This is the last episode in this main series of A History of England. I may add others on specific topics – by all means use the comments to suggest any you’d like me to examine – or in response to interesting new developments.

This episode looks at what has happened since the 2024 election. There’s been a rise in xenophobia that sometimes shades into outright racism. A party of the hard right, Reform UK, is leading in the polls. Labour, in office though perhaps not in power, seems to have lost its sense of direction and has been pandering to Reform UK’s views in the hope of winning back voters it has lost to them, with little sign of success so far. Indeed, its own standing just keeps sliding downwards.

After that, I recap the series, from the days of Henry VIII, showing how England grew from a minor state on the edge of Europe to a leading power. Then, having pushed through the union with Scotland to form Great Britain, it became the ruling power of a major global empire. However, while the empire enriched a minority of people back home, it left the mass of the people in poverty, often in misery. Imperial wealth made individuals rich but not society as a whole.

The twentieth century saw the empire collapse and British society become much more equal. In need of a new role, Britain tried being the partner of the United States and also a major member of the European Union. But the ‘special relationship’ with the US seems pretty well dead in the water now and, in a major self-inflicted wound, the Brexit vote of 2016 took Britain out the EU.

Now with a growing menace to the whole continent, including Britain, from Russia, the Starmer government is trying to put together new alliances without confronting its right-wing critics by working to rejoin the EU. Together with the anti-immigration stance it’s taking to try to woo Reform UK voters back, that policy is making a return to economic growth more difficult than ever. That only stokes the grievances felt by many at home, encouraging the hard right further.

Britain seems to caught in a dilemma of its own making. The Starmer government has adopted policies that are making things worse not better. Sadly, the logic of its position means it can’t change those policies.

Change though, and not the kind of change Reform UK proposes, is desperately needed to get Britain out of the mess that England has led it into.

Quite a dilemma, as I said.

Illustration: The British bulldog confused about the way forward. Image from ChatGPT.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

272. What a fine mess you've got us into