History in Policy

‘Public history’ is something of a misnomer. The degree to which history which can influence policy is ‘public’ is a difficult question. E. H. Carr writes in his What Is History? that, when he was working in a junior capacity at the Paris peace conference in 1919, all the diplomats and their staffs took extra care to empty their wastepaper baskets. They were thinking of the discussions surrounding the peace treaty after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, and the history they used to inform their actions was a titbit of information about that time: that nefarious negotiators spied on their opposite numbers’ plans by going through their waste paper. Carr uses this to illustrate the fallacy of thinking one can ultimately ‘learn from history’ in a way which is total and all-encompassing. Each moment in time presents new and unique challenges. One cannot rely simply on knowing the past to know the present, or indeed to predict the future.

Let Us Be Sensible: In Praise of NHS Reform

The National Health Service was founded over 60 years ago and was intended originally to meet the needs of Britain in the immediate post-war period. Not only did it seem to cover the crippling costs of the new political situation, it seemed to demonstrate the same spirit which the British people had entered into during the course of that war. It was publicly financed, publicly run, and it was intended to pay for itself. None of these grand aspirations have been met, and the service itself is now a shallow husk of the great promise it used to embody. For these reasons I believe that it is time for a radical re-evaluation of what the NHS means and its place in society; we cannot afford to be timid or meek in this endeavour.