Category: British History
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New CFP: The First Eric Richards Symposium in British and Australasian History (31 Jan – 3 Feb 2017)
This is a call for papers for a conference organised by my colleague Andrekos Varnava. It looks exciting. Hopefully see you all there! The First Eric Richards Symposium in British and Australasian History Tuesday 31 January – Friday 3 February 2017 The School of History and International Relations, Flinders University, and the other sponsors of…
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The UK Home Office and American Nazis: The Deportation of George Lincoln Rockwell
Earlier this week, a researcher at the BBC contacted me to ask about other cases of the Home Office refusing visas to ‘undesirable’ political figures, as Parliament was to debate the petition calling for Donald Trump to banned from entering the country. Amongst the cases that I could remember, one of the most interesting cases…
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New archival documents reveal potential dangers of Thatcher’s advisers on policing and community relations issues
The latest round of government papers from the Thatcher era have been released by the National Archives, this time relating to documents from 1986 to 1988. Amongst the papers that have been released is a Prime Minister’s Office file (PREM 19/1783) relating to the 1985 riots in Handsworth and Tottenham, continuing on from these files…
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The Communist Party’s campaign for the Race Relations Act 1965
This month is the fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of the Race Relations Act 1965 by the Wilson government, the first piece of legislation dealing with racial discrimination in the United Kingdom. As I have argued elsewhere (here and here), a major part of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s anti-racist activism between the 1950s…
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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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Public engagement ftw!
Two guest posts by yours truly have been published in the last two days. The first is on my research into the UK perspective on the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975 and has been published by The Conversation. The second is on Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and their view of Australia as…
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‘By whatever means necessary’: The origins of the ‘no platform’ policy
Recently the concept of ‘no platform’ was in the news again when there were attempts to cancel a talk by Germaine Greer at Cardiff University. While there is no doubt that the use of ‘no platform’ has expanded since its first use in the 1970s, the term is bandied about in the media with little…
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IS/SWP Internal & Pre-Conference Bulletins 1974-1984 on anti-racism/anti-fascism
Next in the bunch of documents that I am looking to digitise is the internal and pre-conference bulletins of the International Socialists and Socialist Workers Party. The documents that I have scanned were especially requested by another researcher so they are no the full IBs, but selections relating to anti-racism, anti-fascism and the SWP’s black…
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Removing the barriers to deportation from the UK: Lord Carrington and counter-terrorist efforts in the early 1980s
A story has appeared in The Guardian today that the UK Appeals Court has ruled that it is legal for foreign convicted criminals to be deported without their chance to appeal from the United Kingdom. The right to appeal before deportation was originally enshrined in the Immigrants Appeals Act 1969 and was long considered a…
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