HebrideanUltraTerfHecate on Nostr: https://thecritic.co.uk/british-politics-needs-more-history/ We must do better than ...
https://thecritic.co.uk/british-politics-needs-more-history/
We must do better than this. Without being glib or platitudinous, there is obvious value in rigorous analysis of history, especially recent history, and in the distillation of lessons about what worked, what went wrong and why policies succeeded or failed.
The past can offer us useful experience and shortcuts in our learning processes; when the Falklands crisis erupted unexpectedly in 1982, Margaret Thatcher consulted her aged predecessor as prime minister, 88-year-old Harold Macmillan, about managing a conflict. Drawing on his experience in Churchill’s wartime government and during the Suez crisis, he advised her to assemble a small “war cabinet” in which HM Treasury should not be represented.
This was created in the form of OD(SA), the Cabinet Defence and Overseas Policy Sub-Committee on the South Atlantic and Falkland Islands, and consisted of the prime minister, the foreign, home and defence secretaries, the attorney-general, the chief of the Defence Staff and the chairman of the Conservative Party. No Treasury ministers were involved, and the chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, later said it was “like being on sabbatical”.
A few years ago, Sir Anthony Seldon proposed that each government department should have “an active historian advising ministers on historical precedent”, and there should be a “chief historian” alongside the chief scientific adviser, the national statistician and other experts. This luminary would “oversee the steady supply of accurate historical information to the prime minister and his key advisers, with the power and confidence to challenge them”.
We must do better than this. Without being glib or platitudinous, there is obvious value in rigorous analysis of history, especially recent history, and in the distillation of lessons about what worked, what went wrong and why policies succeeded or failed.
The past can offer us useful experience and shortcuts in our learning processes; when the Falklands crisis erupted unexpectedly in 1982, Margaret Thatcher consulted her aged predecessor as prime minister, 88-year-old Harold Macmillan, about managing a conflict. Drawing on his experience in Churchill’s wartime government and during the Suez crisis, he advised her to assemble a small “war cabinet” in which HM Treasury should not be represented.
This was created in the form of OD(SA), the Cabinet Defence and Overseas Policy Sub-Committee on the South Atlantic and Falkland Islands, and consisted of the prime minister, the foreign, home and defence secretaries, the attorney-general, the chief of the Defence Staff and the chairman of the Conservative Party. No Treasury ministers were involved, and the chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, later said it was “like being on sabbatical”.
A few years ago, Sir Anthony Seldon proposed that each government department should have “an active historian advising ministers on historical precedent”, and there should be a “chief historian” alongside the chief scientific adviser, the national statistician and other experts. This luminary would “oversee the steady supply of accurate historical information to the prime minister and his key advisers, with the power and confidence to challenge them”.