Martin Meenagh blog

   It has been just over a month since Mary Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Truss became the last prime minister of Her Late Majesty’s reign, and the first of King Charles’. What have we learned?   Constitutional Matters From a constitutional point of view, the famous ‘unwritten conventions’ of the British state have been put under severe strain. Truss is the fourth Prime Minister to lead a Conservative administration since 2015, and the second not to have won her majority in a general election. Such situations are not meant to overly trouble the state, since the conventional wisdom is that the Conservative Party won the 2019 election, not Boris Johnson, and so the mandate to govern from the electorate belongs to the party, not a person. This is not a novel idea, and not in itself problematic. Of the past twenty Prime Ministers, Truss, Johnson, May, Brown, Major, Callaghan, Home, Macmillan, Eden, Churchill, Chamberlain, Baldwin, and Bonar Law all became Prime Minister in such a...

I used to teach a course in Bath for an American undergraduate placement programme. It was a lovely programme, based in Nelson House, just down from the train station, and run by lovely people. An American university oversaw its courses. Over ten weeks or so, five to seven students and I would study the English, French, and American revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the counter-revolutions too. We would range from the barebones parliament to Napoleon, and from Tom Paine to the diggers. The courses were based around a source book, and I loved travelling down from Oxford or London to Bath, which I would hang around in at the end of the day before going back via the train bar and a good book. For many years, I taught the source book as a kind of chrestomathy—a collection of documents that illustrated key moments, each of which would help the students learn the language of liberty in the Atlantic world. Though I did of course introduce and refine religious ...

A friend of mine sent me a copy of Rosemary Wakeman's book on modern utopias. I had never realised that I grew up in large part in one, but, well, Corby is included and I still love it in my memory, so here is the extract. The full book itself is very interesting. “The new town of Corby in the English Midlands is a more detailed example of how designation as a new town played out. Corby was located near England’s largest supply of accessible ironstone and also the coalfields in Yorkshire and Durham. Mining rights and steel production were owned by the Stewarts and Lloyds Company. By the mid-1930s, the town was budding into a premier steelworks and steel tube-making centre. Thousands poured into the sleepy village of fifteen hundred souls, especially young Scottish workers from the Clyde Valley. Ten years later, in 1945, Corby was a boomtown of twelve thousand people, its steel mills churning out war materiel, including the steel tubes used in the cross-channel pipeline supplyin...