Category: National Archives (UK)
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The West German police, the RAF manhunt and the killing of a British citizen: Reading the (slim) FCO file on the death of Iain Macleod
This is the draft of a paper that I presented at the online conference of the Australasian Association of European Historians last year. It is a reading of the rather slim FCO file on the death of Iain Macleod, a British citizen who was killed by the West German police during a raid on a…
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Orgreave is not merely history, but an important historical incident that needs to be fully investigated
To Guardian journalist Simon Jenkins, just over thirty years ago is too far into the past for an inquiry into the events at Orgreave in June 1984, when the police reacted violently to striking workers in South Yorkshire and led to the arrest of 95 miners, as well as a number of people injured. Jenkins argues…
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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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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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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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The road to ‘The Dismissal’ in 1975: The British perspective
The Museum of Australian Democracy has announced that in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, it will be tweeting the events of late 1975 leading up to 11 November. This will be a very interesting for those into in Australian history and helpful in understanding how the events in…
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Policing Communism Across the British Empire: A Transnational Study
This is a revised (yet shortened) version of the conference paper I gave last week at the XXIV Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History. I am currently knocking it into shape for submission as a journal article, so any feedback, comments or questions is most welcome. If you’re interested in reading the…
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Determining the number of ‘virginity testing’ cases within the UK immigration control system
On this day (February 19) in 1979, Labour MP Jo Richardson led the criticism in the House of Commons of the Home Office and the Home Secretary Merlyn Rees over the gynaecological and physical examinations conducted upon South Asian women migrating to the UK, colloquially known as ‘virginity testing’. During this session of parliament, Rees…
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Exploiting the Pearce Commission: The British Communist Party and the national liberation struggle in Rhodesia, pt 2
This is the second part in a three-part series of blog posts about the Communist Party of Great Britain’s relationship with the national liberation struggle in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe between 1965 and 1979. This post focuses on the Pearce Commission in 1972 and how the Communists used it to publicise its opposition to the Smith regime. After…
New Historical Express 