This is the most dramatic and important democratic decision ever taken by the British people. But it leaves our country deeply divided. Andrew Marr, The Andrew Marr Show 26 June 2016
This has been the rebellion of the diminished against the cocky, the ignored against the shapers of modern times, and the struggling against the strutting. ibid.
Princess Elizabeth, just 25 years old, was now Queen Elizabeth II. Churchill was on his way to address the Commons. Despite his grief, he saw in the young and glamorous queen the promise of a new Elizabeth age to rival even the golden age of Elizabeth I. New Elizabethans With Andrew Marr I: Building a New Society, BBC 2020
The Queen has presided over a period of unrivalled peace and prosperity. But also over a period of astonishing change. ibid.
The nation that learned of the conquest of Everest that auspicious day feels today like another country: class-obsessed, overwhelmingly white and Christian, deeply conservative about the role of women, much more easily embarrassed about sex. ibid.
James became Jan Morris [1926-2020]: Jan Morris stands as a powerful symbol [transgender] of the shifting thinking about identity was to come over the Queen’s reign. ibid.
The Ruth Ellis case was a genuine watershed in British justice: hanging had been very popular in this country but what was done on that July morning to a young, traumatised, and abused woman horrified and disgusted millions of the Queen’s subjects. ibid.
The Case of the Mangrove 9: August 1970 a street demonstration against the repeated raids on the Mangrove [restaurant]. It wasn’t a very big one, about 150 people left this restaurant to march around local police stations which were heavily defended by hundreds of police. Violence flared and demonstrators were grabbed and thrown into the back of police vans. In the end, nine demonstrators including Frank Critchlow, including Darcus Howe, were charged with incitement to riot … It was the first judicial acknowledgement of racial prejudice by the police during the Elizabethan age, but it was not the last. ibid.
The Coronation Review of the Royal Navy showcased the most famous fleet in the world. Once defenders of an empire that had circled the globe they gathered here to honour one young woman. Eleven days earlier the 27-year-old Elizabeth II had been crowned Queen … For all the epic splendour, what the young Queen was really seeing that day was the end of an era. New Elizabethans with Andrew Marr II: A Brave New World
He was one of the most extraordinary, maddening, colourful, fascinating new Elizabethans of them all: Lord Louis Mountbatten. ibid.
Elizabeth David: she was about to make a unique mark on British culture with a one-woman mission to introduce us to continental food … She pioneered the food revolution we see around us all today not to mention the army of globetrotting TV chefs. ibid.
Anthony Wedgwood Benn ditched his seat in the House of Lord and became a prophet of British socialism. For him Brussels was dominated by capitalism and bankers. ibid.
Jayaben Desia: One of the most notorious industrial disputes had begun: Grunwick … She hadn’t planned to start the strike but she was a natural … Reporter: Why are you on strike?
Desai: We have to ask permission to go to the toilet. ibid.
December 1982: 30,000 women linked arms around the entire site [Greenham Common]: Embrace the Base. ibid.
On 30th June 1953, less than a month after her coronation, Queen Elizabeth walked across the tarmac at London airport. The Queen was there to wave her mother and sister off but also to catch a glimpse of a very exiting new British aeroplane. The De Haviland Comet represented the future, the world’s very first commercial jet airliner … But within a year of the royal flight a series of terrible crashes would ground the Comet fleet and devastate Britain’s lead in the jet age. New Elizabethans with Andrew Marr III
We’ve managed a shift from heavy industries to exporting services, ideas and creativity … There was also an entire array of new Elizabethans who found new innovations, adaptions, fresh ways to build and new things to sell. ibid.
Norah Docker embodied [going down coal mine to ‘do her bit’] the changes that would buffer and transform British industry over the next half century. ibid.
Dusty Springfield started her musical career with her brother as the singer in a three-piece folk band: they called them The Springfields … The first British group to enter the US Billboard charts. ibid.
Tories triumphant: voting defeated. Lib-Dems crushed. As bitter recriminations flow between the parties is their strained marriage on the rocks? Andrew Rawnsley, Dispatches: A Year Inside No.10
The result of the 2010 General Election was a hung parliament, and a shock for the leader of the Conservative Party. ibid.
From the jaws of disappointment the two men snatched power ... The first coalition since 1945. ibid.
Foes were suddenly transformed into friends. ibid.
£80 billion over four years: maybe the Lib Dems hadn’t come into politics to cut spending, but many of their Tory partners did want a smaller state. ibid.
In their rush to prove that coalition could be strong and radical, ministers blundered into policies which were poorly conceived, or badly presented, or politically inflammatory, or all three ... There were U-turns on them all. ibid.
The romance of the Rose Garden Love-In is dead. ibid.
Ten years in power. Three election victories. Tony Blair has been the most successful leader ever in the history of the Labour Party. But has he fulfilled the expectations that carried him to Number Ten? Or does he depart having disappointed both the nation and himself? What manner of man has ruled Britain for the last decade? Andrew Rawnsley, The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair I & II, Channel 4 2007
‘We were pretty sparse if we’re truthful about what the policies were going to be.’ ibid. David Blunkett
Brown would displace much of his resentment towards Blair on to the third side of the new Labour triangle – Peter Mandelson. ibid.
Relations between the government and the civil service turned sour. ibid.
He secured the prize that obsessed him most – a second general election victory. ibid.
Blair travelled to Camp David to meet Bush for the first time. ibid.
The danger was that Tony Blair was committing himself and Britain to limitless and indefinite conflict against any regimes that America regarded as a threat. And he already knew where George Bush wanted to go next. ibid.
There was bafflement and anger about the nature of Tony Blair’s relationship [with Bush]. ibid.
When Blair really needed to make his voice felt he failed. ibid.
Now he thought Campbell had to go. ibid.
Did Tony Blair bring himself down or was he pushed by his best friend turned deadliest rival George Brown? ibid.
Clarke and Brown fought ferociously over top-up fees. ibid.
Not all that money has been spent effectively. ibid.
Now he was a prime minister who didn’t seem to give a damn what anyone thought. ibid.
The UK is currently the only European nation to have suspended Article 5 of the European Convention of Human Rights which prevents such detention ... Consider the cases of the following terrorists: Walter Wolfgang, the eighty-two-year-old pensioner removed from the Labour Party Conference in September 2005 for heckling Jack Straw, and then after he tried to gain re-entry, detained under the Terrorism Act; eight-year-old John Catt stopped by police for wearing a T-shirt suggesting that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes – searched under the Terrorism Act; Sally Cameron arrested and held for four hours for walking on a cycle path in Dundee – under the Terrorism Act; Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft stopped and searched under the Terrorism Act despite being eleven years old. Ludicrous Diversion: 7/7 Bombings
Ironically, it’s not the terrorists attacking our way of life but our own government. Through the expansion of police powers and stringent anti-terrorist measures being imposed upon Britain, they are using our fear for our safety to restrict our liberty and they are using their false promises of security to erode our privacy. This is happening now. And it’s happening to every person in the UK. ibid.
The struggle of ordinary people for jobs, security and dignity is the story of modern Britain. It’s been an epic story of gain and setback and courage – the miners, the transport workers, the nurses, the dockers, and it’s still going on especially here in Liverpool, although you wouldn’t know it reading the people’s papers. John Pilger, Breaking the Mirror: The Murdoch Effect
How contrite their former heroes now seem. On 17 May, the Leader of the House of Commons, Harriet Harman, who is alleged to have spent £10,000 of taxpayers’ money on ‘media training’, called on MPs to ‘rebuild cross-party trust’. The unintended irony of her words recalls one of her first acts as social security secretary more than a decade ago – cutting the benefits of single mothers. This was spun and reported as if there was a ‘revolt’ among Labour backbenchers, which was false. None of Blair’s new female MPs, who had been elected ‘to end male-dominated, Conservative policies’, spoke up against this attack on the poorest of poor women. All voted for it.