A History of the World From the 20th to the 21st Century

they might lose support. With the benefit of some creative accounting, Italy was judged to have met the Maastricht criteria and ...

Whatever the rest of the world may have expected, the British people did not spend much energy grieving over their lost empire o ...

annual percentage of only 0.9 per cent. During the 1970s and early 1980s the gap between the performance of Britain and its neig ...

increase significantly. The middle classes widened and so did middle-class culture. More young people aspired to own a house rat ...

Fitzgerald. But Protestant opponents in Northern Ireland denounced the idea of giving Dublin any role in Northern Irish politics ...

for the bill to cancel out the Conservative anti- marketeers and the majority of Labour members who voted against. Wilson held h ...

standards time and time again; a family man could not live on his wages but was forced to collect a whole range of state social ...

Argentinian junta invaded the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher did not hesitate. Regardless of the cost of defending a barren ...

fallen from 11 per cent in 1981 to an average of 4.4 per cent in 1985–7, and wages for those in work rose much faster than infla ...

Labour and the Alliance the result was decisive: Labour had clearly seen off the Alliance’s attempt to replace it (Labour gained ...

Sir Geoffrey Howe became the third senior Conservative minister to resign from the Cabinet, in his case incensed by Thatcher’s h ...

same marginal rate as the middle class. Living standards rose for all sections of the community, but unequally – the wealthiest ...

next election in the early 1990s could be fought with lower interest rates, sound money, a strong economy and a return of confid ...

eignty. Attitudes were hardening against the Conservative government and its whole European strategy. At home, October 1992 prov ...

Labour Party after John Smith’s sudden death, moved the party towards the centre, rejecting out- worn socialist dogma. The moder ...

Irish voters and 90 per cent of voters in the Republic. It marks not the end of all violence, but the beginning of the end. Whil ...

After the high drama of the de Gaulle years, President Georges Pompidou restored calm to France. Pompidou had been closely assoc ...

gramme, a Kennedy-style ‘new society’, but was able to win the president’s consent only to limited reforms. Decentralisation and ...

Giscard’s RP party. Ever since he had broken away from de Gaulle in 1962, Giscard’s relations with the Gaullists had been charac ...

sectors of industry. And because the dependence on imported oil had revealed an energy weakness, France embarked on a massive ex ...