A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES.
Great Britain refers to England, Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom (UK) is the political union that includes Northern Ireland. The British Isles is a geographical term that adds Ireland and the Channel Islands.
Prehistory
The last Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago and man first crossed over from Europe shortly after – there was no water in the English Channel. By about 4000 BC, instead of a nomadic existence, they settled in one place and started farming. These Stone Age people used rocks and turf to build their homes and massive burial mounds, many still evident today. Their most impressive legacies were the stone circles of Stonehenge, Avebury and Orkney Islands.
Iron Age (800 BC to 100 AD)
The population expanded and began to divide up into specific tribes. Forests were cleared for farm land leading to a patchwork of fields, woods and small villages that exists today. Necessary territorial defence resulted in the great ‘earthwork castles of southern England, stone forts in northern England and ‘brochs’ (stone towers) in Wales and Scotland.
Celts
Originally from Central Europe, they arrived before 500 BC and soon settled across much of the island absorbing the indigenous people and forming about 20 tribes: Cantiaci (Kent), Iceni (Norfolk), Brigantes (NW England), Picts and Caledoni (Scotland), Ordivices (parts of Wales) and the Scotti (Ireland). Their Latin names were ones given them by the Romans.
Romans
Relatively small groups of Roman invaders under Julius Caesar made forays into southern England from Gaul (now France). The real Roman invasion under Emperor Claudius led a ruthless Roman invasion around 50 AD to control most of southern England soon after. Several Celtic-British tribal kings collaborated rather than fought – but some didn’t including the famous warrior-queen Boudica who led an army that destroyed the Roman town of Colchester and got as far as Londinium, then a Roman port.
In Wales, the Celts led by their mystic faith healers, the Druids, fought a last stand at Anglesay, were beaten but not conquered. Otherwise, opposition was sporadic and little threat to Roman might. By about 80 AD, the province of Britannia (most of today’s England and Wales) was firmly under Roman rule. They went as far as north Scotland but Hadrian consolidated the borders to the north of England, marked by Hadrian’s Wall, the northernmost limit of the Roman Empire for 300 years.
In 200, the Romans built a defensive wall around London with four entrance gates: Aldgate, Ludgate, Newgate, and Bishopgate.
Roman rule lasted about 4 centuries. Intermarriage was common and incomers especially from Belgium, Spain, and Syria evolved into a Romano-British population, especially in towns. An indigenous Celtic-British culture remained in the rural areas. Rome brought stability and wealth and introduced Christianity after Emperor Constantine officially recognized it in 313 AD. The Roman Empire started to decline and Britannia was simply dumped by Rome by 410 AD.
Anglo-Saxons
These Teutonic tribes arrived from Germany in the vacuum left by the Romans and either replaced or absorbed the locals by adopting the Anglo-Saxon language and culture. By the end of the 6th century, England was divided into three Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Wessex (southern England), Mercia (Midlands), and Northumbria (northern England). Some areas remained unaffected and Celtic was still being spoken in parts of southern England in 1000. The core of the English language is Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxon (much abused and factually incorrect) has become a byword for ‘pure English’.
In 597, Pope Gregory sent missionary St Augustine to southern England to convert it and his colleague St Aidan converted northern England.
Wales
The Celts especially in Ireland kept alive their own culture (but still Roman influenced). The Scotti invaded Wales and western Scotland towards the end of the 5th century. In response, people from the kingdom of Gododdin near today’s Edinburgh moved to NW Wales to become the kingdom of Gwynedd. More settlers came to Wales from Cornwall and western France, and Christian missionaries arrived from Ireland in the 6th and 7th centuries. By the 8th century, the disparate tribes in Wales had banded together and called themselves Cymry (fellow countrymen), and today Cymru is the Welsh name for Wales.
Scotland. The Picts were the dominant indigenous tribe in the north and east (the Gaelic name for Scotland, Alba is a Pict word). Ancient Britons inhabited the southwest. By the end of the 5th century, the Scotti crossed over from Ireland and established the Kingdom of Dalriada (now Argyll) and became well established alongside the Picts. In the early 6th century, St Columbia established the Christian mission on the Scottish island of Iona and by the late 8th century, most of Scotland was converted. In the 7th century, Anglo-Saxons from Northumbria colonized the southeast. In 685, the Pictish king Bridei defeated the Northumbrians at Angus setting the foundation for Scotland as a separate entity.
Vikings
In the 9th century, the Vikings invaded today’s Scandinavia. They raped and pillaged but many settled especially evident today in Shetland, Orkney, and northern England. They established their capital at Jorvik, today’s city of York in 850. In 872, the King of Norway created an earldom in Orkney, also governing Shetland from there. These island groups became the Viking base for raids and colonization into Scotland and northern England. After conquering the north and east, they started to expand into central England fighting the Anglo-Saxon armies led by Alfred the Great, the king of Wessex. Eventually, Alfred pushed the Vikings back to the north and east – ‘Daneland’.
England
Alfred was hailed as the king of the English, the first time the Anglo-Saxons regarded themselves as a truly united people. Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder gained control of Danelaw and became the first king to rule over the whole of England. His son, Athelstan was specifically crowned King of England in 927. But the Vikings were still around and continued to raid Scandinavia. Control swung from Saxon (King Edgar) to Dane (King Knut) and back again to Saxon (King Edward the Confessor). England was an uncertain place by the end of the 1st millennium.
The Vikings also invaded Wales. King Rhodri Mawr (died in 878), defeated the Vikings off the Island of Anglesey and began the unification process. His grandson, Hywel the Good drew up a set of laws to bind the disparate Welsh tribes. But the Anglo-Saxons invaded and the Welsh kings recognized the Anglo-Saxon King Athelstan as their overlord, in exchange for an anti-Viking alliance.
Scottish Kingdom
In the 9th century, Robert MacAlpin (his father was a Scot and his mother a Pict princess) took advantage of the Pictish custom of matrilineal succession and declared himself the ruler of the Scots, Picts, and thus all of Alba (the area north of the Firth of Forth). In a short time, the Scots gained cultural and political worth. The Picts were absorbed and their culture disappeared and the Scottish kingdom began.
In the 11th century, Scottish nation-building was further consolidated under King Malcolm III (whose most famous act was the 1057 murder of Macbeth. With his English queen, Margaret, he founded the Canmore dynasty that would rule Scotland for the next two centuries.
1066 and the Normans
When King Edward the Confessor died, the crown passed to Harold, his brother-in-law. But Edward also had a cousin in Normandy called William, who thought he had a right to the crown. William sailed from Normandy with an army of soldiers, and at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Saxons were defeated and Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye.
William the Conqueror became king and the Normans built castles across England. By 1086, the Doomsday Book provided a census of England’s current stock and potential. The French-speaking Normans stayed pretty much to themselves and a strict hierarchy of class developed known as the feudal system. At the top of the feudal system came the monarch, followed by nobles (barons, dukes, and bishops) then earls, knights, lords, and ladies. At the bottom were peasants or ‘serfs’ – the basis of a class system that still exists in Britain today.
In 1095, the first crusade started – the campaign of Christian-European armies against the Muslim occupation of Jerusalem and the ‘Holy Land’. A series of crusades continued until 1272.
William’s son, Henry I married a Saxon princess, but this unifying move counted for nothing on Henry’s death and a bitter struggle followed, finally won by Henry II, who took the throne as the first king of the Plantagenet dynasty.
Post-Invasion Wales & Scotland
William the Conqueror built castles and appointed feudal barons (the Lords Marcher) along the Welsh border who became massively rich and powerful. The parts of England here are called the Marches today.
In Scotland, Malcolm’s successor, David I (1124-53), adopted the Norman feudal system and granted land to Norman families. By 1212, the Scottish court was French in race and manner of life, speech, and culture. However, further north, the Highland clans remained inaccessible in their glens and were a law unto themselves for another 600 years.
Royalty versus the Church
The enduring bickering between the royalty and the church came to a head in 1170 when Henry II had the turbulent priest Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in his cathedral. The next king, Richard I (the Lionheart) wanted to make amends by leading a crusade against Saladin in the Third Crusade, capturing Acre and Jaffa but not Jerusalem. In Richard’s absence, the country fell into disarray.
Richard was succeeded by his brother John, but under his harsh rule, things got even worse for the general population. According to legend, a nobleman named Robert of Luxley (better known as Robin Hood) started his brand of wealth distribution. In 1215, the barons forced John to sign the Magna Carta (the Great Charter) at Runnymede near Windsor, limiting the monarch’s power. It became a fledging bill of human rights that eventually led to the creation of parliament – a body to rule the country independent of the throne.
In Wales, the Welsh king Llywelyn the Great (d. 1240) attempted to set up a state and his grandson, Llywelyn the Last was recognized by Henry III as the first Prince (but not king) of Wales.
Edward I (1272-1307) was a skilled ruler and ambitious general who had no patience for such niceties, led campaigns in Wales that lasted much of the 1270s and Wales became a dependent principality. That was the last of the Welsh kings and Edward made his own son Prince of Wales and ever since, the British sovereign’s eldest son has automatically been given the title. Edward built a ring of castles to suppress further Welsh uprisings.
In Scotland, Edward also ended the Canmore dynasty in 1286 with the death of Alexander III. He was succeeded by his 4-year-old granddaughter Margaret (the Maid of Norway) who was engaged to the son of Edward but died in 1290 before the wedding could take place.
Scotland Independence. A dispute for the Scottish throne followed between John Balliol and Robert Bruce of Annandale. Edward chose Balliol and Edward forced local leaders to swear allegiance. In a final blow to Scottish pride, he removed the Stone of Destiny, on which the kings of Scotland had been crowned for centuries, and sent it to London. Balliol arranged a treaty with France that lasted centuries. In 1296, the English marched on Scotland with an army of 30,000 men and in a brutal invasion, captured the castles of Berwick, Edinburgh, Roxburgh and Stirling defeating Balliol and forcing the Scottish barons to accept Edward’s rule. His ruthless retaliation earned him the title ‘Hammer of the Scots.
In 1297, at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, the English were defeated by a Scots army led by William Wallace (who is still remembered as a Scottish hero). Wallace has proclaimed Guardian of Scotland in 1298 but Edward’s army defeated the Scots at the Battle of Falkirk and Wallace went into hiding and was betrayed and executed in 1305.
In 1290, Robert the Bruce (grandson of Bruce of Annandale) crowned himself king of Scotland, was beaten in battle, went on the run and while hiding in a cave, was inspired to renew his efforts by a spider persistently spinning its web. Bruce’s army went on to defeat Edward II’s superior English army at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, a famous victory that led to the official recognition of Scotland as an independent nation, with Bruce asking, in 1328. This consolidated Scottish independence for the next 400 years.
The story of William Wallace is told in the Mel Gibson epic Braveheart. In devolution debates in the 1990s, the patriotic pride engendered by this movie did more for Scottish nationalism than any politician’s speech.
The Stewarts
From 1337-1453, England battled France in the long conflict known as the Hundred Year’s War, actually a series of small conflicts. After the death of Robert the Bruce in 1329, Bruce’s son became David II of Scotland, but he was soon caught in battles against fellow Scots disaffected by his father and aided by England’s Edward III. So when David died in 1371, the Scots quickly crowned Robert Stewart, Robert the Bruce’s grandson) as king, marking the start of the House of Stewart, which was to crop up again in England later.
In 1348, the bubonic plague (the Black Death) arrived ultimately killing more than a third of the population. For peasant laborers who survived, an upside was a rise in wages.
Houses of Lancaster & York
In 1399 the ineffectual Richard II of England was ousted by the powerful baron Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV, the first monarch of the House of Lancaster. A year later, the downtrodden Welsh, led by Owain Glyndwr rebelled but were crushed, Glyndwr died an outlaw and the Welsh elite was banned from public life for many years.
Henry V stirred up the dormant Hundred Year’s War by defeating the French at the Battle of Agincourt. The patriotic speech penned for him by Shakespeare in Henry V has ensured his position among the most famous English kings of all time.
When the Hundred Year’s War finally ground to a halt in 1453, Henry VI (emblem of the red rose) was challenged by Richard, Duke of York (emblem of a white rose) in the War of the Roses (1459-71). Henry was weak and it was almost a walkover for Richard, but Henry’s wife, Margaret of Anjou, defeated the challenger. Richard’s son, Edward turned the tables and finally drove out Henry to become Edward IV, the first monarch of the House of York.
In 1471, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and Margaret Anjou teamed up to force Edward into exile and bring back Henry VI to the throne. A year later, Edward bounced back, killed Warwick, captured Margaret, and executed Henry in the Tower of London. Edward ruled for only a decade before being succeeded by his 12-year-old son Edward V. In 1483, he was mysteriously murdered, along with his brother at the Tower of London. That left the throne open to their dear old uncle Richard III who in 1485 was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth by a nobleman from Wales, Henry Tudor who became Henry VII. This ended the York-Lancaster rivalry for the throne.
The Tudors
Henry married his daughter to James IV of Scotland, linking the Tudor and Stewart lines. James invaded England in 1513 only to be killed at the Battle of Flodden. Henry married Edward’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, further cementing his claim to the throne.
Henry VIII had difficulty siring a male heir, hence his famous six wives, but the Pope’s disapproval of divorce and remarriage led to a split with the Roman Catholic Church. Parliament made Henry the head of the Protestant Church of England – the English Reformation and the beginning of the pivotal division between Catholics and Protestants that still exists in some areas of Britain.
In 1536, Henry followed this up by ‘dissolving’ many monasteries in Britain and Ireland, a blatant takeover of their land and wealth rather than the struggle between church and state. The general population felt little sympathy for the wealthy and often corrupt abbeys and in 1439-40, another monastic land grab swallowed the larger ones as well. In 1536 and 1543, English authority was exerted over Wales by the Acts of Union, formally tying the two countries into a single political entity.
Meanwhile in Scotland, James IV was succeeded by James V, but he died in 1542. His baby daughter Mary became queen, and Scotland was ruled by regents.
The Elizabethan Age (1458-1603)
Henry VIII died in 1547, succeeded by his son Edward VI, and then by his daughter Mary I, but their reigns were short. So unexpectedly, Elizabeth, third in line, came to the throne.
As Elizabeth I, she inherited a nasty mess of religious strife and divided loyalties, but after an uncertain start, she gained confidence and turned the country around. Refusing marriage, she borrowed biblical imagery and became the Virgin Queen, making her perhaps the first British monarch to create a cult image. It paid off, as her 45-year reign was a period of boundless optimism characterized by the naval defeat of the Spanish Armada, the expansion of trade due to global explorations of seafarers such as Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, and a cultural flourishing due to William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.
Mary, Queen of Scots. During Elizabeth’s reign, her cousin (the Catholic daughter of Scottish King James V) became known as Mary, Queen of Scots. She’d spent her childhood in France and had married the French dauphin (crown prince), thereby becoming Queen of France as well. After her husband’s death, she returned to Scotland, where she claimed the English throne too, on the grounds that Elizabeth I was illegitimate. Her plans failed when she was imprisoned and forced to abdicate in favour of her son (a Protestant) who became James VI of Scotland. But she escaped to England and appealed to Elizabeth for help. But she was imprisoned again and held in arrest, in an uncharacteristic display of indecision by Elizabeth, for nearly 19 years when she was moved from house to house (there are many homes and pubs today claiming she slept there) until she was finally executed.
United and Disunited Britain
Elizabeth died without an heir in 1603 and was succeeded by her closest relative, James, the safely Protestant son of the executed Mary. He was James VI of Scotland, the first monarch of the House of Stuart (Mary’s time in France had Gallicised the Stewart name), and became James I of England. Most importantly, James united England, Wales, and Scotland into one kingdom for the first time, a big step towards British unity.
James’ attempts to smooth religious relations were set back by the anti-Catholic outcry that followed the infamous Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot, a terrorist attempt to blow up parliament in 1605. The event is still celebrated every November 5 with fireworks, bonfires, and burning effigies of Fawkes. Also smouldering was the power struggle between the king and parliament that worsened during the reign of the next king, Charles I and eventually erupted into civil war in 1642-49. The anti-royalist (or parliamentarian) forces were led by Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan who preached against the excesses of the monarchy and established the church. His army (known as the Roundheads) was pitched against the king’s forces (the Cavaliers) in a conflict that tore England apart. It ended with a victory for the Roundheads, with the king executed, England declared a republic (the Commonwealth of England), and Cromwell hailed as ‘Protector’.
The civil war extended into Scotland where the main struggle was between royalists and radical ‘Covenanters’, who sought freedom from state involvement in church government.
The Return of the King
In 1653, Cromwell found parliament too restrictive and he assumed dictatorial powers, much to his supporter’s dismay. On his death in 1658, he was followed half-heartedly by his son, but in 1660 parliament decided to re-establish the monarchy as republican alternatives were proving far worse.
Charles II, the exiled son of Charles I, came to the throne, and his rule, known as the ‘Restoration’, saw scientific and cultural activity blossoming. Exploration and expansion were also on the agenda. Backed by the army and navy (modernized, ironically by Cromwell), British colonies stretched down the American coast, while the East India Company set up headquarters in Bombay laying foundations for what was to become the British Empire.
The next king, James II, had a harder time. Attempts to ease restrictive laws on Catholics ended with his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne by William III, the Protestant king of Holland, better known as William of Orange. William was married to James’ own daughter Mary, but it didn’t stop him from having a go at his father-in-law.
William and Mary came to the throne as King and Queen, each in their own right (Mary had more of a claim, but William would not agree to be a mere consort), and their joint accession in 1688 was known as the Glorious Revolution.
Act of Union
In 1694, Mary died leaving William as sole monarch. He died a few years later and was succeeded by his sister-in-law Anne (the second daughter of James II). In 1707, during Anne’s reign, the Act of Union was passed, bringing to an end the independent Scottish Parliament and linking the countries of England, Wales, and Scotland under one parliament based in London for the first time. The nation of Great Britain was now established as a single state, with a bigger, better, and more powerful parliament, and a constitutional monarchy with clear limits on the power of the king or queen.
The Act of Union banned any Catholic, or anyone married to a Catholic, from ascending the throne – a rule still in force today. In 1714, Anne died without leaving an heir, marking the end of the Stuart line. The throne was passed to distant (but still safely Protestant) German relatives, the House of Hanover.
The Jacobite Rebellions
Despite, or perhaps because of the 1707 Act of Union, anti-English feelings in Scotland refused to disappear. The Jacobite rebellions, most notably those of 1715 and 1745, were attempts to overthrow the Hanoverian monarchy and bring back the Stuarts. Although these are iconic events in Scottish history, in reality, there was never much support for the Jacobite cause outside the Highlands; the people of the lowlands were mainly Protestant and feared a return of the Catholicism that the Stuarts represented.
The 1715 rebellion was led by James Edward Stuart (the Old Pretender), the son of the exiled James II of England (James VII of Scotland), but when the attempt failed he fled to France. To impose control on the Highlands, General George Wade was commissioned to build a network of military roads through many previously inaccessible glens.
In 1745, James’ son Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender) landed in Scotland to claim the crown for his father. He was initially successful, moving south into England as far as Derby, but the prince and his Highland army suffered a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, his legendary escape to the western isles is remembered in ‘The Skye Boat Song’. General Wade is remembered too, as many of the roads his troops built are still in use today.
In 1749, London’s first professional police force began – a 1792 Act of Parliament allowed the model to spread across England.
The British Empire
By the mid-18th century, the Hanoverian kings increasingly relied on parliament to govern the country. As part of the process, a senior parliamentarian, Sir Robert Walpole effectively became Britain’s first prime minister from 1721 to 1742.
Meanwhile, the British Empire continued to grow in America, Canada, and India. The first claims were made on Australia after Captain James Cook’s epic voyage of exploration in 1768. Primarily a scientific expedition, his objectives included monitoring the transit of Venus, an astronomical event that happens only once every 180 years or so (most recently in 2004 and 2012). Discovering Australia was just a sideline.
The empire’s first major reverse came when the American colonies won the War of Independence (1776-83). This setback forced Britain to withdraw from the world stage for a while, a gap not missed by French ruler Napoleon. He threatened to invade Britain and hinder the power of the British overseas before his ambitions were curtailed by naval hero Admiral Nelson and military hero the Duke of Wellington at the famous battles of Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815).
The Industrial Age
While the empire expanded abroad, at home Britain became the crucible of the Industrial Revolution. Steam power (patented by James Watt in 1781) and steam trains (launched by George Stephenson in 1830) transformed methods of production and transport, and the towns of the English Midlands became the first industrial cities.
From about 1750, much of the Scottish Highlands were emptied of people as landowners casually expelled entire farms and villages to make way for more profitable sheep, a seminal event in Scotland’s history known as the Clearances. Although many of the dispossessed left for the New World, others headed to the burgeoning cotton mills of Lancashire and the shipyards of Glasgow.
By the early 19th century, copper, iron, and slate were being extracted in the Merthyr Tydfil and Monmouth areas of Wales. The 1860s saw the Rhondda valleys opened up for coal mining, and Wales soon became a major exporter of coal, as well as the world’s leading producer of tin plate.
Across Britain, industrialization meant people were on the move as never before, leaving the farms and villages their families had occupied for generations. The rapid change from rural to urban society caused great dislocation, and although knowledge of science and medicine also improved alongside industrial advances, for many people the adverse side effects of Britain’s economic blossoming were poverty and deprivation.
Age of Empire
By the time Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837 Britain’s factories dominated world trade and British fleets dominated the oceans. The rest of the 19th century was seen as Britain’s Golden Age, a period of confidence not enjoyed since the days of the last great queen, Elizabeth I. At its height, the British Empire covered 20% of the land area of the earth and contained a quarter of the world’s population as it expanded to include Canada, much of Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand.
The 1847 publication of the government report dubbed the ‘Treason of the Blue Books’ suggests the Welsh language was detrimental to education in Wales and fueled the Welsh language struggle.
Prime Minister Disraeli (1868) and his successor William Gladstone introduced social reforms to address the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution. Education became universal, trade unions were legalized and the right to vote was extended in a series of reform acts, finally being granted to all men over the age of 21 in 1918, and to all women in 1928.
World War I
When Queen Victoria died in 1901, it seemed Britain’s energy fizzled out too. The new king Edward VII, ushered in the Edwardian era, a long period of decline.
Meanwhile, in Europe, other states were more active: four restless military powers (Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Germany) focused their sabre-rattling on the Balkan states, and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 finally sparked a clash that became the ‘Great War’ we now call WW I. Soldiers from Britain and Allied countries were drawn into a conflict of horrendous slaughter, most infamously on the killing fields of Flanders and the beaches of Gallipoli. By the war’s end in 1918, over a million Britons had died (plus millions more from many other countries) and there was hardly a street not touched by death, as the sobering lists of names all over Britain still show.
Depression
For the soldiers that did return from WWI, the war had created disillusion and a questioning of the social order. Many supported the ideals of a new political force, the Labour Party, to represent the working class.
Meanwhile, the bitter Anglo-Irish War (1919-21) saw most of Ireland achieving full independence from Britain. Six counties in the north remained British, creating a new political entity called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. However the decision to partition the island of Ireland was to have long-term repercussions that still dominate political agendas in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland today.
The Labour Party won for the first time in the 1923 election, in coalition with the Liberals. James Ramsay MacDonald was the first Labour prime minister, but by the mid-1920s the Conservatives were back. Increasing mistrust of the government, fuelled by soaring unemployment, leads to the General Strike. Millions of workers – train drivers, miners, shipbuilders – downed tools and brought the country to a halt. The world was now in decline and in the 1930s the Great Depression meant another decade of misery and political upheaval.
World War II
In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and in 1939 Germany invaded Poland, once again drawing Britain into war. The German army swept through Europe and pushed back British forces to the beaches of Dunkirk in June 1940. An extraordinary flotilla of rescue vessels turned a total disaster into a brave defeat and an event that is still remembered with pride and sadness every year in Britain.
By mid-1940 most of Europe was controlled by Germany. In Russia, Stalin had negotiated a peace agreement, The USA was neutral leaving Britain virtually isolated. Into this arena came a new prime minister, Winston Churchill.
Between September 1940 and May 1941, the German Air Force launched the Blitz, a series of mainly nighttime bombing raids on London and other cities. Between July and October 1940, the Royal Air Force withstood Germany’s aerial raids to win what became known as the Battle of Britain. But morale in Britain remained high, thanks partly to Churchill’s regular radio broadcasts. In late 1941, the USA entered the war and the tide began to turn.
In 1944, Germany was in retreat. Russia pushed back from the east and Britain, the USA and other Allies were again on the beaches of France. The Normandy landings on D-Day marked the start of the liberation of Europe’s western side. By 1945 Hitler was dead and the war was finally over.
Postwar and the End of the Millennium
Despite victory in WW II, there was an unexpected swing in the political front in 1945. An electorate tired of war and hungry for change tumbled Churchill’s Conservatives in favour of the Labour Party. In 1948 the National Health Service, the core of Britain as a welfare state was launched.
In 1952, George VI died and was succeeded by Elizabeth II who has now remained on the throne for over six decades, overseeing massive social and economic change.
By the late 1950s, recovery was strong, but the 1970s saw an economic slide thanks to a combination of inflation, the oil crisis, and international competition. The rest of the decade was marked by strikes, disputes, and all-around gloom. Neither the Conservatives nor Labour proved capable of controlling the problems and the elections of 1979 saw the Conservatives win a landslide victory led by Margaret Thatcher. The policies introduced were successful economically but her social policies were a failure and created a polarized Britain – those that gained from the prosperous wave of opportunities and those left dispossessed and unemployed by the decline of the old industries such as coal mining and steel. By 1988, Thatcher was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century.
New Labour, New Millennium
The political pendulum swung again in the early 90s and ‘New’ Labour swept to power in 1997, with Tony Blair as PM. They had another walkover in 2001 and won again in 2005 with Blair the longest-serving Labour PM in British history.
In 1999 the first National Assembly was elected for Wales. Scottish Parliament also convened the same year. In 2003, Britain joined America in the invasion of Iraq. In 2007, a large transfer of power was passed to Cardiff and Wales.
In 2010, Labour rule came to an end with a coalition government. The experiment was a disaster for the Lib Dems when they lost 49 seats in the 2015 election. The defeated Labour party was divided and the Conservatives were back in power.
Today
In a 2014 referendum, Scotland voted 55% to remain in the UK but Brexit in 2016 brought that decision into question.
On June 24, 2016, the Brexit referendum opted to leave the European Union by a small margin, 52% to 48%. David Cameron, the PM resigned, the pound fell to its lowest level in 31 years and the stock index hit an eight-year low. The economy and health care were central issues against the backdrop of a Europe-wide refugee crisis. Immigration was the major flashpoint – the debate revolved around whether Britain should have the right to set limits on immigration from within the EU – latent racism or sovereignty? It tended to mean how to identify themselves – English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, British or European? The distinctions were important as the EU referendum results were divided by nation: England and Wales voted to leave, but Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain.
One thing the British are united about is the monarchy. It consistently enjoys popular support with 68% feeling the royal family was good for the country. Many put this down to Queen Elizabeth II.
One slogan repeated time and time again is ‘Keep calm and carry on. It evokes a very British attitude towards adversity, to keep your chin up and get on with things amid chaos.
STATISTICS
Population. 61.4 million
Area. 88,500 sq. miles
GDP per capita. £29,807
Ethnicity. White 87%, Asian 7%, Black 3%, Other/mixed
Religion. Christian 59%, None or not stated 33%, Muslim 4.5%, Hindu 1.5%, Other 2%
Population density (per sq. km), Britain 280, France 120, America 40