British politics needs more history

For most people, New Year is a paradoxical combination of excess and resolve to do better: the party and the hangover distilled to their essential elements. As you edge closer to the Westminster village, it is a time to scour the New Year Honours List, remembering Gore Vidal’s dictum that “whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies”.

The true connoisseur, however, cherishes New Year because the National Archives at Kew, thanks to the Public Records Act 1958, release classified government documents from two decades before under the 20-year-rule. Last month saw the publication of official records from 2003, in the second half of Sir Tony Blair’s long premiership.

It was the year of the Iraq War and the downfall of Saddam Hussein, of the Treaty of Accession which would the following year admit ten new member states to the European Union. The Convention on the Future of the EU published its draft European constitution, never to be adopted, and Blair’s self-appointed mentor Lord Jenkins of Hillhead died at 82.

The Blair government’s agenda for that year seems eerily familiar. With the imminent accession of ten new EU member states, there was widespread anxiety about potential mass immigration, set against a backdrop of record numbers of asylum-seekers. The prime minister demanded “radical measures” to make the UK a less attractive destination for refugees and economic migrants, some of which, legal advisers warned, might breach the European Convention on Human Rights. One proposal was to send failed asylum-seekers to “safe havens” in third countries, perhaps in East Africa.

Ministers were pulled in several directions. Home Secretary David Blunkett argued that the economy relied on the “flexibility and productivity of migrant labour”, while John Prescott, deputy prime minister, and foreign secretary Jack Straw urged Blair to delay full freedom of movement so that public services were not overwhelmed. One adviser wanted to “err on the side of publishing less rather than more” official data to avoid inflaming public opinion.

The previous year’s Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 had provided for a stricter English language requirement and “Life in the United Kingdom” tests in an attempt to promote integration. Blair and Blunkett wanted to introduce a system of identity cards to help the government manage its population and data about citizens. Is it sounding familiar yet?

The success of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? and Wolf Hall, Netflix’s The Crown and the podcasting behemoth The Rest Is History demonstrates that the past is big business. We are fascinated by history. Almost anyone can half-remember a mangled adage about learning the lessons of the past, from George Santanaya (“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”) to Winston Churchill (“Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft”).

(As an historian, I’ve always felt more comfortable with Alan Bennett’s description of history as “just one f**king thing after another”.)

There is an obvious synergy here. If we regard the past as such a vital professor, then this annual release of documents from 20 years previously is, surely, an invaluable opportunity to pause so early in the course of the new year, analyse and take stock. The process of “lessons learned” is a fundamental part of modern project management, and recent times have demonstrated that government, perhaps above all institutions, needs what Kipling called “no end of a lesson”.

Yet from Whitehall there is bleak silence. There are pockets of collective memory and analysis: 10 Downing Street has a researcher in residence; each of the three armed services has an historical branch; the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has a small but active group of historians; and the Cabinet Office Public Records and Archives Unit includes the Official History Programme. As of 2023, there were no civil servants assigned to the Official History Programme, though last April the Northern Ireland secretary announced an “independent Public History project relating to the Troubles”.

… there is obvious value in rigorous analysis of history, especially recent history

We must do better than this. Without being glib or platitudinous, there is obvious value in rigorous analysis of history, especially recent history, and in the distillation of lessons about what worked, what went wrong and why policies succeeded or failed.

The past can offer us useful experience and shortcuts in our learning processes; when the Falklands crisis erupted unexpectedly in 1982, Margaret Thatcher consulted her aged predecessor as prime minister, 88-year-old Harold Macmillan, about managing a conflict. Drawing on his experience in Churchill’s wartime government and during the Suez crisis, he advised her to assemble a small “war cabinet” in which HM Treasury should not be represented.

This was created in the form of OD(SA), the Cabinet Defence and Overseas Policy Sub-Committee on the South Atlantic and Falkland Islands, and consisted of the prime minister, the foreign, home and defence secretaries, the attorney-general, the chief of the Defence Staff and the chairman of the Conservative Party. No Treasury ministers were involved, and the chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, later said it was “like being on sabbatical”.

A few years ago, Sir Anthony Seldon proposed that each government department should have “an active historian advising ministers on historical precedent”, and there should be a “chief historian” alongside the chief scientific adviser, the national statistician and other experts. This luminary would “oversee the steady supply of accurate historical information to the prime minister and his key advisers, with the power and confidence to challenge them”.

… the past is one of the best advisers any government can have

As a first step, while we are still in January, the prime minister should bring his senior ministers and advisers together for a weekend at Chequers. Historians should walk them through the newly released documents and begin that invaluable “lessons learned” process. And it should be an annual event.

History should never be our jailer or blind us to our ability to change and improve. But the past is one of the best advisers any government can have. The material released by the National Archives every year is an impossibly rich resource, and at the moment, we are — unforgivably and through sheer inattention — letting it go to waste. Sir Keir Starmer can turn the tide if he really is interested in “doing government differently”, and for this education there are no tuition fees. Everything is already there.