Monthly Archives: May 2015

This week’s of contemporary British history on TV demonstrates what is wrong with the genre – too much romanticised nostalgia and too little questioning and probing of our collective past.  Only Panorama seems likely to deliver something serious if it can come with the goods on the British state collusion with loyalist paramilitaries during the Troubles.  Unusually, Radio 4 is a complete washout this week.  Details can be found on the TV and Radio page.

Not a great deal this week.  A couple of men-and-motors clip fests posing as documentaries (sorry about the picture, but i could find a picture of EH Carr in a Jag).  The most likely highlight is Radio 4’s all too short examination of Ukrainians in Britain.  Details can be found on the TV and Radio page.

If Thomas Picketty’s book put the study of inequality into a thoroughly grounded historical context, then Tony Atkinson is that history.  He has been attempting to assert that inequality and income distribution should be a central concern of mainstream economics since the 1960s, and has been a major influence on Picketty.

When he started writing this was a matter of deepening the state policy that was, to a degree, acting a countervailing force to the inequalities that an unmitigated market would have created.  Since the end of the 1970s he has been arguing against the neo-liberal orthodoxies that have dominated both economic theory and government policy.

It would be good to produce a fully grounded historical account of this process, and there are elements of this in Atkinson’s book.  But in lieu of that, here is a critical review of Atkinson’s book.

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I will be writing an analysis of UKIP’ 2015 election result in due course.  In April 2014 I wrote a critique of Ford and Goodwin’s book on UKIP, Revolt on the Right, arguing that they overestimated the potential of UKIP to break through electorally.  In particularly, I questioned the assertion that UKIP were imminently about the start making inroads Labour’s working class electoral base.  This is, particularly on Matthew Goodwin’s part, allied to something of a “Blue Labour” view that the Labour Party needs to be more assertive in accommodating the anti-immigration views of many in its potential electoral base.

In this review I argued that Ford and Goodwin’s view that UKIP could break through into Westminster politics was at best an exaggeration, but more likely based on a reading of their statistical data that was simply wrong.  The election result, I think, bears this view out (although this needs much more detailed analysis).  The original piece bears re-reading in this context. Read it here.

Maybe it the election, but the recent history of Britain receives very short shrift in the broadcast this week with just two programmes:  a re-run about working class solidarity on the Caledonian Road in north London and a look at racism and Caribbean serviceman in Britain in the Second World War.  Oddly for Radio 4, there is nothing on offer at all. Detail can be found on the TV and Radio page.

Nothing that could be considered related to British history since 1945 on terrestrial TV this week, unless one counts ITV clips programme of election over the last 50 years (Weds 6th, 10:40pm Unforgettable Election Moments: 60 Years On) which I don’t. (Was 1959, not 1955 the first TV election in the UK, and does not even that overstate it a bit?)  Not even Radio 4 can step into this breach, although at a push Archive of 4’s The New Language of Pain could be considered relevant (Saturday 2nd May, 8:00pm).  The programme which looks at the changing way in which people have described pain, which (if we are lucky) we raise more questions than it answers.

UPDATE.

I didn’t look at the BBC Parliament Channel, which often has interest snippets from the past on it (they has a fantastic six hours of coverage from the February 1974 election night programme a couple of Christmases ago).  It thought that it would be dedicated to the general election at the moment, but we have a number of interesting programmes coming up over the weekend.

From 9:00pm to 9:35pm Saturday 2^nd May we have a trio of programmes When Nobody Wins with Professor Iain McLean will give, one assumes, a perspective based on the devolved settlement; Professor Peter Hennessy will certainly be the most historically grounded; and Catherin Haddon of the Institute of Government may relate to more immediate constitutional concerns.

On Sunday, Peter Snow looks at TV coverage of the elections in 60 years of Swing on Sunday at 9pm on the Parliament Channel.

Nothing that could be considered related to British history since 1945 on terrestrial TV this week, unless one counts ITV clips programme of election over the last 50 years (Weds 6^th, 10:40pm Unforgettable Election Moments: 60 Years On) which I don’t. (Was 1959, not 1955 the first TV election in the UK, and does not even that overstate it a bit?)  Not even Radio 4 can step into this breach, although at a push Archive of 4’s The New Language of Pain could be considered relevant (Saturday 2^nd May, 8:00pm).  The programme which looks at the changing way in which people have described pain, which (if we are lucky) we raise more questions than it answers.