History Cafe

Why was the 15th century in England and Wales so violent? It certainly wasn’t York v Lancaster, white-rose v red-rose rivalry. Monarchs were useless but that’s not unique to the 15th century. So what was it that defined this period? It has everything to do with the plague… (R)

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Why do we know so little about medieval history? About England and Wales in the fifteenth century? The Wars of the Roses (Lancaster v York) lasted 4 months not the traditional 85 years. Even the roses were (mostly) inventions. And was it even medieval? The execution of the King’s chief minister as a traitor in 1450, by sailors dissatisfied with an ineffective king, was shocking. It revealed that the common people believed the true crown was the community. You can’t get more modern than that. (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. (R)

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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. (R)

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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. (R)

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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.  (R)

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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… (R)

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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? (R)

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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... (R)

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In 1983 Professor Hugh Trevor Roper claimed that Scottishness had been invented. We enjoyably demolish Trevor Roper’s theory and reveal that the commercialisation of romantic Scottishness in the nineteenth century had far deeper and darker roots than the manufacture of tartan and romantic fiction. (R)

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