90. A war fought for no good reason

The ‘flapper election’ took place on 30 May 1929. The reference was top ‘flappers’, fashionable and slightly shocking young women of the 1920s, who could vote in it because, at last, universal suffrag...

22 Sep 202414min

We pick up the story just after the defeat of the 1926 British General Strike. It was a bad time for the unions, with strikes accounting for only just over a fifth as many working days lost in the wh...

15 Sep 202414min

It's time for A History of England to take a short break, until 15 September. So this episode is a brief review of where we’ve got to, after the defeat of the General Strike. That defeat showed the po...

18 Aug 20246min

It’s the general strike! This time the unions couldn’t push Stanley Baldwin’s government into making concessions to the miners. That was because while, in his own words, in the previous year Baldwin ...

11 Aug 202414min

The Labour government was kicked out of office at the 1924 General Election, in a campaign marked by the Conservative-leaning Daily Mail engaging in some fake news. It published a forged letter claimi...

4 Aug 202414min

In contrast to the last episode, where we saw how dire the state of the British economy was and how close to violent confrontation society was coming, this episode is the one where we find Britain rea...

28 Jul 202414min

The promise of building Britain into a ‘land fit for heroes’ never came close to being kept. Instead inflation undermined wages, unemployment rose, and living conditions, with widespread slum housing,...

21 Jul 202414min

Before moving on from the times when Lloyd George held power, we take a look in this episode at one of the major moments of his time as an international statesman: the Paris Peace Conference and, abov...

14 Jul 202414min