During the 2017 General Election I happened to be driving through Hastings, a town I know well and lived in for a few years. I was surprised to see a large group of Labour canvassers out in a fairly Tory part of the town. Hastings has gone Labour in the past but it was far from being an obvious target. I concluded that the folk I saw were enthusiastic but perhaps a little too optimistic. After all the media was assuring us that far from picking up places like Hastings Labour was on course to lose out badly. In fact one union leader set the bar pretty low by saying that if Labour only lost 20 seats it would be an acceptable result. Continue reading
Author Archives: Colin
Labour – The Summer That Changed Everything BBC2 20/11/17
Filed under History & Current Affairs
Betting The House by Tim Ross
Elections can often be dramatic and unpredictable events. But they are often soul destroying and boring as well. The UK’s 2015 one was just dispiriting. The referendum on the EU was not much fun either. And when Theresa May called her snap election in 2017 it looked like it would simply be the worse possible example of the genre. Continue reading
Filed under History & Current Affairs, Uncategorized
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 42 – Establishment of the Lombards on the Danube
We have given a lot of attention to the campaigns of Belisarius, especially those in Italy. Gibbon covers it all in sumptuous detail. I think we can assume that the court in Constantinople did as well. Big events like the recapture of Rome and Ravenna are bound to be seen as important and significant. Continue reading
Filed under Byzantine Empire, Gibbon
What Is Happening With Political Parties?
Edward Heath led the Conservatives in the 1970s
I wrote this back in 2015 just after Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour Party leader, but before his MPs started the process of trying to get rid of him. At the time his rise seemed the most surprising and unpredicted political event. I didn’t trouble publishing it at the time. It isn’t particularly insightful or even very well written. But it does show how quickly events change how things seem.
I really really wish I had kept the slip of paper I put in my jacket pocket one Saturday night in 1978. I was 18, and was devoting considerable efforts to try and get a girlfriend. This was the height of the Disco era, so it was discos I mostly went to. But a straight forward old fashioned dance was worth a try as well. So this particular weekend I had ended up in the Conservative Club in the seaside town where I grew up, at a dance. I seem to remember enjoying it, but didn’t manage to pull anyone which was my main objective at the time. It was only the next day that I realised that by picking the cheaper admission option I had actually joined the Conservative Party and had a membership card to prove it. Continue reading
Filed under 20th Century
Trump Isn’t Hitler. He Is Augustus. And That Is Nearly As Bad
Ruler of the world, but not his own hair
I don’t think it is a great idea to use historical parallels as a guide to present day actions. Just because things played out a particular way back then there’s no reason they should do so again in the same way. And worse than that, historical parallels can be very bad guides to action. For example, the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden described Egyptian president Nasser as another Hitler to justify invading Egypt to take control of the Suez canal. Continue reading
Filed under History & Current Affairs
Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli
Dante’s vision of the universe prefigured 20th Century ideas
Reality turns out not to be what it seems. I have a feeling that there was never a time when people who thought about it actually believed that the Earth was flat. But we have certainly believed lots of things that are equally untrue since we evolved brains that had the capability to ponder these matters. Continue reading
Filed under History in Culture
The Holy Roman Empire By Peter Wilson
The Holy Roman Empire gets written out of European history to a large extent. This is despite having been founded by Charlemagne and ended by Napoleon and having played a big part in the history of wide chunks of Europe in between. Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope
In Victorian Britain married women were firmly under the control of men. They were obliged to be obedient to their husbands and could not own property independent of him. Okay it sounds great in theory, but how did it actually work? Continue reading
Filed under 19th Century, History in Culture
The View From The Foothills by Chris Mullin
I am interested in politics, but I don’t follow the day to day political coverage very much. I do have the occasional binge. I get caught up sometimes in a big story like an election or a big scandal. But this is pretty much like someone who has got their eating disorder under control having the odd relapse. A daily diet of news stories spun by the politicians themselves and filtered through a media owned by vested interests is much like eating fast food. It feeds a craving, and you enjoy it at the time, but doesn’t really give you what you need. Continue reading
Filed under History & Current Affairs
The Secret History – Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 41 Part 5
We’ve all got used to social media and communicating over the internet. We instinctively know what the real meaning of a lot of communications are. You can tell that an email or a message on Twitter is not genuine even without reading the whole thing. But put yourself in the place of an historian looking back on the 21st century from a 1,000 years in the future. Human nature probably won’t be very different, but the social context will have changed enormously. Many of the social conventions we regard as so obvious we hardly even feel the need to notice let alone explain will be far from obvious any more. There will probably be a thesis written on exactly what LOL means. Our future digital historian might well ponder statistics about how many plaintive tweets went unanswered and ponder how lonely people using Twitter used to be in the early years of the twentieth century. As to what they will make of Twitter exchanges between famous people – well we all know that their accounts are run by their offices. But how do we know that? Again, taken out of context would it make any sense? Continue reading
Filed under Byzantine Empire, Gibbon