History Cafe

England in the mid-1550s was being governed by a joint monarchy: Philip and Mary and a select council of extremely able English politicians. Almost all of them had experience in government stretching back through the violently protestant regime of Edward VI. To all appearances they had for years been living as active protestants. And yet here they were in a government that was conducting a campaign against religious heresy that we have always understood to be a Catholic campaign to stamp out Protestantism. (R)

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Bloody Queen Mary? 313 people died for their beliefs 1555-58. We owe it to the victims to get the story right. In 2020 historian Alexander Samson said about the reign of Mary Tudor ‘it feels as if we are at the start.’ So dismiss everything you thought you knew and be prepared to be amazed. Ever since Mary died childless, at the age of just 42 in 1558, the history of her reign was written almost exclusively by English Protestant historians, mainly using Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ written by an Elizabethan Protestant. We look at why Foxe exclusively blames Mary and why he’s wrong. (R)

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A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. (R)

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We present the final, damming evidence that the neoliberal case for freedom from all government regulation was always a dangerous deceit. It was always intended to make us prisoners of the unaccountable rich, as we are today. This is not liberty. It is not even the twilight of sovereignty. This is Armageddon.

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Unbelievable, sinister. Milton Friedman advises apartheid South Africa that neoliberal free-market economics can solve the problems of the Soweto riots, in the same way it delivered a ‘miracle’ of liberty under the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile.

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Neoliberalism was welcomed, finally, as a way to tackle what seemed to be a breakdown in American society in the late 1960s. Big business and FBI under J Edgar Hoover felt threatened by Keynsian consensus on welfare and the eradication of poverty. They had plenty to gain by provoking the extremism, and clearing the way for Milton Friedman. 

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The breakdown of American post-war consensus in the 60s calls for desperate measures on all sides: a government war in Vietnam, inner-city rioting, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Alarmed, US businesses seek salvation from the previously dismissed economic theory of neoliberal free-market capitalism. 

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We look at the roots of free market Neoliberalism and discover that big business in the US has been championing freedom from regulation since 1895, even claiming in 1923 that the anti-child labour movement in America was secretly being run from Moscow…

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How did less welfare, less government regulation of business (aka neoliberalism free market) become a global ‘fashion’ without any evidence of its benefits? Something to do with an imposter ‘Nobel’ prize and a PBS TV series funded by American big business?

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Civil liberty is different from individual liberty. Philosophers have known this since at least the 17th Century. We explore the two fundamental fallacies of neoliberalism to show why neoliberal economics can only bring prosperity to the few, and is incapable of predicting financial crashes. Today in the USA those damaged by neoliberalism have been driven to elect an unhinged criminal...

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