The cheers and bouquets with which he was greeted on visiting Pristina reinforced his messianic faith in the virtue of ‘liberal interventionism’. In 2022,’ he reminds us, ‘Transparency International, the global anti-corruption campaign group, described Britain as a ‘safe haven for corrupt individuals, their allies and assets. Throwing in just enough resource to keep the war going for a long time, but never putting any boots on the ground. In fact, Heath was defeated by the trade unions, which simply boycotted his industrial legislation, and by the Arab oil embargo, which began in 1973 and which made a national coal miners’ strike in the winter of 1973–74 particularly effective. However, like the notion of national unity during World War II, this interpretation can also be seen largely as a myth produced by politicians and the press at the time and perpetuated since.

Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya are all analysed as more or less disastrous interventions by the UK pursuing deluded objectives with inadequate strategic planning or resource and no stomach to carry anything through to a pre-meditated objective. He even argues that Kosovo -usually seen as a success - was ultimately unhelpful for the Balkans, although it did result in a generation of children being named after Tony Blair. Each colony's unique societies presented different political pressures which could sometimes lead to violence ranging from riots to massacres. According to the philosopher John Gray, this became a utopian project based on a quasi-religious faith in progress, the subjective power of reason, free markets, and the unbounded potential of technology.A web that has amplified the ambitions, ineptitudes, and abilities of ten infamous characters in contemporary British political culture. We talk about choices and democracy and representation, but what can people do when they have such a corrupt, oppressive and violent government? Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Pro- and anti-Brexit demonstrators outside parliament in October 2019.

The reason for the book’s title and the word ‘broke’, is that there is a terrifying arc, or echo if you prefer, that connects Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 back to the then Labour government’s decision to take military action in Kosovo, followed by war in Iraq in 2003, neither of which were played out according to the ‘rules.

Desperate to do some ‘real soldiering’, and to rescue their position, it was the acute embarrassment of Basra that bounced UK defence chiefs into the next big adventure in Afghanistan, where despite the doleful and enormous lessons of history and the loss of most of an army as early as 1842 (the First Anglo-Afghan War), not a single soul paused to consider the risks or realities. If you are blindly left wing then you’ll likely feel short changed by the treatment of Jeremy Corbyn, but then counting can be the scurge of bias: it’s for proving or disproving. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. In the first half of the twentieth century, the death of Empire occasioned a similar feeling that the nation’s identity and power had somehow collapsed. It also makes his criticisms of some extremely hard-working journalists (the BBC’s former political editor, Laura Kuenssberg; the presenter of Today, Nick Robinson) seem snide and unnecessary.

The Afghans I met in Helmand saw our arrival as another phase in the ebb and flow of our presence in the region.The pound was sharply devalued in 1949, and a general election on February 23, 1950, reduced Labour’s majority over the Conservative and Liberal parties to only five seats. Unlike many foreign ministries in comparable countries, the Foreign Office does not recruit or promote experts to senior management roles. The Labour government faced severe economic challenges—including post-World War II record levels of unemployment and inflation—yet Wilson was able to renegotiate British membership in the EEC, which was confirmed in a referendum in June 1975.

Sometimes you may be asked to solve the CAPTCHA if you are using advanced terms that robots are known to use, or sending requests very quickly.While decolonisation across South and South East Asia seemed inevitable, the territory of the British Empire was at its apogee in 1945 and the journey to independence for countries in this region was not simple. In How Britain Broke the World, his first book, former senior British diplomat Arthur Snell (Magdalen, 1994) serves up gracefully written history of ‘Britain in the world’ that goes from Blair/Kosovo and Blair/Iraq right through to Brexit and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, taking account of many chapters in between such as Afghanistan, Libya and other UK geo-political relations including China, India and Russia. It was a day of piercing cold and as I walked through the twilight from the Sheldonian to Christ Church, the streets were empty and the whole city was shutting itself away. Hutton argues for a new kind of politics that harnesses the power of the collective to transform the economy, leadership and society for the better. British-made bombs, engineers, targeters, analysts and “liaison officers” all keep the Saudi jets flying.