Category: 1989
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Policing football crowds and the aftermath of Hillsborough: What the new Thatcher papers reveal, pt 2
In my previous post looking at the policing of acid house parties in the late Thatcher period, I noted that the Home Office complained: No amount of statutory power will make it feasible for police forces to take on crowds of thousands on a regular basis. We cannot have another drain on police resources equivalent…
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Policing Acid House Parties in 1989: What the new Thatcher Government papers reveal
The latest round of papers from the Prime Minister’s Office have been released, relating to the final years of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1989-90. While files on several topics have been opened, this post will look at the file dedicated the policing of ‘acid house parties’ (also known as raves) in 1989. As I’ve mentioned…
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Historians and the online archive of the Hillsborough Independent Panel
Last week, the jury from the Hillsborough Inquest found that the 96 victims of the Hillsborough Disaster on 15 April, 1989 had been unlawfully killed. This new inquest, established by the Attorney General in December 2012, relied heavily on the uncovering of over 450,000 documents by the Hillsborough Independent Panel, itself established in January 2010…
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How the Morning Star reported the collapse of the Ceausescu regime in December 1989
By late December 1989, the revolution sweeping across the Eastern Bloc had reached Romania and in the days before Christmas, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu attempted to shore up his regime by launching a military offensive against those protesting against the dictatorship. On December 21, Ceausescu attempted to give a speech in Bucharest which descended into…
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‘Fortress Britain’ and the end of the Cold War
Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian this week that the walls and barriers that had fallen in 1989 were being rebuilt in 2015. A cartoon in the pages of Marxism Today published in December 1989 seems to have made the same argument – that while the West celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall,…
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How the Morning Star reported the fall of the Berlin Wall
Two days before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Morning Star (the paper nominally tied to the newly established Communist Party of Britain) had a two page spread celebrating the 72nd anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. Interviewing Yuri Kasin of the Soviet Union’s Social Sciences Institute, the article praised…
New Historical Express 