the partition of India to allow the creation of Muslim Pakistan. The violence and pain continued to decades, with wars and genocidal actions, not just in India and Pakistan but also in the other parts of the British Indian empire, Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). That rather leads to the question, might it not have been better had Britain never set out to rule India in the first place?Illustration: Muslim refugees attempting to flee India sit on the roof of an overcrowded train near Delhi in September 1947. From The Guardian. Photograph: APMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

Following the German surrender in May 1945, the ‘Big Three' – the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain – met for the third and last time in conference. And this time, appropriately, they met on German territory, in Potsdam near Berlin. It was Soviet-held territory too, perhaps significant given the power with which the Soviet Union was emerging from the war.Indeed, its delegation was the only one to keep the same leader, Joseph Stalin, at its head, as he had been at Tehran and Yalta. Roosevelt had died. As for the British, after nearly ten years without a general election, they finally held one, and to general surprise, the victorious war Prime Minister Churchill was defeated by his deputy, Clement Attlee, the Labour leader. Attlee would form the first ever Labour government with a parliamentary majority. He would also take over from Churchill as leader of the British delegation at Potsdam.The conference took place under the shadow of the first successful test of a nuclear device, the day before the conference started. The US was now a nuclear power. That gave it quite an edge in international power politics.Although the device had been designed to use against Nazi Germany, since only Japan was left in the war, and given how high the casualties would be in an invasion of the Japanese home islands, the Americans dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. To make sure the message had got through, they dropped another on Nagasaki on the 9th. The Japanese surrendered on the 15th, the only concession to their sensibilities being that the Emperor was not deposed. When the final Japanese surrender document was signed on 2 September, World War 2 was at last over. Illustration: The A-bomb dome in Hiroshima, Japan. Public DomainMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

Later this week marks 60 years since the death of Winston Churchill, on 24 January 1965. So we thought it would be interesting to bring back this episode with Professor David Reynolds from 2023. In it, he explores how Winston Churchill's remarkable career saw him interact with other great figures of the age, many of whom had a profound impact on Britain's wartime leader. Speaking to Rob Attar, David examines Churchill's relationships with the likes of Stalin, Mussolini, Gandhi and Clement Attlee – and considers how these figures left their mark on the statesman. The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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As the Prime Minister Keir Starmer tries to recover from the worst start by a new government in recent times, the Three Old Hacks discuss why the government needs a re-launch a mere six months after coming to office with a huge majority. “Does it mean” asks Mihir Bose that “Labour no longer has leaders with political nous”.  What happened to the party of Clement Attlee and Tony Blair?Nigel Dudley recalls how Tories under Thatcher in 1979 also had a rocky start and David Smith explains points about Rachel Reeves's CV and controversial budget that were missed by the media. With the sale of the Observer, the oldest Sunday paper, to the Tortoise group, they also discuss whether the unique British phenomenon of Daily and Sunday papers may be changing and we are moving to seven day papers. Former Sports editor of BBC News Mihir Bose discusses why the Keir Starmer government is showing such political ineptitude with political analyst Nigel Dudley and Economics Editor of the Sunday Times David Smith, aka the Three Old Hacks.Get in contact with the podcast by emailing threeoldhacks@outlook.com, we'd love to hear from you!

In the light of John Prescott's death and the outpouring of tributes across the political spectrum we explore the role of the deputy in politics, from Clement Attlee to Willie Whitelaw to Michael Heseltine to Nick Clegg to Angela Rayner. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Professor John Bew's knowledge as the biographer of Lord Castlereagh and Clement Attlee and the historian of Realpolitik was put to good use when he became the senior foreign policy advisor to no fewer than four British prime ministers. Recorded on October 18, 2024.

Britain and France reckoned they'd secured the support of Italy, in the Stresa Front, for their efforts to contain Hitler. Britain was the first to undermine that pleasant understanding, by signing a naval agreement with Nazi Germany on its own. Even so, the British government did what it could to keep Mussolini's Italy in the Front, a position shared by Winston Churchill. He was already ringing alarm bells over Germany but, proving how difficult prediction can be, he got Italy (and indeed Japan) completely wrong. Then Mussolini showed his true colours by preparing to launch an invasion of Abyssinia, which is now Ethiopia, to extend Italy's imperial holdings in Africa. Doing so meant spitting in the face of the League of Nations, even though Italy was a member. But Mussolini could do that with impunity. The League, only as powerful as its members, and above all its great power members, Britain and France, allowed it to be, took no effective action against it. In the face of that spinelessness, Mussolini went ahead with his invasion. That had a surprising impact on the Labour Party, whose annual conference started the day after news of the Italian invasion arrived in Britain. Labour decided that it had no further patience with its declared pacifist leader, George Lansbury. He resigned and the jostling started to pick a successor. Clement Attlee, who'd been Lansbury's deputy, was given the job on a temporary basis, as Britain went into the 1935 general election. It was a huge win for the Tories but Labour also did well, winning nearly three times as many seats as in 1931. Attlee who'd led the party into that success was boosted by it. Viewed by many as poorly qualified for the job and short of personality, he saw off others who thought themselves better suited, and to the surprise of many, was confirmed as leader. Illustration: Italian officers consulting maps as they advance into Abyssinian territory. Public domain Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

We start this episode with the unveiling of the statue of Edward Carson at Stormont Castle in Northern Ireland. It rather makes the point that a man who helped organise an armed force against British law, and even to call on British soldiers to mutiny rather than fire on rebels – no doubt because to him and his friend they were the right kind of rebels – could get away with such behaviour if he had the backing of the right circles of power back in England. Not just get away with it, in fact, but be honoured with a statue. From there, we move to India where a man like Gandhi kept finding himself being gaoled by the British authorities for actions far less noxious than Carson's. A brown-skinned Hindu simply couldn't be allowed to call on action against the rule of the British government, even if that action was far less subversive of the law than what the white-skinned Protestant Carson had championed. As it happens, the National government in Britain was beginning to consider the possibility of granting a little more autonomy to India, though nothing like as much as enjoyed by white-ruled holdings, such as Australia or Canada, which enjoyed Dominion Status, giving them almost independence. That was far too little for Gandhi, or for Clement Attlee and his Labour Party. On the other hand, it was far too much for Winston Churchill. He fought the government all the way to the point, by the end, of becoming something of a figure of fun in the House of Commons. No one proved that better than his chief tormentor, Leo Amery, despite being a fellow Conservative and a contemporary of his at Harrow school. He used mockery against him in a way that Churchill himself might have been proud of had he used it himself. But the real danger for Churchill was that he was perilously close to becoming a bore. Illustration: the Carson statue outside the home of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Stormont Castle, outside Belfast. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

It was a terrible time for Labour, down to just 52 MPs and having to choose a new leadership from a narrow pool from which most of the brightest lights, in the view of many but above all their own, were excluded. The Tories were on top of the world, with a clear majority. MacDonald still led the the National government, but in complete dependence on the Conservatives for his survival in office. A sharp change in direction of economic policy ended the linkage to the gold standard and introduced tariffs on imports. Both initiatives started to improve things, with growth back and with some strength. But the poor remained desperately poor. Illustration: composite of the Labour Party leader, George Lansbury, and deputy leader, Clement Attlee, chosen by default because the obvious candidates weren't available. Both photos from the National Portrait Gallery: Attlee by Walter Stoneman, 1930, NPG x163783; Lansbury by Howard Coster, 1930s, NPG Ax136093 Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

This episode looks at the impact in Britain of continuing trouble in India. There Gandhi had launched his salt march, walking to the sea to make salt, in breach of the British monopoly and the heavy tax on salt inflicted by the colonial authorities. That had led to his being gaoled. In Britain, the report of the Simon Commission recommended limited reform in India, but not the granting of Dominion Status. That was in spite of the view of one of the Commission's co-chairs, Labour's Clement Attlee, who had been convinced of the need for that status following his travels with the Commission around India. The Prime Minister called a Round Table conference in London which had representation from many Indian groups, unlike the Simon Commission which had had none. Unfortunately, the gaoled Gandhi's organisation, the Indian National naturally didn't attend, and it was the most significant in the sub-Continent. That rather underlines how silly it is to label an opponent as criminal and then proclaim that you don't talk to criminals – it makes negotiations meaningless. Fortunately, the Viceroy of India Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax) released Gandhi and agreed the Gandhi-Irwin pact with him, which included his attendance at a second Round Table. Winston Churchill was furious that any moves were being made towards Indian self-rule at all, and that his party leader Stanley Baldwin backed them. Baldwin was also under pressure from a campaign by press barons to make him adopt a policy backing tariffs on imports. Baldwin saw off that pressure, denouncing the newspaper proprietors for pursing power without responsibility, ‘the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages'. Even so, he began to soften his own opposition to tariffs, further adding to Churchill's disquiet. By January 1931, he'd had enough and resigned from Baldwin's leadership team. That, for him, was the start of what he would later call his ‘wilderness years'. Illustration: Gandhi, for Churchill a seditious, half-naked fakir, visiting millworkers in Lancashire while in England for the Second Round Table conference. Photo by Keystone Press Agency Ltd. National Portrait Gallery x137614. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

King Charles III has set out the government's plans for the year ahead, but what happened the last time a King was on the throne unveiling the programme for an incoming Labour prime minister?We look back at 1945, when Labour's Clement Attlee had defeated Conservative Winston Churchill, and find some surprising modern-day parallels. The voice of George VI is provided by the actor Kieran Hodgson.Plus: Columnists Robert Crampton and Trevor Phillips discuss the scale of opposition to planning reform and Trevor's warning about tribal politics here and in America. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the turn of the 20th century, election campaigns - though still replete with politicians behaving badly - have evolved. They have become less mass-participation events or festivals, and receded, with the majority of the population growing increasingly indifferent. Though, following Nixon and Kennedy's presidential campaigns in the 1960's, there seeped across the Atlantic a sense that elections were a “race”, which could actively alter the outcome of an election rather than merely acting as a summoning call to predetermined voters. However, the gaffs endured. For instance, Winston Churchill's famously controversial speech in 1945, during the election that he later lost to the politically adept Clement Attlee; Harold Wilson's large crowd of hecklers during his 1964 campaign, and John Major's infamous soap-box orations. Then, with the landmark election of 1983, Margaret Thatcher revolutionised campaigning strategy by capitalising on television. This trend has endured through the various campaigns of her successors, many in their way just as dysfunctional, derisory, and even comical as those of their early predecessors. Join Dominic and Tom as, with a week to go until Britain enters the polls, they discuss the evolution of campaigning from the 20th century through to the present day. They reveal in glorious technicolour who have been the most effective campaigners of British politics; who the worst, and why. With a cast of characters including Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Harold Wilson, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Davey; they reveal some of the funniest, and most shocking election gaffs of all time.... EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London! Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week we look at Vaclav Klaus and Clement Attlee on the EU;  the new Dutch PM;  The UK election - Sunak on euthanasia; Rod Stewart on Ukraine;  Country of the Week - Colombia;  The Euros and French Football Wokery; Gay Sharks and Lions;  SNP Equalities Officer jailed;  Heterochronology; Don't 'Dal' Women Hill Walkers; Rising Perversity in Victoria; Word Alive closes; and  SEEK 39 - Forgiveness; with music from Bach, Del Amitri, Rod Stewart, Corelli, Pink Fong, EmmyLou Harris, Vivaldi and Alan Jackson.

Le Soviétique Igor Gouzenko a été au centre d'une affaire d'espionnage un peu oubliée aujourd'hui. Affecté à l'ambassade soviétique à Ottawa, Gouzenko se rend compte, durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, que son pays entretient un réseau d'espionnage au Canada.Il est bien placé pour le savoir, puisqu'il s'occupe notamment de chiffrer les messages. Il se dit sans doute qu'il en sait un peu trop sur des questions qui doivent rester secrètes. Peut-être est-il également déçu par l'évolution politique de son pays.Toujours est-il qu'en septembre 1945, il quitte l'ambassade et décide de demander l'asile politique. Il n'est pas parti les mains vides, puisqu'il a emporté avec lui une centaine de documents, dérobés dans les bureaux de l'ambassade.Gouzenko s'adresse d'abord à un journal qui, trouvant l'affaire trop sensible, lui conseille de se rendre au ministère de la Justice.Même si le ministre se montre assez circonspect, il juge l'affaire assez importante pour en parler au Premier ministre, Mackenzie King. Celui-ci informe alors le Président Truman et le Premier ministre britannique, Clement Attlee.En attendant, Igor Gouzenko obtient l'asile politique dès septembre 1945, et se voit accorder une protection policière, pour lui et sa famille, qu'il a réussi à faire venir d'URSS.L'affaire reste d'abord secrète, puis ces informations sont finalement divulguées par la presse, en février 1946. Une commission d'enquête est alors nommée, pour faire la lumière sur les faits rapportés par Gouzenko.Elle conduit à l'arrestation de plusieurs personnes au Canada, dont un militaire et un député communiste. Au Royaume-Uni, des scientifiques travaillant pour le programme nucléaire britannique sont également appréhendés.Pour autant, et même si cette affaire est parfois considérée comme le premier épisode de la guerre froide, les renseignements donnés par Gouzenko n'ont pas paru d'une grande importance à certaines des autorités de l'époque.De son côté, Ivor Gouzenko, toujours protégé par la police, se sent menacé. C'est pourquoi il prend soin de changer souvent d'identité et de donner des interviews le visage masqué. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Entre el 17 de julio y el 2 de agosto de 1945 se celebró en Potsdam, una localidad en las inmediaciones de Berlín, la conferencia de paz que puso fin a la segunda guerra mundial en Europa. Tres grandes potencias asistieron a la misma: Estados Unidos, la Unión Soviética y el Reino Unido representadas por Harry Truman, Iósif Stalin y Winston Churchill, que fue sustituido por Clement Attlee en la recta final de la conferencia porque había perdido las elecciones. El peso de las negociaciones, no obstante, recayó sobre los hombros de sus ministros de Exteriores: James Byrnes por EEUU, Vyacheslav Molotov por la Unión Soviética y los británicos Anthony Eden y Ernest Bevin. Sus objetivos eran muy ambiciosos y no tenían mucho tiempo para ponerse de acuerdo. Querían establecer el nuevo orden de posguerra en Europa y decidir qué hacer con Alemania, un país derrotado y en ruinas que en aquel momento se encontraba ocupado por ejércitos de cuatro países distintos. La conferencia tuvo lugar en Cecilienhof, un palacete de estilo inglés que había mandado construir el káiser Guillermo II como residencia para su hijo mayor. Se celebraron un total de trece sesiones. Las reuniones eran de dos tipos. Por un lado, las que sostenían el equipo negociador al completo con los jefes de Gobierno a su cabeza, por otro las que mantuvieron los ministros de Exteriores en las que se debatían los detalles que luego pasaban a la sesión principal. Tanto Truman como Stalin querían dejar el asunto resuelto cuanto antes por lo que se mostraron dispuestos a ceder en algunos asuntos para no embrollarse en discusiones bizantinas. Los británicos poco pudieron influir ya que su posición era la más precaria y cambiaron de negociadores en mitad de las sesiones, lo que les debilitó de forma notable. En el curso de la conferencia, Truman fue informado de que la prueba Trinity de la primera bomba atómica había sido exitosa. Insinuó a Stalin que Estados Unidos estaba a punto de utilizar un nuevo tipo de arma contra los japoneses. Aunque esta era la primera vez que los soviéticos recibían oficialmente información sobre la bomba atómica, Stalin ya estaba al tanto del proyecto de la bomba gracias a sus infiltrados dentro del Proyecto Manhattan. A los cuatro días de concluir la conferencia, la primera bomba atómica cayó sobre la ciudad de Hiroshima. En la conferencia de Potsdam nació la Europa de posguerra. Alemania quedó formalmente ocupada por estadounidenses, soviéticos, británicos y franceses. La frontera oriental de Alemania se trasladaría hasta la línea Oder-Neisse, lo que redujo la superficie del país un 25% con respecto a las fronteras de 1937. Todas las anexiones realizadas por el Tercer Reich se revirtieron. Esto tuvo como consecuencia que los alemanes que viviesen al otro lado de la línea fuesen deportados a las zonas ocupadas de lo que quedaba de Alemania. Ese territorio pasaría a Polonia, que, eso sí, no recuperaría las regiones ocupadas por Stalin en 1939. En toda la Europa ocupada por el ejército rojo Stalin quedaba libre para hacer y deshacer a su antojo. De modo que, aunque se comprometió a que se celebrasen elecciones libres, en apenas tres años todos los países que habían caído en la órbita soviética se transformaron en repúblicas populares controladas desde Moscú. Durante los siguientes 45 años el continente quedaría partido en dos. La primera piedra de la guerra fría se puso en Potsdam y todos los que participaron en ella ya lo sospechaban. 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Today I sit down with historian David Reynolds and talk about his latest book: Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him.Winston Churchill remains one of the most revered figures of the twentieth century, his name a byword for courageous leadership. But the Churchill we know today is a mixture of history and myth, authored by the man himself. In Mirrors of Greatness, prizewinning historian David Reynolds reevaluates Churchill's life by viewing it through the eyes of his allies and adversaries, even his own family, revealing Churchill's lifelong struggle to overcome his political failures and his evolving grasp of what “greatness” truly entailed. Through his dealings with Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, we follow Churchill's triumphant campaign against Nazi Germany. But we also see a Churchill whose misjudgments of allies and rivals like Roosevelt, Stalin, Gandhi, and Clement Attlee blinded him to the British Empire's waning dominance on the world stage and to the rising popularity of a postimperial, socialist vision of Great Britain at home. Magisterial and incisive, Mirrors of Greatness affords Churchill his due as a figure of world-historical importance and deepens our understanding of his legend by uncovering the ways his greatest contemporaries helped make him the man he was, for good and for ill.Buy the book HERE.WebsitePatreon Support

Winston Churchill remains one of the most revered figures of the twentieth century, his name a byword for courageous leadership. But the Churchill we know today is a mixture of history and myth, authored by the man himself. Today's guest, David Reynolds, author of “Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him,” re-evaluates Churchill's life by viewing it through the eyes of his allies and adversaries, even his own family, revealing Churchill's lifelong struggle to overcome his political failures and his evolving grasp of what “greatness” truly entailed. Through his dealings with Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, we follow Churchill's triumphant campaign against Nazi Germany. But we also see a Churchill whose misjudgments of allies and rivals like Roosevelt, Stalin, Gandhi, and Clement Attlee blinded him to the British Empire's waning dominance on the world stage and to the rising popularity of a postimperial, socialist vision of Great Britain at home.

George VI (1936-52) led Britain through one of the most consequential periods in world history. His modest and undramatic style of rule in stark contrast to the controversy and drama which surrounded the short reign of his brother was required to guide Britain through the Second World War and the death of the British Empire. He was a steady hand, who overcame his own personal limitations and won the respect of the British people. Characters George VI - King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions (1936-52), Emperor of India (1936-47) Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon - Queen consort of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions (1936-52), Empress of India (1936-47) Edward VII - King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India (1936), brother of GeorgeGeorge V - King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India (1910-36), father of George Edward VII - King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India (1901-10), grandfather of George Victoria - Queen of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions (1837-1901) and Empress of India (1876-1901), Great-grandmother of George Mary of Teck - Queen consort of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India (1910-36), mother of George Wallis Simpson - Wife of Edward VIII Princess Elizabeth - elder daughter of George and Elizabeth Princess Margaret - younger daughter of George and Elizabeth Prince Philip - husband of Princess Elizabeth Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin (1935-37)Neville Chamberlain (1937-40) Winston Churchill (1940-45, 1951-55) Clement Attlee (1945-51) Aneurin Bevan - Labour Minister of Health, co-founder of the NHS Duff Cooper - anti-appeasement Conservative politician  Alec Hardinge - Private Secretary of George VI Lionel Logue - Australian speech therapist Freda Dudley Ward - Edward VIII's former mistress Phyllis Monkman - George's former love interest Sheila Chisholm - George's former mistress Cosmo Lang - Archbishop of Canterbury Adolf Hitler - Fuhrer of Germany (1934-45) Benito Mussolini - Dictator of Italy (1922-43) Richard Grigg - Historian Credits Wenn die Soldaten I was glad Hubert Parry King Oliver s Jazz Band The Planets - Jupiter - Gustav Holst Bbc_world-war-_07046171 bbc_air-raids-_07048083  bbc_bang----qu_07043166  Bbc_ships---tu_07018114 bbc_battle-of-_07008071

Laura and Steven talk to Professor Richard Toye about his new book 'Age of Hope', which focuses on Clement Attlee's 1945 Labour government and its contribution to modern Britain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This weekend Keir Starmer's team took the opportunity to discuss Margaret Thatcher in an op-ed for the Sunday Telegraph. Whilst Starmer also praised other former prime ministers – such as Tony Blair and Clement Attlee – his admission that ‘Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism', has ruffled a few feathers in the Labour party. Could this be a genius piece of politics to reach out to those on the right? Or is it a misfire?  Also on the podcast, Rishi Sunak has started the week with the news that he has recorded his lowest rating ever in the latest ConservativeHome league table, racking up a dire -25.4 among card-carrying Conservatives. Can he turn it around?  James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

Winston Churchill's remarkable career saw him interact with many of the other great figures of the age, many of whom had a profound impact on Britain's wartime leader. Speaking to Rob Attar, Professor David Reynolds examines Churchill's relationships with the likes of Stalin, Mussolini, Gandhi and Clement Attlee – and considers how these figures left their mark on the statesman. (Ad) David Reynolds is the author of Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him (William Collins, 2023). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0BY84WXVN/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Professor Richard Toye talks about a pivotal year in British history – 1945. The end of the war, a landslide election for the Labour Party under Clement Attlee, and the start of the modern British welfare state. He explains why Labour won the election, why Churchill and the Conservatives lost, and what the Labour government of 1945-1951 tried to accomplish. Episode 532.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5455565/advertisement

The British royal family and UK intelligence operations have been linked since Queen Victoria's time, involving everything from personal protection to matters of international intrigue to concerns about blackmail. Professor and author Rory Cormac, who has conducted extensive research on the British intelligence services, has recently added to his corpus of writings in the field with a book about the modern royal-intelligence intersection: Crown, Cloak, and Dagger, co-authored with Richard Aldrich.David Priess and Rory discussed the difference in US and UK education about the royal family; intelligence foundations during the reign of the first Elizabeth; why it fell apart under her successor; the seeds of modern intelligence under Victoria; the involvement of UK intelligence officers in the death of Grigori Rasputin; the challenges and advances involving intelligence and Edward VII, George V, and Edward VIII; the contributions of George VI to the Allies' massive D-Day deception operations; Elizabeth II's reading of intelligence reports; Soviet spy Anthony Blunt's close relationship with the royal family; Elizabeth's role as a diplomatic "helper;" the exposures of Charles III and Prince Willliam to intelligence; why Clement Attlee was an underappreciated prime minister; and more.Among the works mentioned in this episode:The book Crown, Cloak, and Dagger by Richard J. Aldrich and Rory CormacThe book How To Stage a Coup by Rory CormacChatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The British royal family and UK intelligence operations have been linked since Queen Victoria's time, involving everything from personal protection to matters of international intrigue to concerns about blackmail. Professor and author Rory Cormac, who has conducted extensive research on the British intelligence services, has recently added to his corpus of writings in the field with a book about the modern royal-intelligence intersection: Crown, Cloak, and Dagger, co-authored with Richard Aldrich.David Priess and Rory discussed the difference in US and UK education about the royal family; intelligence foundations during the reign of the first Elizabeth; why it fell apart under her successor; the seeds of modern intelligence under Victoria; the involvement of UK intelligence officers in the death of Grigori Rasputin; the challenges and advances involving intelligence and Edward VII, George V, and Edward VIII; the contributions of George VI to the Allies' massive D-Day deception operations; Elizabeth II's reading of intelligence reports; Soviet spy Anthony Blunt's close relationship with the royal family; Elizabeth's role as a diplomatic "helper;" the exposures of Charles III and Prince Willliam to intelligence; why Clement Attlee was an underappreciated prime minister; and more.Among the works mentioned in this episode:The book Crown, Cloak, and Dagger by Richard J. Aldrich and Rory CormacThe book How To Stage a Coup by Rory CormacChatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Possibility Club podcast: Practical Bravery - COMMON SENSE NEWS!   In a world hooked on extremes, where every headline screams for your outrage or your wholehearted agreement—what happens to the middle ground? You might think it's the realm of the indecisive. A wishy-washy place where no one takes a stand. But, what if today's moderate voice is actually the most radical in the room?   In this episode of The Possibility Club, we're diving deep into the audacious world of common sense. Because while others are looking to divide, meet a young man who's built his mission around unity and reasonableness.   Despite his youth, our guest this week is a polymath—don't let that intimidate you; it just means he's darn good at many things. He's mingled with royalty, spoken on United Nations stages, and he's been recognised by the Financial Times as a tech influencer. He's the CEO of The Common Sense Network, a news platform with the rebellious idea that we should understand both sides of a story.   He founded The Apex Group for CEOs, and even The BAM Project, which dares young boys to reimagine masculinity.   This is a conversation with a man who makes the ordinary, extraordinary; the sense-maker in a world gone mad - meet Micheal Omoniyi. ----------   Mike Omoniyi https://www.mikeomoniyi.com/   “I have to be particularly disciplined because there's a lot of context switching.”   Mike on Instagram @oneyoungworld @mikeomoniyi @tcsnetwork    “The golden thread that connects a lot of my work is I'm very big on bending the levers of power towards justice.”   Mike on X / Twitter: @MikeOmoniyiCS @OneYoungWorld @TCSNetwork   “My curiosity is just too heavy, and sometimes it's more of a problem than an asset. As you follow your curiosity, your life tends to look a bit messy.”   LinkedIn One Young World Mike Omoniyi The Common Sense Network   “On a personal level, when I go to bed at night, I think about whether I made the world somewhat brighter. Whether my unique contribution advanced things. I'm a philosophy major, I deal in big grandiose ideas. Now if there's maybe five days, two weeks in a row where the answer to that question is no, then it's often an indication that I need to switch things around, that maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.”   “I used to have an afro a few years ago, it's gone now and I'm clinging on to the last hair strands I've got, so I'm always asking: was this worth my afro?”   The Common Sense Network https://www.tcsnetwork.co.uk/   “Common Sense Network was born out of that frustration of what opposite sides of the political wing would do to each-other.”   “When I say ‘common sense', I mean the process of deciphering or working out what you believe, through logical thinking, through exploration, just being someone who is curious, who can follow that curiosity and arrive somewhere.”   Clement Attlee via Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee   Rory Sutherland via Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Sutherland_(advertising_executive)   "We need to think about ways to redistribute power to make sure we don't have so much of a ‘winner takes all' political system.”   The ‘Partygate' scandal via Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate   “I always used to say the mainstream media was broken, until I said it once and an older lady corrected me and said, no, it works for who it was made to work for.”   Galdem goodbye letter https://gal-dem.com/gal-dem-goodbye-letter/   Al Jazeera UK leaves London, via The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/apr/12/al-jazeera-english-announces-plans-to-move-from-londons-shard-to-qatar   Novara Media https://novaramedia.com/   Spiked Online (trigger warning: homophobic disinformative content on the front page) https://www.spiked-online.com/   “You really have to be very dynamic when you're our size, to make it through Covid, still be employing people.”   "There's this phrase I talk about all the time, distance creates distortion, and the further we are away from something the harder it is to ascertain its virtues, its values.”   “A company is a group of people. The ‘halo effect' thing is a real danger in today's social media culture.” -----------   This episode was recorded in June 2023 Interviewer: Richard Freeman for always possible Editor: CJ Thorpe-Tracey for Lo Fi Arts   For more visit www.alwayspossible.co.uk

Clement Attlee's efforts in 1950 to make America promise to consult Britain before launching the nukes.Join my Patreon here and get extra podcast episodes. Buy my book, ATTACK WARNING RED!, here Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Donald Trump was indicted for a third time this week and a fourth is on the way. He emerged from a DC courthouse this week actually inviting more - he thinks it's helping him, feeding into a long-established persecution complex which he feels will been a key asset in his bid to be re-elected.In this episode, we ask a simple question: is he right? And is he right everywhere? If it is helping him secure the Republican nomination, will all this actually end up hurting his chances of obtaining the thing he truly craves - the presidency itself?And in the latest of our extended political conversations Lewis talks to Labour peer and refugee champion Lord Alf Dubbs about a political life which stretches back to Clement Attlee and Nazi-occupied Prague.Editor: Tom HughesSenior Producer: Gabriel RadusSocial Media Editor: Georgia FoxwellPlanning Producer: Alex BarnettVideo Producer: Will Gibson SmithThe News Agents is a Global Player Original and a Persephonica Production.

São mais dois casos para juntar ao longo rol de casos polémicos em um ano e meio de Governo de António Costa com maioria absoluta.Na sexta-feira, o secretário de Estado da Defesa, Marco Capitão Ferreira, demitiu-se, depois de ter sido constituído arguido, por suspeitas de corrupção e participação económica em negócio.Já este domingo, foi a entrevista dada pelo ministro da Cultura, Pedro Adão e Silva, à TSF e ao JN, em que criticou os trabalhos da comissão de inquérito à TAP - declarações que Lacerda Sales apelidou de "desrespeito" ao Parlamento e à comissão de inquérito da TAP.O que é que as novas polémicas podem significar para o Governo de António Costa? Neste episódio conversamos com Ana Sá Lopes, que pede emprestada uma frase de Clement Attlee para explicar as declarações de Adão e Silva sobre a CPI da TAP: “If you have a good dog, don't bark yourself”, que se pode traduzir por “se tens um bom cão, não sejas tu a ladrar”.

With Keir Starmer seemingly on course for victory at the next election, Tom and Helen look back at the only other Labour leaders to have won a majority: Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair. What was it about these three leaders (and the age in which they served) which allowed them to triumph — and what does that tell us about Labour's chances today? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sometimes Doing the Right Thing is Hard Caution! This is the cynical and bitter version of the Develop This! podcast! In this episode, Dennis vents his frustrations about the difficulty of building coalitions even when you're trying to do the right thing. Dennis has made a conscious decision to be less like Neville Chamberlain and more like Winston Churchill.....Never, never, never, give up Economic development professionals are often at the nexus of difficult projects Everyone wants to impact workforce but doing meaningful work and doing the right thing is hard You would think it would be easy to build coalitions and that everyone would understand what's at stake if we fail to take action Unfortunately, local politics, egos, and turf battles can derail even the best intentions Neville Chamberlain was prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1940. He is best known for his role in the Munich Agreement of 1938 which ceded parts of Czechoslovakia to Hitler and is now the most popular example of the foreign policy known as appeasement. Winston Churchill was an inspirational statesman, writer, orator and leader who led Britain to victory in the Second World War. He served as Conservative Prime Minister twice - from 1940 to 1945 (before being defeated in the 1945 general election by the Labour leader Clement Attlee) and from 1951 to 1955.  Dennis would love to hear your stories of how you have overcome obstacles that your organization has faced. Contact him at dennis@developthispodcast.com or call 319-753-0690          

British historian and biographer Nick Thomas-Symonds MP is in Sir Keir Starmer's shadow cabinet and will play a key role in any future Labour government.  Here he speaks about the giants of Labour Party history: Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan, and Harold Wilson.

Após 70 anos de reinado, a rainha Elizabeth II faleceu na última semana e colocou a monarquia britânica sob análise. A coroação de Charles, como rei Charles III, não traz a confiança de estabilidade que Elizabeth trazia. Não quer dizer que de uma hora para a outra a monarquia corre o risco de desmoronar, mas o novo soberano sabe que não conta com a mesma simpatia que a mãe.  Thiago de Aragão, analista político Para quem vê de fora, principalmente de um país que não vive um sistema monarquista, não é sempre fácil perceber o papel moderador político que a rainha tinha e como isso é importante no Reino Unido. Ao longo dos últimos 70 anos, a monarca viveu inúmeros tipos de crise. Entre elas, Elizabeth II passou pela reconstrução do país no pós Segunda Guerra Mundial, onde o Reino Unido, liderado mais uma vez por Winston Churchill (que havia substituído Clement Attlee em 1951), passava por dificuldades econômicas.  O aprendizado cumulativo de décadas à frente de um dos mais relevantes países no mundo fez da rainha Elizabeth um símbolo doméstico de estabilidade e tranquilidade. A soberana teve um papel importante nas crises do meio dos anos 70, durante o governo de Harold Wilson e James Callaghan, além de solucionar as diferenças com Margaret Thatcher, para realizar uma “dobradinha” que fez com que a popularidade da família real se recuperasse ao longo da década de 80.  Apesar das polêmicas e escândalos familiares, a rainha mantinha na população o sentimento de unidade no país, independentemente do crescente sentimento separatista escocês dos últimos anos. O referendo escocês pela independência de 2014 trouxe 55% a 45% a favor do “não”. Já em 2021, o resultado das eleições parlamentares escocesas demonstrou o crescimento dos partidos separatistas, tornando-os uma das principais forças da política escocesa.  A rainha era um símbolo do soft power britânico. Esse soft power sempre foi extremamente útil para a diplomacia britânica. Quando Elizabeth se tornou um símbolo pop, a Reino Unido do pós-guerra precisava, mais do que nunca, de uma forma de mostrar sua assertividade ao mundo. Muitas pessoas, artistas, jornalistas e líderes políticos endossaram e embarcaram na percepção da rainha como um símbolo pop. Essa importância não sumiu, muito pelo contrário. A relevância da Comunidade Britânica de Nações - Commonwealth para a influência política britânica no mundo é enorme. Elizabeth sabia transmitir a confiança de que o Reino Unido ainda poderia liderar alguns países diplomaticamente. Será Charles, como rei Charles III, capaz de trazer essa mesma simpatia e soft power para a mesa diplomática?  O papel de um monarca pode ser político se este é hábil e conhecedor da comunicação popular por meio de gestos e comportamentos. Claro, sempre é mais fácil ser um monarca esquecido politicamente, numa neutralidade pensada em relação aos eventos domésticos e externos. Charles é rei de um país onde a imprensa e a sociedade gostam de sinais bem dados, nos campos da política, diplomacia e avanços sociais. Sua responsabilidade é grande e ocupar o espaço da sua mãe, difícil. 

Na décima primeira hora da Segunda Guerra Mundial, no dia 26 de julho de 1945, Winston Churchill, o grande líder na nação britânica, vê-se obrigado a renunciar ao cargo de primeiro-ministro por conta da surpreendente derrota eleitoral do Partido Conservador diante do rival Partido Trabalhista. Essa foi a primeira eleição geral em mais de uma década. No mesmo dia, Clement Attlee, o líder trabalhista, presta juramento como o novo chefe de governo.Veja a matéria completa em: https://operamundi.uol.com.br/politica-e-economia/23255/hoje-na-historia-1945-winston-churchill-renuncia-ao-cargo-de-primeiro-ministro-do-reino-unido----Quer contribuir com Opera Mundi via PIX? Nossa chave é apoie@operamundi.com.br (Razão Social: Última Instancia Editorial Ltda.). Desde já agradecemos!Assinatura solidária: www.operamundi.com.br/apoio★ Support this podcast ★

What if the Roman Empire had experienced an Industrial Revolution? That's the compelling hook of Helen Dale's two-part novel, Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules and Order. Drawing on economics and legal history, Helen's story follows the arrest and trial of charismatic holy man Yeshua Ben Yusuf in the first century — but one with television, flying machines, cars, and genetic modification.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I dive into the fascinating world-building of Kingdom of the Wicked with Helen. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: Your Kingdom of the Wicked books raise such an interesting question: What would have happened if Jesus had emerged in a Roman Empire that had gone through an industrial revolution? What led you to ask this question and to pursue that answer through these books?Helen Dale: There is an essay in the back of book one, which is basically a set of notes about what I brought to the book when I was thinking. And that has been published elsewhere by the Cato Institute. I go into these questions. But the main one, the one that really occurred to me, was that I thought, what would happen if Jesus emerged in a modern society now, rather than the historic society he emerged in? I didn't think it would turn into something hippy-dippy like Jesus of Montreal. I thought it would turn into Waco or to the Peoples Temple.And that wasn't necessarily a function of the leader of the group being a bad person. Clearly Jim Jones was a very bad person, but the Waco story is actually much more complex and much messier and involves a militarized police force and tanks attacking the buildings and all of this kind of thing. But whatever happened with it, it was going to go badly and it was going to end in violence and there would be a showdown and a confrontation. And it would also take on, I thought — I didn't say this in the essay, but I thought at the time — it would take on a very American cast, because that is the way new religious movements tend to blow up or collapse in the United States.And so I was thinking this idea, through my head, “I would like to do a retelling of the Jesus story, but how do I do it? So it doesn't become naff and doesn't work?” And so what I decided to do was rather than bring Jesus forward and put him now, I would put us back to the time of Jesus — but take our technology and our knowledge, but always mediated by the fact that Roman civilization was different from modern civilization. Not in the sense of, you know, human beings have changed, all that kind of thing. We're all still the same primates that we have been for a couple of hundred thousand years or even longer. But in the sense that their underlying moral values and beliefs about the way the world should work were different, which I thought would have technological effects. The big technological effect in Kingdom of the Wicked is they're much better at the biosciences and the animal sciences. They're much weaker at communications. Our society has put all its effort into [communication]. Their society is much more likely to put it into medicine.To give you an idea: the use of opioids to relieve the pain of childbirth is Roman. And it was rediscovered by James Young Simpson at The University of Edinburgh. And he very famously used the formula of one of the Roman medical writers. So I made a very deliberate decision: This is a society that has not pursued technological advancement in the same way as us. It's also why their motor vehicles look like the Soviet-era ones with rotary engines. It's why their big aircraft are kind of like Antonovs, the big Ukrainian aircraft that we've all been reading about since the war has started in Ukraine. So, in some respects, there are bits of their culture that look more Soviet, or at least Britain in the 1950s. You know, sort of Clement Attlee's quite centralized, postwar settlement: health service, public good, kind of Soviet-style. Soft Soviet; it's not the nasty Stalinist sort, but like late-Soviet, so kind of Brezhnev and the last part of Khrushchev. A few people did say that. They were like, “Your military parades, they look like the Soviet Union.” Yes. That was deliberate. The effort has gone to medicine.It's an amazing bit of world-building. I was sort of astonished by the depth and the scale of it. Is this a genre that you had an interest in previously? Are there other works that you took inspiration from?There's a particular writer of speculative fiction I admire greatly. His name is S.M. Stirling, and he wrote a series of books. I haven't read every book he wrote, but he wrote a series of books called the Draka series. And it's speculative fiction. Once again, based on a point of departure where the colonists who finished up in South Africa finished up using the resources of South Africa, but for a range of reasons he sets out very carefully in his books, they avoid the resource curse, the classic economist's resource curse. And so certainly in terms of a popular writer, he was the one that I read and thought, “If I can do this as well as him, I will be very pleased.”I probably didn't read as much science fiction as most people would in high school, unless it was a literary author like Margaret Atwood or George Orwell. I just find bad writing rebarbative, and a lot of science fiction struggles with bad writing. So this is the problem, of course, that Douglas Adams famously identified. And one of the reasons why he wrote the Hitchhiker's books was to show that you could combine science fiction with good writing.In all good works of speculative fiction of the alt-history variant, there's an interesting jumping-off point. I would imagine you had a real “Eureka!” moment when you figured out what your jumping-off point would be to make this all plausible. Tell me about that.Well, yes. I did. Once I realized that points of departure hugely mattered, I then went and read people like Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle. The point of departure for him is the assassination of Roosevelt. I went and read SS-GB [by] Len Deighton, a great British spycraft writer but also a writer of speculative fiction. And in that case, Britain loses the Battle of Britain and Operation Sea Lion, the putative land invasion of the UK, is successful. And I really started to think about this and I'm going, "Okay, how are you going to do this point of departure? And how are you going to deal with certain economic issues?"I'm not an economist, but I used to practice in corporate finance so I've got the sort of numerical appreciation for economics. I can read an economics paper that's very math heavy because that's my skill based on working in corporate finance. And I knew, from corporate finance and from corporate law, that there are certain things that you just can't do, you can't achieve in terms of economic progress, unless you abolish slavery, basically. Very, very basic stuff like human labor power never loses its comparative advantage if you have just a market flooded with slaves. So you can have lots of good science technology, and an excellent legal system like the Romans did. And they reached that point economists talk about of takeoff, and it just never happens. Just, they miss. It doesn't quite happen.And in a number of civilizations, this has happened. It's happened with the Song dynasty in China. Steve Davies has written a lot about the Song dynasty, and they went through the same thing. They just get to that takeoff point and then just … fizzled out. And in China, it was to do with serfdom, basically. These are things that are very destructive to economic progress. So you have to come up with a society that decides that slavery is really shitty. And the only way to do that is for them to get hooked on the idea of using a substitute for human labor power. And that means I have to push technological innovation back to the middle republic.So what I've done for my point of departure is at the Siege of Syracuse [in 213-212 B.C.]. I have Archimedes surviving instead of being killed. He was actually doing mathematical doodles outside his classroom, according to the various records of Roman writers, and he was killed by some rampaging Roman soldier. And basically Marcellus, the general, had been told to capture Archimedes and all his students and all their kids. So you can see Operation Paperclip in the Roman mind. You can see the thinking: “Oh no, we want this fellow to be our DARPA guy.” That's just a brilliant leap. I love that.And that is the beginning of the point of departure. So you have the Romans hauling all these clever Greek scientists and their families off and taking them to Rome and basically doing a Roman version of DARPA. You know, Operation Paperclip, DARPA. You know, “Do all the science, and have complete freedom to do all the…” — because the Romans would've let them do it. I mean, this is the thing. The Romans are your classic “cashed up bogans,” as Australians call it. They had lots of money. They were willing to throw money at things like this and then really run with it.You really needed both. As you write at one point, you needed to create a kind of a “machine culture.” You sort of needed the science and innovation, but also the getting rid of slavery part of it. They really both work hand in hand.Yes. These two have to go together. I got commissioned to write a few articles in the British press, where I didn't get to mention the name of Kingdom of the Wicked or any of my novels or research for this, but where people were trying to argue that the British Empire made an enormous amount of money out of slavery. And then, as a subsidiary argument, trying to argue that that led to industrialization in the UK. … [So] I wrote a number of articles in the press just like going through why this was actually impossible. And I didn't use any fancy economic terminology or anything like that. There's just no point in it. But just explaining that, “No, no, no. This doesn't work like that. You might get individually wealthy people, like Crassus, who made a lot of his money from slavery.” (Although he also made a lot from insurance because he set up private fire brigades. That was one of the things that Crassus did: insurance premiums, because that's a Roman law invention, the concept of insurance.) And you get one of the Islamic leaders in Mali, King Musa. Same thing, slaves. And people try to argue that the entirety of their country's wealth depended on slavery. But what you get is you get individually very wealthy people, but you don't get any propagation of the wealth through the wider society, which is what industrialization produced in Britain and the Netherlands and then in Germany and then in America and elsewhere.So, yes, I had to work in the machine culture with the abolition of slavery. And the machines had to come first. If I did the abolition of slavery first, there was nothing there to feed it. One of the things that helped Britain was Somerset's case (and in Scotland, Knight and Wedderburn) saying, “The air of the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe.” You know, that kind of thinking. But that was what I realized: It was the slavery issue. I couldn't solve the slavery issue unless I took the technological development back earlier than the period when the Roman Republic was flooded with slaves.The George Mason University economist Mark Koyama said if you had taken Adam Smith and brought him back to Rome, a lot of it would've seemed very recognizable, like a commercial, trading society. So I would assume that element was also pretty important in that world-building. You had something to work with there.Yes. I'd read some Stoic stuff because I did a classics degree, so of course that means you have to be able to read in Latin. But I'd never really taken that much of an interest in it. My interest tended to be in the literature: Virgil and Apuleius and the people who wrote novels. And then the interest in law, I always had an advantage, particularly as a Scots lawyer because Scotland is a mixed system, that I could read all the Roman sources that they were drawing on in the original. It made me a better practitioner. But my first introduction to thinking seriously about stoicism and how it relates to commerce and thinking that commerce can actually be a good and honorable thing to do is actually in Adam Smith. Not in The Wealth of Nations, but in Moral Sentiments, where Adam Smith actually goes through and quotes a lot of the Roman Stoic writers — Musonius Rufus and Epictetus and people like that — where they talk about how it's possible to have something that's quite base, which is being greedy and wanting to have a lot of money, but realizing that in order to get your lot of money or to do really well for yourself, you actually have to be quite a decent person and not a s**t.And there were certain things that the Romans had applied this thinking to, like the samian with that beautiful red ceramic that you see, and it's uniform all through the Roman Empire because they were manufacturing it on a factory basis. And when you come across the factories, they look like these long, narrow buildings with high, well-lit windows. And you're just sort of sitting there going, “My goodness, somebody dumped Manchester in Italy.” This kind of thing. And so my introduction to that kind of Stoic thinking was actually via Adam Smith. And then I went back and read the material in the original and realized where Adam Smith was getting those arguments from. And that's when I thought, “Ah, right. Okay, now I've got my abolitionists.”This is, in large part, a book about law. So you had to create a believable legal system that did not exist, unlike, perhaps, the commercial nature of Rome. So how did you begin to work this from the ground up?All the substantive law used in the book is Roman, written by actual Roman jurists. But to be fair, this is not hard to do. This is a proper legal system. There are only two great law-giving civilizations in human history. The Romans were one of them; the English were the other. And so what I had to do was take substantive Roman law, use my knowledge of practicing in a mixed system that did resemble the ancient Roman system — so I used Scotland, where I'd lived and worked — and then [put] elements back into it that existed in antiquity that still exists in, say, France but are very foreign, particularly to common lawyers.I had lawyer friends who read both novels because obviously it appeals. “You have a courtroom drama?” A courtroom drama appeals to lawyers. These are the kind of books, particularly if it's written by another lawyer. So you do things like get the laws of evidence right and stuff like that. I know there are lawyers who cannot watch The Wire, for example, because it gets the laws of evidence (in the US, in this case) wrong. And they just finish up throwing shoes at the television because they get really annoyed about getting it wrong.What I did was I took great care to get the laws of evidence right, and to make sure that I didn't use common law rules of evidence. For example, the Romans didn't have a rule against hearsay. So you'll notice that there's all this hearsay in the trial. But you'll also notice a mechanism. Pilate's very good at sorting out what's just gossip and what is likely to have substantive truth to it. So that's a classic borrowing from Roman law, because they didn't have the rule against hearsay. That's a common law rule. I also use corroboration a lot. Corroboration is very important in Roman law, and it's also very important in Scots law. And it's basically a two-witness rule.And I did things, once again, to show the sort of cultural differences between the two great legal systems. Cornelius, the Roman equivalent of the principal crown prosecutor. Cornelius is that character, and he's obsessed with getting a confession. Obsessed. And that is deeply Roman. The Roman lawyers going back to antiquity called a confession the “Queen of Proofs.” And of course, if confessions are just the most wonderful thing, then it's just so tempting to beat the snot out of the accused and get your bloody confession. Job done. The topic of the Industrial Revolution has been a frequent one in my writings and podcasts. And one big difference between our Industrial Revolution and the one you posit in the book is that there was a lot of competition in Europe. You had a lot of countries, and there was an incentive to permit disruptive innovation — where in the past, the proponents of the status quo had the advantage. But at some point countries realized, “Oh, both for commerce and military reasons, we need to become more technologically advanced. So we're going to allow inventors and entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas, even if it does alter that status quo.” But that's not the case with Rome. It was a powerful empire that I don't think really had any competitors, both in the real world and in your book.That and the chattel slavery is probably why it didn't finish up having an industrial revolution. And it's one of the reasons why I had to locate the innovation, it had to be in the military first, because the military was so intensely respected in Roman society. If you'd have got the Roman military leadership coming up with, say, gunpowder or explosives or that kind of thing, the response from everybody else would've been, “Good. We win. This is a good thing.” It had to come from the military, which is why you get that slightly Soviet look to it. There is a reason for that. The society is more prosperous because it's a free-market society. The Romans were a free-market society. All their laws were all sort of trade oriented, like English law. So that's one of those things where the two societies were just really similar. But in terms of technological innovation, I had to locate it in the army. It had to be the armed forces first.In your world, are there entrepreneurs? What does the business world look like?Well, I do try to show you people who are very commercially minded and very economically oriented. You've got the character of Pilate, the real historical figure, who is a traditional Tory lawyer, who has come up through all the traditional Toryism and his family's on the land and so on and so forth. So he's a Tory. But Linnaeus, who he went to law school with, who is the defense counsel for the Jesus character, Yeshua Ben Yusuf, is a Whig. And his mother was a freed slave, and his family are in business in commerce. They haven't bought the land.A lot of these books finished up on the cutting room floor, the world-building. And there is a piece that was published in a book called Shapers of Worlds: Volume II, which is a science-fiction anthology edited by a Canadian science-fiction author called Ed Willett. And one of the pieces that finished up on the cutting room floor and went into Shapers of Worlds is a description of Linnaeus's family background, which unfortunately was removed. You get Pilate's, but you don't get Linnaeus's. And Linnaeus's family background, his dad's the factory owner. The factory making cloth. I was annoyed with my publisher when they said, “This piece has to go,” and I did one of those snotty, foot-stamping, awful things. And so I was delighted when this Canadian publisher came to me and said, “Oh, can we have a piece of your writing for a science-fiction anthology?” And I thought, “Oh good. I get to publish the Linnaeus's dad story in Shapers of Worlds.”And I actually based Linnaeus's dad — the angel as he's referred to, Angelus, in the Kingdom of the Wicked books, and his personality is brought out very strongly — I actually based him on John Rylands. Manchester's John Rylands, the man who gave his name to the Rylands Library in Manchester. He was meant to be the portrait of the entrepreneurial, Manchester industrialist. And to this day, authors always have regrets, you don't always get to win the argument with your publisher or your editor, I am sorry that that background, that world-building was taken out of Kingdom of the Wicked and finished up having to be published elsewhere in an anthology. Because it provided that entrepreneurial story that you're talking about: the factory owner who is the self-made man, who endows libraries and technical schools, and trains apprentices, and has that sort of innovative quality that is described so beautifully in Matt Ridley's book, How Innovation Works, which is full of people like that. And this book as well, I've just bought: I've just bought Arts and Minds, which is about the Royal Society of Arts. So this is one of those authorial regrets: that the entrepreneur character wasn't properly fleshed out in the two published books, Kingdom of the Wicked book one and book two. And you have to get Shapers of Worlds if you want to find out about Linnaeus's industrialist dad.Is this a world you'd want to live in?Not for me, no. I mean, I'm a classically trained lawyer. So classics first, then law. And I made it a society that works. You know, I don't write dystopias. I have a great deal of admiration for Margaret Atwood and George Orwell, who are the two greatest writers of dystopias, in my view, in contemporary, and not just contemporary fiction, probably going back over a couple of hundred years. Those two have really got it, when it comes to this vision of horror. You know, the boot stamping on the human face forever. I greatly admire their skill, but those are not the books I write. So the society I wrote about in Kingdom of the Wicked is a society that works.But one of the things I deliberately did with the Yeshua Ben Yusuf character and what were his early Christian followers, and the reason I've taken so much time to flesh them out as real characters and believable people [is] because the values that Christianity has given to the West were often absent in the Roman world. They just didn't think that way. They thought about things differently. Now some of those Christian values were pretty horrible. It's fairly clear that the Romans were right about homosexuality and abortion, and the Christians were wrong. That kind of thing. That's where they were more liberal. But, you will have noticed, I don't turn the book into Gattaca. I try to keep this in the background because obviously someone else has written Gattaca. It's an excellent film. It's very thought provoking. I didn't want to do that again. It's kept in the background, but it is obvious — you don't even really need to read between the lines — that this is a society that engages in eugenics. You notice that all the Roman families have three children or two children, and there's always a mix of sexes. You never have all boys or all girls. You know what they're doing. They're doing sex-selective abortions, like upper-class Indians and Chinese people do now. You've now dealt with the problem of not enough girls among those posh people, but they still want a mixture of the two. You notice that the Romans have got irritatingly perfect teeth and their health is all very good. And people mock Cyler, one of the characters, because his teeth haven't been fixed. He's got what in Britain get called NHS teeth. He hasn't got straightened teeth, because he genuinely comes from a really, really poor background. I have put that in there deliberately to foil those values off each other, to try to show what a world would look like where there are certain values that will just never come to the fore.And as you mentioned, industry: how those values also might influence which areas technology might focus on, which I think is a great point.I did that quite deliberately. There is a scene in the first book in Kingdom of the Wicked where Linnaeus — who's the Whig, the nice Whig, the lovely Whig who believes in civil rights and justice and starts sounding awfully Martin Luther King-ish at various points, and that kind of thing; he's the most likable form of progressive, Stoic Roman ideas — and when he encounters a child that the parents have kept alive, a disabled child, which in his society would just be put down at birth like Peter Singer, they have Peter Singer laws, he's horrified. And he doesn't even know if it's human.I actually wrote a piece about this couple of years ago for Law & Liberty, for Liberty Fund. I did find that people wanted to live in this sort of society. And I just sort of thought, “Hmm, there are a lot more people out there who clearly agree with things like eugenics, Peter Singer laws, a society that has absolutely no welfare state. None.” There are people who clearly find that kind of society attractive. And also the authoritarianism, the Soviet-style veneration of the military. A lot of people clearly quite like that. And clearly like that it's a very orderly society where there are lots of rules and everybody knows where they stand. But even when the state is really, really very powerful.I deliberately put a scene in there, for example, where Pilate's expectorating about compulsory vaccinations — because he's a Roman and he thinks compulsory vaccinations save lives and he doesn't give a s**t about your bodily integrity. I did try to leave lots of Easter eggs, to use a gaming expression, in there to make it clear that this is a society that's a bit Gattaca-ish. I did that for a reason.I don't know if there's a sequel in mind, but do you think that this world eventually sort of Christianizes? And if this is what the world looks like 2000 years ago, what would that world look like today?I haven't thought of the answer to the first one. I must admit. I don't really know the answer to that. But in the second one, I did discuss this in quite a bit of detail with my then partner. And she said, “I honestly think that with that sort of aggressiveness and militarism, they will finish up conquering the planet. And then it'll start looking like a not-nice version of Star Trek. It won't be the Federation. It will be much more likely to be Khan and the Klingons and they'll start looking really, really Klingon basically.” That was her comment at the time.Like a more militaristic version of Star Trek.Yeah. But sort of very militarized and not the Prime Directive or any of that. Obviously Star Trek is very much an American conception of Americans in space. My Romans in space would look much more like the Centauri out of Babylon 5 or the Klingons in Star Trek. They would be much more aggressive and they'd be a lot more ambiguous…I don't know how much of a Star Trek fan you are, but of course there's the mirror universe, which kind of looks like that. We have the evil Kirk and the evil Spock. There's still advance, but there's like a Praetorian Guard for the captain and…All of that. Yes. I hadn't really thought about the first question, but the second question I thought, “Yeah, if this persists into the future, imagining a hypothetical future, then I think you are going to be dealing with people who are really, really quite scary.”Apparently you're not working on a sequel to this book, but what are you working on? Another book?Yes. I'm actually being pursued at the moment by a British publisher, who I won't drop into it because otherwise, if I say the name, then I will never, never be forgiven. And then they will insist on me writing a book. I'm never going to be the world's most super productive novelist. I think that I may finish up in my life writing maybe another two. I look at Stephen King. That man writes a door stopper of a book every time he sits down to have a hot meal. Incredible. How does he do it? I'm not that person.Helen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.Thank you very much for having me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Why are creative partnerships so powerful? How can we work on multiple creative projects at one time? In this interview, we talk to the award-winning investigative journalist and Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman, we discuss her non-fiction book It Takes Two: A History of the Couples Who Dared to Be Different which is all about the power of collaboration. We deconstruct how she writes news stories, books, and her research process. We also explore the idea of creative partnerships from Beyonce and JayZ to Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill, how these partnerships are like a ‘dance' and how we might spot our own creative collaborator. *ABOUT CATHY NEWMANCathy Newman is an award-winning investigative journalist and Channel 4 News' first female main presenter. Cathy is also the author of Bloody Brilliant Women: Pioneers, Revolutionaries & Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention, and her latest book, It Takes Two: A History of the Couples Who Dared to Be Different.*SHOW NOTES:[03:41] Cathy's love for music, and why she shifted from music to writing[05:15] Playing in The Commons, and about her music group, The Statutory Instruments[07:40] Transitioning from writing journalistic articles to writing for TV[10:10] Some examples of what Cathy's writing process for TV looks like[14:19] How she stays on top of things, including the tools she uses[16:18] The inspiration behind her book It Takes Two[19:19] The themes that unify the power collaborators, including competitiveness, muses, and the idea of the power couple[22:34] The pas de deux and the concept of balance in relationships[26:20] The partnerships and collaborations that have helped Cathy with her career[30:18] How to find and form creative partnerships[33:39] The writing and research process for her book[43:24] Self-doubt and responding to positive and negative reception[45:40] The power of reading and how it's helped Cathy in difficult times*QUOTES FROM CATHY:“I was fascinated by the idea that a coupledom is a dance and whether that's a work relationship, a romantic relationship, and as part of the research, I read, um, a German sociologist called Georg Simmel, who talked about this concept of dyads and why this relationship of two is so crucial. And here's what I felt was quite revolutionary, was that he was talking about the need for balance and a horizontal type approach to any relationship…you've got to be finely tuned and balanced for the dance to work.”*RESOURCESConnect with Cathy Newman:Twitter: @cathynewmanInstagram: @cathynewmanc4Links from the show:A dilemma for Nick Clegg as Lord Rennard apologisesManhunt: Closing in on a British PaedophileUkraine conflict: Military actions unfortunately connected to human loss, says Sergei Lavrov‘You're being emotional': What happened when I asked Sergei Lavrov about the blood on his handsBloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention by Cathy NewmanIt Takes Two: A History of the Couples Who Dared to Be Different by Cathy NewmanThe Statutory Instruments - UK Parliamentary String QuartetGeorg Simmel - A German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.Serial podcastFor show notes, transcripts and to attend our live podcasts visit podcast.londonwriterssalon.comFor free writing sessions, join free Writers' Hours: writershour.com*FOLLOW LONDON WRITERS' SALON:Twitter: twitter.com/​​WritersSalonInstagram: instagram.com/londonwriterssalonFacebook: facebook.com/LondonWritersSalonCREDITS:Production by Victoria Spooner. Artwork by Emma Winterschladen

[Warning: this is a long post, and probably not of interest to everyone, but you never know. Also it's probably one to read rather than listen to, but some prefer the audio, so I've given you the choice.]As regular readers of my stuff will know, I'm of the view that a society should be designed around direct democracy and very low levels of land value tax (LVT), what Milton Friedman called “the least bad tax”. I may dream of Ancapistan, a land of no government, but the reality is that taxation of some kind, even if it be voluntary, is inevitable. There has never been a civilisation without taxation.Ideally, land value tax would replace ALL other taxes. However, if you offered me LVT in the UK and all other taxes, income tax especially, slashed to 10, 15 or even 20%, I'd bite your hand off. My friends in the countryside hate the idea, and I get angry messages about it, but the reality is that it is the owners of prime city centre real estate, the likes of the Crown, the Grosvenor Estate, major institutions and so on, who would bear the brunt, not ordinary homeowners or someone with 10 acres of field with no planning permission. (In my book Daylight Robbery, I argue for location value tax - it's the same as land value tax, but I use the word “location” because the location of the land - ie city centres - is more important than the actual amount of land).In any case, LVT is not going to happen here in the UK. Introducing a major new tax is too big an undertaking. It's easier for politicians to raise and lower the taxes they already impose, and tinker round the edges of the existing system. LVT would be a whopping vote-loser in a nation whose primary concept of wealth is the value of their house. Just explaining it, never mind getting it across the line, is hard enough. (If you want an explainer, by the way, there is one here and another here). Anyway this is all pre-amble, and I'm not here today to discuss the merits - or lack thereof - of LVT. For the purposes of this blog, just take my word that LVT keeps the relationship between ruler and citizen, between governor and governed, in healthy, transparent check. With LVT you would pay fewer taxes and lower levels of tax - ie less tax overall.So I've been trying to come up with a politically possible means by which* LVT can be implemented and shown in practice to work* Beautiful housing can be made affordable to ordinary people without collapsing the housing market or having to reform the fiat money system* Corporations, particularly crony capitalist building companies, planners, regulators and government are kept out of it, and people can be left to their own ingenious devicesAnd, by George, I think I've got it.Here's my idea. I stress: it is just an idea I am working through so there are bound to be flaws. I'd be grateful for any comments, pointers, thoughts, statistics, data, and so on.Water Location Value TaxSummary:Today's unaffordable housing is a consequence of both our system of planning and our system of money. They have conspired. But wholesale reform to either as good as politically impossible. With Britain's over-leverage to housing, the financial repercussions of markedly lower house prices are politically intolerable. Instead we propose to bypass the housing market altogether with an initiative to re-populate the underused rivers, keys, docks and canals of Britain with houseboats, barges and floating homes. Local authorities and the land registry will determine who “owns” the water and the land beside it (most water is nationally owned). That which is not needed for transportation (eg the middle of rivers) will be parcelled off into small plots to be sold to individual owners – not corporate entities – on which they can then build or buy, then moor floating homes and other edifices. An annual Water Tax will then be levied along the lines of Henry George's Single Tax (land value tax), based on the rental value of the plot, payable to the local authority and to the body in charge of the waterway, usually the Canal River Trust.20 housing ministers since 1999The unaffordability of housing has been for twenty years or more one of the biggest issues in the country. As if to illustrate the priority this problem is being given in Whitehall, we have this:In fact, we have had two more, since Esther McVey and this chart: Christopher Pincher Stuart Andrew and Steward Andrew. I make that 20 different housing ministers since Hilary Armstrong in 1999. It's not what you would describe as evidence of a long-term strategy.It seems absurd that we should have any crisis at all. A house does not cost a lot of money to build. In China it has long been the case that a 3D printer can build a home in a day for about £3,000. Here in the UK you can buy a flatpack 3-bed house, which takes 6-7 hours to erect, yours for £24,000. The interior of one of architect, Renato Vidal's 3-bed, flat-packed homes, £24,000. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of land. Little more than 4% of the land in England and Wales is built on, even less in Scotland. This was the finding of the National Ecosystem Assessment in 2011: just 1.1% of rural and urban land in England and Wales has domestic property on it, another 1% has commercial property and 2% is roads. The rest – around 95% - is not built on. You could, in theory, double the housing stock of England and Wales, using little more than 1% of land. (It is more complicated than that but you take my point).How on earth have we got into the situation that in 21st century Britain almost an entire generation is “priced out”? Underlying cause of high house prices number one – money supplyBetween 1997 and 2007 the population grew by 5%, yet the housing stock grew by 10%.  If house prices were a simple function of supply and demand, they would have fallen slightly over the period. Instead, they tripled.Mortgage lending over the same period went up by 370%. It was the increased supply of money, which caused house prices to rise. Money supply increased at a rate of roughly 11.5% per annum in the 40 years between 1971 and 2011. Some 40% of it went into residential and commercial property. Roughly speaking, house price inflation mirrored money supply growth. The Bank of England has a remit to curb inflation, but it does not include house prices or money supply growth in its standard measures, and so house price inflation went unchecked. If interest rates had reflected 11.5% annual money supply growth, house price inflation would have been stopped in its tracks.  Underlying cause number two – planningPlanning laws are the second part of the problem. The newly created money poured into a market which had limited ability to expand.The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, passed by Clement Attlee's Labour Government, became the foundation of modern town and country planning in the UK, followed by new statutes in 1990 and 2004.  It was founded on the laudable aim “that all the land of the country is used in the best interests of the whole people”. What happened, however, was that it became difficult to get permission to build anything, so the act had the effect of reinforcing the monopoly of the landowner. Today, just 6,000 or so landowners (the Crown, large institutions and a few rich families) own more than 70% of UK land. Most people do not have the time and resources to navigate planning laws, so house building has become the preserve of a few large corporations. An acre of rural land worth £10,000 becomes an acre of land worth as much as £1m once it has planning permission. This is an expensive and utterly needless cost of government, and it goes a long way to explain why house prices are so much higher than build prices. The act led to huge concentrations of both people and capital in areas that were already built up – especially London – and brought vast, unearned wealth to those who owned at the expense of those who didn't. Our most beautiful domestic architecture was predominantly built in the 18th and 19th century, before planning laws. The more planning there is, the uglier buildings seem to get. This is causation not correlation: it is inevitable when the final say on creative decisions is in the hands of planners. Imagine Van Gogh needing regulatory approval on a painting. Here are some nice houses built before planning laws.Why this housing crisis is unsolvableTo solve the crisis requires two things: money reform and planning reform.  Both are such huge undertakings with such opposing vested interests as to be almost unachievable. As a nation, Britain is over-leveraged to housing. Too many people have too much money tied up in their house. The economic risks of significantly lower prices are high. What party standing for lower house prices would even get elected? Homeowners are more likely to vote than renters. The house price crash of 1989-94 was a major factor in making the Tories unelectable for half a generation. No party wants such a fate. A land value tax, along the lines of the Single Tax suggested by Henry George, would go a long way to resolving many of the housing market's distortions, but there is as little chance of that as there is of money and planning reform. Politicians promising new taxes when there is no national emergency tend not to be popular. Margaret Thatcher's Community Charge is one of many examples.There is an impossible deadlock. We must seek a solution elsewhere. In his 2009 essay, The Education of a Libertarian, tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel argued that political change cannot be achieved through political activism. Instead, one must “find an escape from politics in all its forms”, he says, and “focus on technologies that create a new space for freedom”. The Internet, for example, was one such “new space” albeit a virtual one.  In the future sea steading or outer space might be. “The mode for escape,” he says “must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.”It might be that there is an “undiscovered country” that exists in the middle of every major city of the UK: on its water.The most valuable real estate in the worldThere is a piece of prime Central London real estate, bigger than Hyde Park and better located. It is undeveloped - 150 years ago Londoners were making more use of it than they are today. Yet it could create all sorts of possibilities for people, not least billions of pounds worth of business, as well as lighten London's chronic congestion and housing problems. The River Thames.I lived for many years on a barge, docked on the Isle of Dogs. How it used to frustrate me, as we drove up the river, that this enormous resource, the Thames, was barely used.  A few party, pleasure and tour boats, some barges carrying freight, HMS Belfast, the Thames Clippers, a couple of floating restaurant-bars and the occasional mooring for houseboats. That's pretty much it. Plenty of office and apartment blocks have been built along each side (what a missed opportunity to produce something beautiful that was), but in front of them, from Teddington Lock to the Isle of Dogs and beyond, there is mile upon mile of unused bank wall, foreshore and river with hardly any activity. Here is Canaletto's Greenwich Hospital painted on the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs in around 1750. It is a haven of activity: boats ferrying people about, delivering goods, industry, commerce - as well as people living in boats moored on the river. It was bustling. Here is that same view today. There is nothing going on.This is the view from either side of Vauxhall Bridge. I took these pictures during the rush hour a couple of years back. Plenty is happening on either side, but on the river itself there is nothing going on. We cross the Thames, we walk along the side of it, we look at it, occasionally we take boat trips on it, but we don't actually use it. The River Thames used to be the lifeblood of London and we have lost touch with it. The story is the same in so many cities across the country. Each one has its water: its docks, its quays, its rivers, its canals. Almost invariably the banks have been developed in some way – the docks of Liverpool, Cardiff, Salford or Birmingham, for example - but the water itself just sits there, looking on – idly ignored. Canary Wharf is another example – even there, so much of the quay water goes almost unused. The waterways of Britain have become a relative economic desert.There should be houseboats, barges, floating structures, shops, restaurants, workplaces, offices, cinemas, theatres, small craft ferrying people in between. The possibilities are enormous. Of course there are ecological and aesthetic concerns, but these can be addressed. In London especially, but elsewhere too, there are safety issues with the tide and currents, but these are challenges which can easily be overcome by entrepreneurs, engineers and inventors between them. They managed 200 years ago. Take a leaf out of Venice's book, take a leaf out of Amsterdam's book, out of Seattle or Vancouver's book. But the mayor cannot just shout “everyone in a boat”. How then to develop our water? How to do it well? And why has it not happened before?Without clear ownership capital will not be investedOne of the barriers to development has been lack of clear ownership. On the non-tidal Thames (from Teddington Lock to the source in Oxfordshire), for example, there are riparian rights. The owner of the bank has ownership of the bed to the middle of the river. However, the middle of the river must be left clear for craft to pass and the Environment Agency limits what can and can't be done. (Can any lawyer readers confirm this?)On the tidal Thames, however – which stretches from Teddington Lock to the Estuary - these riparian rights are less clear. The Port Of London Authority (PLA) inherited ownership of the riverbed and the foreshore from the City of London in 1907. The bank and one boat width immediately next to it are owned by somebody else. Often there is a dispute over ownership of the wall alongside the river. Many moorings - Reed Wharf by Tower Bridge, Nine Elms in Vauxhall, St Mary's Church in Battersea, for example - have been there for decades, yet they are all constantly in and out of legal disputes over ownership. Much of the problem is that ownership was never registered and recorded in the same way that “normal” land was. Water moves.When ownership is not clear, capital is less likely to be risked. Things then fall into disrepair. Take a look at the mooring by St Mary's Church in Battersea if you want to see the depths of disrepair to which boats on an unmaintained mooring can sink (literally). This could be such a beautiful mooring. The spot is glorious (though not as nice as it was before they built those horrible glass fronted apartment blocks next to it).The disrepair gives rise to nimby-ism. Riverside properties don't want their view of the river spoiled by grotty old boats.  When they have control of the access point on the bank to the water, they have control of what can or can't happen. Moored boats, complain those who live on the river, even if lived on for many years, have fewer rights than squatters. They can be moved on with little notice or permission. The waters of Britain are, for the most part, nationally owned, under the stewardship of the Canal River Trust. The Environment Agency also has a role. In the case of the tidal Thames, the Port of London Authority is the body responsible. These bodies made certain decisions about how the waterways were to be used – no residential development on the Thames was one. But these decisions were taken without any kind of public vote. All three would vehemently defend this charge, but they have proved barriers to rather than facilitators of progress. None are popular with those who live on boats. Our goal is to sell small plots of water – on docks, canals, rivers, wherever there is ample space – to private (not corporate) owners. The owner, not the public body, will then have the say as to what they moor there. The solutionHow ironic that a land value tax could be the answer.The local authority, together with the land registry, should parcel up each area of water, foreshore and bank in its jurisdiction into plots, with a register of who owns what. Most of the water is nationally owned, but there may be some disputes over ownership of access points and banks. These will be resolved in due course, as I'll explain.Each plot that is nationally owned should then be put up for auction with a 125-year lease, some for domestic use, some for commercial. The proceeds of the sale go to the local authority and the body in charge of the water on a 70:30 basis. We want to encourage individual owners. We want to discourage property speculators, landlords and corporate developers. So there will a maximum size to each plot and no body may buy more than one - at this stage. Buyers of domestic plots may be individuals or families – but no corporations. Against every plot a tax is then levied, which should be a proportion – likely 10% - of the annual rental value of that plot. That percentage rate is agreed in advance and, probably, fixed for the duration of the lease. Thus everyone will know where they stand. No chains are allowed in the commercial plots. Small businesses only.Every year for 125 years the lessee will pay, say, 10% of the rental value of the plot. If he/she doesn't want to pay the tax, they sell the plot to someone who is happy to. Rental values can be assessed every three years - but they are pretty easy to determine. You just look at what nearby plots are renting for.This tax revenue, as with the sale money, is shared 70:30 between the local authority and the body in charge of the waterway in that area, usually the Canal River Trust, thereby providing an income stream for both. The Authority then has an obligation to spend or invest that tax revenue maintaining and improving the waterways, in consultation with those who live on them. The lure of the tax and the sale revenue should encourage the compliance of both in the scheme, but the order should come from above - from central government.The administration of the tax should settle many issues surrounding ownership. In many cases it should force disputes to be settled. The obligation to pay tax will force many owners, either to make use of the plot - to develop it in some way (a way that is ecologically and aesthetically agreeable, of course) - or to sell it to someone who will. Once ownership is clear, and development possible, capital will follow.With individual families and small businesses developing floating properties according to their own needs and wants – self-build essentially – we are guiding development along the lines of a Schumacherian, “small is beautiful” ethos. The large building corporations (not to mention the regulators who approved their projects), who between them have between brought Britain its bland and characterless architecture of the last 70 years, will not be involved in any way. There will be certain craft specifications (usually a limit on size), but the main say will lie with the creator not the regulator. We do not want not homogenisation, but individuality and character. Individuals developing their own places to live and work will have a far greater incentive to create something unique and beautiful than a planner looking to tick boxes. Houses – and boats and barges – can be bought and sold for much closer to their build costs, a far cry from the astronomical prices paid elsewhere. It is unlikely banks will lend recklessly, if at all, thus will we keep “excess money creation” out of this market. The obligation to pay tax should deter speculators and land-bankers. Beautiful floating edifices can be built, homes, places of work and entertainment, water commerce can flourish once again, congestion elsewhere can ease. Fantastic communities can flourish - boating communities are as close-knit and happy as you get. Thus do we create a thriving new opportunity in the middle of our cities at a low cost to entrants. A market-based policy to alleviate the UK's housing shortage. Please share your thoughts. I'm particularly interested in any data there is on how much water is actually available. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

[Warning: this is a long post, and probably not of interest to everyone, but you never know. Also it's probably one to read rather than listen to, but some prefer the audio, so I've given you the choice.]As regular readers of my stuff will know, I'm of the view that a society should be designed around direct democracy and very low levels of land value tax (LVT), what Milton Friedman called “the least bad tax”. I may dream of Ancapistan, a land of no government, but the reality is that taxation of some kind, even if it be voluntary, is inevitable. There has never been a civilisation without taxation.Ideally, land value tax would replace ALL other taxes. However, if you offered me LVT in the UK and all other taxes, income tax especially, slashed to 10, 15 or even 20%, I'd bite your hand off. My friends in the countryside hate the idea, and I get angry messages about it, but the reality is that it is the owners of prime city centre real estate, the likes of the Crown, the Grosvenor Estate, major institutions and so on, who would bear the brunt, not ordinary homeowners or someone with 10 acres of field with no planning permission. (In my book Daylight Robbery, I argue for location value tax - it's the same as land value tax, but I use the word “location” because the location of the land - ie city centres - is more important than the actual amount of land).In any case, LVT is not going to happen here in the UK. Introducing a major new tax is too big an undertaking. It's easier for politicians to raise and lower the taxes they already impose, and tinker round the edges of the existing system. LVT would be a whopping vote-loser in a nation whose primary concept of wealth is the value of their house. Just explaining it, never mind getting it across the line, is hard enough. (If you want an explainer, by the way, there is one here and another here). Anyway this is all pre-amble, and I'm not here today to discuss the merits - or lack thereof - of LVT. For the purposes of this blog, just take my word that LVT keeps the relationship between ruler and citizen, between governor and governed, in healthy, transparent check. With LVT you would pay fewer taxes and lower levels of tax - ie less tax overall.So I've been trying to come up with a politically possible means by whichLVT can be implemented and shown in practice to workBeautiful housing can be made affordable to ordinary people without collapsing the housing market or having to reform the fiat money systemCorporations, particularly crony capitalist building companies, planners, regulators and government are kept out of it, and people can be left to their own ingenious devicesAnd, by George, I think I've got it.Here's my idea. I stress: it is just an idea I am working through so there are bound to be flaws. I'd be grateful for any comments, pointers, thoughts, statistics, data, and so on.Water Location Value TaxSummary:Today's unaffordable housing is a consequence of both our system of planning and our system of money. They have conspired. But wholesale reform to either as good as politically impossible. With Britain's over-leverage to housing, the financial repercussions of markedly lower house prices are politically intolerable. Instead we propose to bypass the housing market altogether with an initiative to re-populate the underused rivers, keys, docks and canals of Britain with houseboats, barges and floating homes. Local authorities and the land registry will determine who “owns” the water and the land beside it (most water is nationally owned). That which is not needed for transportation (eg the middle of rivers) will be parcelled off into small plots to be sold to individual owners – not corporate entities – on which they can then build or buy, then moor floating homes and other edifices. An annual Water Tax will then be levied along the lines of Henry George's Single Tax (land value tax), based on the rental value of the plot, payable to the local authority and to the body in charge of the waterway, usually the Canal River Trust.20 housing ministers since 1999The unaffordability of housing has been for twenty years or more one of the biggest issues in the country. As if to illustrate the priority this problem is being given in Whitehall, we have this:In fact, we have had two more, since Esther McVey and this chart: Christopher Pincher Stuart Andrew and Steward Andrew. I make that 20 different housing ministers since Hilary Armstrong in 1999. It's not what you would describe as evidence of a long-term strategy.It seems absurd that we should have any crisis at all. A house does not cost a lot of money to build. In China it has long been the case that a 3D printer can build a home in a day for about £3,000. Here in the UK you can buy a flatpack 3-bed house, which takes 6-7 hours to erect, yours for £24,000. The interior of one of architect, Renato Vidal's 3-bed, flat-packed homes, £24,000. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of land. Little more than 4% of the land in England and Wales is built on, even less in Scotland. This was the finding of the National Ecosystem Assessment in 2011: just 1.1% of rural and urban land in England and Wales has domestic property on it, another 1% has commercial property and 2% is roads. The rest – around 95% - is not built on. You could, in theory, double the housing stock of England and Wales, using little more than 1% of land. (It is more complicated than that but you take my point).How on earth have we got into the situation that in 21st century Britain almost an entire generation is “priced out”? Underlying cause of high house prices number one – money supplyBetween 1997 and 2007 the population grew by 5%, yet the housing stock grew by 10%.  If house prices were a simple function of supply and demand, they would have fallen slightly over the period. Instead, they tripled.Mortgage lending over the same period went up by 370%. It was the increased supply of money, which caused house prices to rise. Money supply increased at a rate of roughly 11.5% per annum in the 40 years between 1971 and 2011. Some 40% of it went into residential and commercial property. Roughly speaking, house price inflation mirrored money supply growth. The Bank of England has a remit to curb inflation, but it does not include house prices or money supply growth in its standard measures, and so house price inflation went unchecked. If interest rates had reflected 11.5% annual money supply growth, house price inflation would have been stopped in its tracks.  Underlying cause number two – planningPlanning laws are the second part of the problem. The newly created money poured into a market which had limited ability to expand.The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, passed by Clement Attlee's Labour Government, became the foundation of modern town and country planning in the UK, followed by new statutes in 1990 and 2004.  It was founded on the laudable aim “that all the land of the country is used in the best interests of the whole people”. What happened, however, was that it became difficult to get permission to build anything, so the act had the effect of reinforcing the monopoly of the landowner. Today, just 6,000 or so landowners (the Crown, large institutions and a few rich families) own more than 70% of UK land. Most people do not have the time and resources to navigate planning laws, so house building has become the preserve of a few large corporations. An acre of rural land worth £10,000 becomes an acre of land worth as much as £1m once it has planning permission. This is an expensive and utterly needless cost of government, and it goes a long way to explain why house prices are so much higher than build prices. The act led to huge concentrations of both people and capital in areas that were already built up – especially London – and brought vast, unearned wealth to those who owned at the expense of those who didn't. Our most beautiful domestic architecture was predominantly built in the 18th and 19th century, before planning laws. The more planning there is, the uglier buildings seem to get. This is causation not correlation: it is inevitable when the final say on creative decisions is in the hands of planners. Imagine Van Gogh needing regulatory approval on a painting. Here are some nice houses built before planning laws.Why this housing crisis is unsolvableTo solve the crisis requires two things: money reform and planning reform.  Both are such huge undertakings with such opposing vested interests as to be almost unachievable. As a nation, Britain is over-leveraged to housing. Too many people have too much money tied up in their house. The economic risks of significantly lower prices are high. What party standing for lower house prices would even get elected? Homeowners are more likely to vote than renters. The house price crash of 1989-94 was a major factor in making the Tories unelectable for half a generation. No party wants such a fate. A land value tax, along the lines of the Single Tax suggested by Henry George, would go a long way to resolving many of the housing market's distortions, but there is as little chance of that as there is of money and planning reform. Politicians promising new taxes when there is no national emergency tend not to be popular. Margaret Thatcher's Community Charge is one of many examples.There is an impossible deadlock. We must seek a solution elsewhere. In his 2009 essay, The Education of a Libertarian, tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel argued that political change cannot be achieved through political activism. Instead, one must “find an escape from politics in all its forms”, he says, and “focus on technologies that create a new space for freedom”. The Internet, for example, was one such “new space” albeit a virtual one.  In the future sea steading or outer space might be. “The mode for escape,” he says “must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.”It might be that there is an “undiscovered country” that exists in the middle of every major city of the UK: on its water.The most valuable real estate in the worldThere is a piece of prime Central London real estate, bigger than Hyde Park and better located. It is undeveloped - 150 years ago Londoners were making more use of it than they are today. Yet it could create all sorts of possibilities for people, not least billions of pounds worth of business, as well as lighten London's chronic congestion and housing problems. The River Thames.I lived for many years on a barge, docked on the Isle of Dogs. How it used to frustrate me, as we drove up the river, that this enormous resource, the Thames, was barely used.  A few party, pleasure and tour boats, some barges carrying freight, HMS Belfast, the Thames Clippers, a couple of floating restaurant-bars and the occasional mooring for houseboats. That's pretty much it. Plenty of office and apartment blocks have been built along each side (what a missed opportunity to produce something beautiful that was), but in front of them, from Teddington Lock to the Isle of Dogs and beyond, there is mile upon mile of unused bank wall, foreshore and river with hardly any activity. Here is Canaletto's Greenwich Hospital painted on the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs in around 1750. It is a haven of activity: boats ferrying people about, delivering goods, industry, commerce - as well as people living in boats moored on the river. It was bustling. Here is that same view today. There is nothing going on.This is the view from either side of Vauxhall Bridge. I took these pictures during the rush hour a couple of years back. Plenty is happening on either side, but on the river itself there is nothing going on. We cross the Thames, we walk along the side of it, we look at it, occasionally we take boat trips on it, but we don't actually use it. The River Thames used to be the lifeblood of London and we have lost touch with it. The story is the same in so many cities across the country. Each one has its water: its docks, its quays, its rivers, its canals. Almost invariably the banks have been developed in some way – the docks of Liverpool, Cardiff, Salford or Birmingham, for example - but the water itself just sits there, looking on – idly ignored. Canary Wharf is another example – even there, so much of the quay water goes almost unused. The waterways of Britain have become a relative economic desert.There should be houseboats, barges, floating structures, shops, restaurants, workplaces, offices, cinemas, theatres, small craft ferrying people in between. The possibilities are enormous. Of course there are ecological and aesthetic concerns, but these can be addressed. In London especially, but elsewhere too, there are safety issues with the tide and currents, but these are challenges which can easily be overcome by entrepreneurs, engineers and inventors between them. They managed 200 years ago. Take a leaf out of Venice's book, take a leaf out of Amsterdam's book, out of Seattle or Vancouver's book. But the mayor cannot just shout “everyone in a boat”. How then to develop our water? How to do it well? And why has it not happened before?Without clear ownership capital will not be investedOne of the barriers to development has been lack of clear ownership. On the non-tidal Thames (from Teddington Lock to the source in Oxfordshire), for example, there are riparian rights. The owner of the bank has ownership of the bed to the middle of the river. However, the middle of the river must be left clear for craft to pass and the Environment Agency limits what can and can't be done. (Can any lawyer readers confirm this?)On the tidal Thames, however – which stretches from Teddington Lock to the Estuary - these riparian rights are less clear. The Port Of London Authority (PLA) inherited ownership of the riverbed and the foreshore from the City of London in 1907. The bank and one boat width immediately next to it are owned by somebody else. Often there is a dispute over ownership of the wall alongside the river. Many moorings - Reed Wharf by Tower Bridge, Nine Elms in Vauxhall, St Mary's Church in Battersea, for example - have been there for decades, yet they are all constantly in and out of legal disputes over ownership. Much of the problem is that ownership was never registered and recorded in the same way that “normal” land was. Water moves.When ownership is not clear, capital is less likely to be risked. Things then fall into disrepair. Take a look at the mooring by St Mary's Church in Battersea if you want to see the depths of disrepair to which boats on an unmaintained mooring can sink (literally). This could be such a beautiful mooring. The spot is glorious (though not as nice as it was before they built those horrible glass fronted apartment blocks next to it).The disrepair gives rise to nimby-ism. Riverside properties don't want their view of the river spoiled by grotty old boats.  When they have control of the access point on the bank to the water, they have control of what can or can't happen. Moored boats, complain those who live on the river, even if lived on for many years, have fewer rights than squatters. They can be moved on with little notice or permission. The waters of Britain are, for the most part, nationally owned, under the stewardship of the Canal River Trust. The Environment Agency also has a role. In the case of the tidal Thames, the Port of London Authority is the body responsible. These bodies made certain decisions about how the waterways were to be used – no residential development on the Thames was one. But these decisions were taken without any kind of public vote. All three would vehemently defend this charge, but they have proved barriers to rather than facilitators of progress. None are popular with those who live on boats. Our goal is to sell small plots of water – on docks, canals, rivers, wherever there is ample space – to private (not corporate) owners. The owner, not the public body, will then have the say as to what they moor there. The solutionHow ironic that a land value tax could be the answer.The local authority, together with the land registry, should parcel up each area of water, foreshore and bank in its jurisdiction into plots, with a register of who owns what. Most of the water is nationally owned, but there may be some disputes over ownership of access points and banks. These will be resolved in due course, as I'll explain.Each plot that is nationally owned should then be put up for auction with a 125-year lease, some for domestic use, some for commercial. The proceeds of the sale go to the local authority and the body in charge of the water on a 70:30 basis. We want to encourage individual owners. We want to discourage property speculators, landlords and corporate developers. So there will a maximum size to each plot and no body may buy more than one - at this stage. Buyers of domestic plots may be individuals or families – but no corporations. Against every plot a tax is then levied, which should be a proportion – likely 10% - of the annual rental value of that plot. That percentage rate is agreed in advance and, probably, fixed for the duration of the lease. Thus everyone will know where they stand. No chains are allowed in the commercial plots. Small businesses only.Every year for 125 years the lessee will pay, say, 10% of the rental value of the plot. If he/she doesn't want to pay the tax, they sell the plot to someone who is happy to. Rental values can be assessed every three years - but they are pretty easy to determine. You just look at what nearby plots are renting for.This tax revenue, as with the sale money, is shared 70:30 between the local authority and the body in charge of the waterway in that area, usually the Canal River Trust, thereby providing an income stream for both. The Authority then has an obligation to spend or invest that tax revenue maintaining and improving the waterways, in consultation with those who live on them. The lure of the tax and the sale revenue should encourage the compliance of both in the scheme, but the order should come from above - from central government.The administration of the tax should settle many issues surrounding ownership. In many cases it should force disputes to be settled. The obligation to pay tax will force many owners, either to make use of the plot - to develop it in some way (a way that is ecologically and aesthetically agreeable, of course) - or to sell it to someone who will. Once ownership is clear, and development possible, capital will follow.With individual families and small businesses developing floating properties according to their own needs and wants – self-build essentially – we are guiding development along the lines of a Schumacherian, “small is beautiful” ethos. The large building corporations (not to mention the regulators who approved their projects), who between them have between brought Britain its bland and characterless architecture of the last 70 years, will not be involved in any way. There will be certain craft specifications (usually a limit on size), but the main say will lie with the creator not the regulator. We do not want not homogenisation, but individuality and character. Individuals developing their own places to live and work will have a far greater incentive to create something unique and beautiful than a planner looking to tick boxes. Houses – and boats and barges – can be bought and sold for much closer to their build costs, a far cry from the astronomical prices paid elsewhere. It is unlikely banks will lend recklessly, if at all, thus will we keep “excess money creation” out of this market. The obligation to pay tax should deter speculators and land-bankers. Beautiful floating edifices can be built, homes, places of work and entertainment, water commerce can flourish once again, congestion elsewhere can ease. Fantastic communities can flourish - boating communities are as close-knit and happy as you get. Thus do we create a thriving new opportunity in the middle of our cities at a low cost to entrants. A market-based policy to alleviate the UK's housing shortage. Please share your thoughts. I'm particularly interested in any data there is on how much water is actually available. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit frisby.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of the podcast Will is joined by Nathan Yeowell, Director of Progressive Britain and Labour to Win, to discuss a new book which Nathan has contributed to and edited entitled Rethinking Labour's Past. They discuss some of the key figures in the history of the Labour Party such as Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson and how they impacted the history of the Labour Party; Labour's relationship to the Democrats in the US and why Nathan decided to compile the book in the first place.  You can buy this excellent book from Bloomsbury here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/rethinking-labours-past-9780755640164/#:~:text=A%20captivating%2C%20kaleidoscopic%20collection%2C%20packed,future%20of%20the%20Labour%20Party. If you use the code PROGRESSIVE35 via Bloomsbury you will be able to get a 35% discount on the book. 

The story of the 1945 Labour government

Marking the third centenary of the office of Prime Minister, The Impossible Office?: The History of the British Prime Minister (Cambridge UP, 2021) tells its extraordinary story, explaining how and why it has endured longer than any other democratic political office in world history. Sir Anthony Seldon, historian of Number 10 Downing Street, explores the lives and careers, loves and scandals, successes and failures, of all our great Prime Ministers. From Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Younger, to Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, Seldon discusses which of our Prime Ministers have been most effective and why. He reveals the changing relationship between the Monarchy and the office of the Prime Minister in intimate detail, describing how the increasing power of the Prime Minister in becoming leader of Britain coincided with the steadily falling influence of the Monarchy. This book celebrates the humanity and frailty, work and achievement, of these 55 remarkable individuals, who averted revolution and civil war, leading the country through times of peace, crisis and war. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House's International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marking the third centenary of the office of Prime Minister, The Impossible Office?: The History of the British Prime Minister (Cambridge UP, 2021) tells its extraordinary story, explaining how and why it has endured longer than any other democratic political office in world history. Sir Anthony Seldon, historian of Number 10 Downing Street, explores the lives and careers, loves and scandals, successes and failures, of all our great Prime Ministers. From Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Younger, to Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, Seldon discusses which of our Prime Ministers have been most effective and why. He reveals the changing relationship between the Monarchy and the office of the Prime Minister in intimate detail, describing how the increasing power of the Prime Minister in becoming leader of Britain coincided with the steadily falling influence of the Monarchy. This book celebrates the humanity and frailty, work and achievement, of these 55 remarkable individuals, who averted revolution and civil war, leading the country through times of peace, crisis and war. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House's International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

Cette semaine, Un doc Un soir vous propose deux épisodes simultanés pour un thème aussi complexe que prisé des réalisateurs: le passage à l'âge adulte. Deux épisodes pour deux films: Les bonnes conditions de Julie Gavras, sorti en 2018, et Chante ton bac d'abord de David André, sorti en 2014. Deux chroniques sociales très différentes pour aborder l'adolescence, le déterminisme social, les choix de vie et l'héritage familial. Pendant treize ans, Julie Gavras a suivi huit jeunes, de leurs 16 ans à leurs 29 ans. Le film commence sur ces huit adolescents, élèves du très chic lycée Victor Duruy dans le 7ème arrondissement de Paris, tous issus de milieux sociaux très privilégiés; et s'achève sur des adultes qui ont fait leurs choix de vie, parfois attendus, parfois surprenants. Le film, diffusé sur Arte en mai 2018, est disponible sur le site VOD de la chaîne. Les trois recommandations de Julie Gavras: sa perle introuvable: L'esprit de‘45, documentaire de Ken Loach (2013), sur les changements sociaux-économiques de l'Angleterre dans l'immédiat après-guerre, pendant le gouvernement du travailliste Clement Attlee. “Moi qui ai grandi ou appris l'histoire de l'Angleterre ultralibérale avec Thatcher. Et puis tout ce qui s'en est suivi. J'ai découvert un pays avec une idéologie et un enthousiasme, mais un humanisme tellement différent que ce qu'on voit aujourd'hui que ça vaut vraiment le coup de le voir.” Disponible en VOD sur UniversCiné, FilmoTV, Orange VOD, et en streaming sur Vimeo. sa référence: Hitler, connais pas! , de Bertrand Blier (1963): Composé de témoignages de onze jeunes gens interrogés en 1963 sur leur vie et leurs aspirations, une enquête sur la jeunesse réalisée par Bertrand Blier, alors âgé de vingt-deux ans. “C'est un film uniquement à base d'interviews, en noir et blanc. C'est des jeunes qui sont assis sur un tabouret au milieu d'un studio. Ils ne font que parler et tout est dans ce qu'ils disent, et dans le travail de montage.” Disponible en VOD sur Arte, et Orange VOD. le film qui lui a donné envie de réaliser: 1974, une partie de campagne, de Raymond Depardon: Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, alors ministre de l'Economie et des Finances, se lance dans une campagne présidentielle « à l'américaine ». Raymond Depardon, sur commande de VGE, suit partout le fringant candidat et capte des instants rares et historiques de la classe politique française. Longtemps censuré, le film ne sera diffusé pour la première fois qu'en 2002. “Je l'ai vu à la Cinématèque à 10-11 ans et je suis contente de l'avoir fait parce que c'est la première fois que je me suis dit qu'un documentaire, ça pouvait être aussi passionnant qu'un film de fiction.” Disponible sur Arte VOD La recommandation bonus de Julie Gavras, qui ne rentre dans aucune de nos catégories: Documentary Now: “C'est une émission faite par des anciens de Saturday Night Live qui reprennent des documentaires mythiques et qui en font une espèce de parodie en 20 minutes. C'est très drôle et c'est vraiment formidable à regarder parce que ça permet de voir toute la diversité formelle possible des documentaires.” Disponible sur Netflix (catalogue US) et Canal Plus Des documentaires qui vous ont plu? Des réalisateurs que vous aimeriez entendre? Contactez-nous par email undocunsoir@gmail.com ou sur notre compte Instagram.

Iain Dale talks to historian Sir Anthony Seldon about the life and premiership of Clement Attlee, who held the office of Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951.

Few decades have given rise to such potent mythologies as the 1930s. Popular impressions of those years prior to the Second World War were shaped by the single outstanding personality of that conflict, Winston Spencer Churchill. Churchill depicted himself as a political prophet, exiled into the wilderness prior to 1939 by those who did not want to hear of the growing threats to peace in Europe. Although it is a familiar story, it is one we need to unlearn as the truth is somewhat murkier. Robert Crowcroft's The End is Nigh: British Politics, Power, and the Road to the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a tale of relentless intrigue, burning ambition, and the bitter rivalry in British politics during the years preceding the Second World War. Building on both the revisionist and the post-revisionist scholarship of the last forty-years, Crowcroft's narrative goes from the corridors of Whitehall to the smoking rooms of Parliament, and from aircraft factories to summit meetings with Hitler, the book offers a fresh and provocative interpretation of one of the most crucial moments of British history. It assembles a cast of iconic characters--Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden, Ernest Bevin, and more--to explore the dangerous interaction between high politics at Westminster and the formulation of national strategy in a world primed to explode. In the twenty-first century we are accustomed to being cynical about politicians, mistrusting what they say and wondering about their real motives, but Crowcroft, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Edinburgh and Associate Fellow at the War Studies Department at University College London, argues that this was always the character of democratic politics. In The End is Nigh he challenges some of the most resilient public myths of recent decades--myths that, even now, remain an important component of Britain's self-image. Described by Christopher Montgomery in Standpoint as brilliant and a ‘savage and subtle critique of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy, The End is Nigh is by any stretch of the imagination a book that the serious student of history should have on his desk for his summer reading. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House's International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture 2019, given by Lisa Nandy MP for Wigan

The Zeitgeist Tapes on tour!  This month, Emma has dragged Steve all the way down to 'That London' to a play above a pub in Clapham. But a play about Clement Attlee so very much on brand.  Listen to us chat while our teeth chatter (all will be revealed).

His friend, colleague, and esteemed political foe Clement Attlee once memorialized Winston Churchill as "the greatest Englishman of our time - I think the greatest citizen of the world of our time." More than a half-century later, Churchill's life remains proof that a single individual can change the course of history for the better and make of life a blessed and noble thing, despite public and private trials too numerous to name.Who was this extraordinary man who rose up at an hour when freedom and right stood in mortal peril before tyranny and terror to rally the British people? To say with courage, genius, and eloquence, "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"Moreover, how did he accomplish this amazing feat? And how was it that this achievement was just a single part of a long and fruitful life in a stunning array of endeavors?In these 12 inspiring lectures, Professor Fears presents a well-balanced portrait of Churchill that does not whitewash his flaws. Yet he also draws on the most recent historical scholarship and material from Churchill's writings and speeches to make the case that Churchill belongs with Pericles of Athens and Abraham Lincoln as one of the greatest statesmen in the history of democracy.

Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture 2018, given by Paul Mason, journalist and author of 'Post-Capitalism: A Guide to our Future' (2015).