History & Policy

Carolyn Holbrook (Australian Policy and History): Failure to Attach: Australians and their Federation

The Australian federation was hailed as a beacon of democratic governance at the time of its establishment in 1901—a cutting-edge fusion of representative and federal ideals. The shimmer faded rapidly, however. Deficiencies such as service duplication and fiscal imbalance between an enriched Commonwealth and impecunious states, have proved stubbornly resistant to reform. Australians have rejected thirty-six of the forty-four proposed amendments to the Constitution since 1901. This paper examines the link between Australians’ resistance to reform of the federation and their lack of affection for it. It shows that the failure to attach can be traced to the very earliest years after Federation.

Carolyn Holbrook is an Alfred Deakin Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Contemporary Histories Group at Deakin University and Director of Australian Policy and History. She published Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography about the history of how Australians have remembered the Great War in 2014 and is working on a policy decision-making history of Australia with James Walter from Monash University and a cultural history of Australian federalism.

James Grossman (American Historical Association): History, Public Memory, Celebration, and/or Commemoration: US Confederate Monuments and Public Policy

Why does it matter whom we choose to memorialize in public spaces? Are military heroism and sacrifice inevitably tied to the purpose of that war?

Jim Grossman is Executive Director of the American Historical Association. He was previously Vice President for Research and Education at the Newberry Library, and has taught at University of Chicago and University of California, San Diego. The author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989) and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900-1929 (1997), Grossman was project director and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Chicago (2005; online, 2006) and coeditor of the series "Historical Studies of Urban America" (50 vols, 1992-2015 ). His articles and short essays have focused on various aspects of American urban history, African American history, ethnicity, higher education, and the place of history in public culture. Short pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.

Land of Hope received awards from the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights and the Illinois State Historical Society. A Chance to Make Good won awards from the New York Public Library and the National Council for the Social Studies. Grossman was chosen in 2005 as one of seven "Chicagoans of the Year" by Chicago Magazine.

Grossman’s consulting experience includes history-related projects generated by the BBC, Smithsonian, and various theater companies, film makers, museums, and libraries. He serves on the boards of the National Humanities Alliance (Vice President), and American Council of Learned Societies.

Pawan Singh (Deakin University, Melbourne): Biometrics, identity and privacy in India

In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of mandatory Aadhaar, the Indian government's biometric programme that was launched in 2009 and challenged in the Supreme Court 2010 onwards. Civil society groups, lawyers and pro-privacy activists challenged Aadhaar's mandatory linkage to various state-sponsored benefit databases for the Aadhaar scheme's potential to bring about a surveillance state. This presentation provides an overview of the Indian data privacy debate in the context of Aadhaar and identifies some key policy issues. It also reflects on the place of privacy as a legal right, technological affordance and social and cultural practice in India.

Pawan Singh is a media studies researcher and a New Generation Network Scholar in Contemporary Histories at Deakin University. His research concerns issues of privacy, social justice and mediation of identity in India within a transnational framework.

History & Policy exists to put historians in touch with policy makers, encourage historically informed comment in public policy debate and put excellent history at the heart of policy making. Although we are the only project of our kind in the UK we are far from being the only one in the world. For this conference, which will be open to policy makers and the public, we are partnering with the American Historical Association and Australian Policy & History for a day of panels and discussion to explore how history informs public policy debate in different countries. What are the success stories, how do policy makers vary in their receptiveness, what can historians learn from each other and from the policy makers they talk to, and have particular topics got more traction in some places than others?

Joanna Cruickshank (Deakin University, Melbourne): History, Law and Treaty-Making with Indigenous Peoples in Australia

In February 2016, the Victorian state government became the first Australian jurisdiction to announce its intention to work towards a treaty with Indigenous people. As of late 2018, the treaty process is well underway. In this paper I discuss an Australian Research Council-funded project that is providing context for treaty processes between Australian governments and Indigenous people, by researching the history of lawful relations in Australia since colonization. By making accessible this history through a diversity of outcomes, the project is informing policy and seeking to educate the broader community about the practical activities of conducting lawful relations in the present.

Joanna Cruickshank is Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University and a Chief Investigator on the ARC-funded project Indigenous Leaders: Lawful Relations from Encounter to Treaty. Recent publications include 'Colonial Contexts and Global Dissent' in The Oxford History of Dissenting Traditions (2017). Her book White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments will be published by Brill in 2019.

History & Policy exists to put historians in touch with policy makers, encourage historically informed comment in public policy debate and put excellent history at the heart of policy making. Although we are the only project of our kind in the UK we are far from being the only one in the world. For this conference, which will be open to policy makers and the public, we are partnering with the American Historical Association and Australian Policy & History for a day of panels and discussion to explore how history informs public policy debate in different countries. What are the success stories, how do policy makers vary in their receptiveness, what can historians learn from each other and from the policy makers they talk to, and have particular topics got more traction in some places than others?

Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell. In his forty-year career, Lord Butler has served as Private Secretary to five Prime Ministers and was Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service from 1988 to 1998. In addition to the many momentous political shifts in that time he has overseen an important period of change in the history of the Civil Service and its relationship to the wider world.

14 November 2018 - 18:00 pm - 19:30 pm

This is a unique opportunity for historians and practitioners, past and present, to reflect together on how reform comes about in government and how it works - there will be ample opportunity for questions and discussion. Drinks and refreshments will be served. This is one of a series of Whitehall Anniversary events in 2018 – previous events, with audio available, have focussed on the Next Steps Report (1988) and the Fulton Report (1968).

Speaker: Professor Vernon Bogdanor is Research Professor at the Centre for British Politics and Government at King’s College London. As one of Britain’s foremost constitutional experts he has written widely on British politics and the constitution and frequently advised governments and parliamentary bodies.

Respondent: Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell. In his forty-year career, Lord Butler has served as Private Secretary to five Prime Ministers and was Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service from 1988 to 1998. In addition to the many momentous political shifts in that time he has overseen an important period of change in the history of the Civil Service and its relationship to the wider world.

Chair: Dr Catherine Haddon, Senior Fellow and Resident Historian at the Institute for Government. Dr Haddon specialises in the history of Whitehall and the evolution of civil service reform.

Professor Vernon Bogdanor is Research Professor at the Centre for British Politics and Government at King’s College London. As one of Britain’s foremost constitutional experts he has written widely on British politics and the constitution and frequently advised governments and parliamentary bodies.

14 November 2018 - 18:00 pm - 19:30 pm

This is a unique opportunity for historians and practitioners, past and present, to reflect together on how reform comes about in government and how it works - there will be ample opportunity for questions and discussion. Drinks and refreshments will be served. This is one of a series of Whitehall Anniversary events in 2018 – previous events, with audio available, have focussed on the Next Steps Report (1988) and the Fulton Report (1968).

Speaker: Professor Vernon Bogdanor is Research Professor at the Centre for British Politics and Government at King’s College London. As one of Britain’s foremost constitutional experts he has written widely on British politics and the constitution and frequently advised governments and parliamentary bodies.

Respondent: Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell. In his forty-year career, Lord Butler has served as Private Secretary to five Prime Ministers and was Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service from 1988 to 1998. In addition to the many momentous political shifts in that time he has overseen an important period of change in the history of the Civil Service and its relationship to the wider world.

Chair: Dr Catherine Haddon, Senior Fellow and Resident Historian at the Institute for Government. Dr Haddon specialises in the history of Whitehall and the evolution of civil service reform.

Dr Jill Pellew FRHistS

Wednesday 17 October: 5:00pm - 7:00pm

The Grenfell Tower fire is generally agreed to have been the worst tragedy of unnecessary loss of life in Britain since the Aberfan disaster of 1966. In Victorian Britain a number of such disasters struck in various sectors of industry and society as the rapidly changing and largely unregulated profit-oriented economy threw up all manner of hazards from cheap lodging houses to unsafe modes of transport to toxic rivers.

The Victorian response to such tragedies was to set-up statutory regulatory bodies, which by the mid-twentieth century had developed into an extensive system of life-preserving regulatory inspectorates overseeing the economy's proclivity to throw-up new and unsafe commercial products and practices. However, British society has now been subject to several decades of economies and cost-cutting reductions of the functions and scope of these publicly-funded bodies, sometimes characterised in the media as 'red tape' holding back 'enterprise'.

As the Grenfell Tower enquiry proceeds it seems to uncover an underfunded, broken, fragmented and ineffective regulatory system in modern Britain, signifying the unlearning in recent decades of the harsh lessons learned by our Victorian predecessors: that an insufficiently monitored and inspected free market pays insufficient attention to the protection of human life in its search for profits. This event is hosted by History & Policy.

Due to illness, Ewen Shane talk was given by Professor Simon Szreter.

Shane Ewen is Reader in Urban History at Leeds Beckett University. He is Co-Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘Forged by Fire: Burns Injury and Identity in Britain, c.1800-2000’. He has written extensively about the history of Britain’s fire and rescue service. This policy paper is based on a presentation given at the Home Office in January 2018.

Wednesday 17 October: 5:00pm - 7:00pm

The Grenfell Tower fire is generally agreed to have been the worst tragedy of unnecessary loss of life in Britain since the Aberfan disaster of 1966. In Victorian Britain a number of such disasters struck in various sectors of industry and society as the rapidly changing and largely unregulated profit-oriented economy threw up all manner of hazards from cheap lodging houses to unsafe modes of transport to toxic rivers.

The Victorian response to such tragedies was to set-up statutory regulatory bodies, which by the mid-twentieth century had developed into an extensive system of life-preserving regulatory inspectorates overseeing the economy's proclivity to throw-up new and unsafe commercial products and practices. However, British society has now been subject to several decades of economies and cost-cutting reductions of the functions and scope of these publicly-funded bodies, sometimes characterised in the media as 'red tape' holding back 'enterprise'.

As the Grenfell Tower enquiry proceeds it seems to uncover an underfunded, broken, fragmented and ineffective regulatory system in modern Britain, signifying the unlearning in recent decades of the harsh lessons learned by our Victorian predecessors: that an insufficiently monitored and inspected free market pays insufficient attention to the protection of human life in its search for profits. This event is hosted by History & Policy.

15 October 2018 - 18:30 pm - 19:30 pm

As Brexit negotiations proceed, all eyes are on the actions and perspectives of the UK government and the European Commission – but how do the perspectives of other major EU member nations feed into the process? British history has often been deployed by participants in the debate, but how might other national histories have brought us to this moment? And what does the political class in France make of the post-Brexit future?

SPEAKER: Dr Sophie Loussouarn is an Assistant Professor in British History at the University of Amiens and a Visiting Professor at the University of Alicante in Spain where she gives a seminar on Brexit. She is an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and Oxford (Wadham College). She graduated from the Institute of Political Science in Paris and published a biography of Tony Blair (2009) and of David Cameron (2010). Sophie is often interviewed on British politics and Brexit on French television and radio. She organized an international conference on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in Amiens in December 2015. Her article on “Gillray and the French Revolution” was published in National Identities in June 2015.

RESPONDENT: The Rt Hon. Dominic Grieve QC MP is Conservative Member of Parliament for Beaconsfield and has taken a prominent role in the Brexit debate both within and outside Parliament. He is President of the Franco-British Society and a recipient of the Légion d'honneur.

Note: Mr Grieve has unfortunately had to withdraw from the event and has sent his apologies.

CHAIR: Michael Jay, Baron Jay of Ewelme is a crossbench member of the House of Lords, and previously served as the UK Ambassador to France and Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

15 October 2018 - 18:30 pm - 19:30 pm

As Brexit negotiations proceed, all eyes are on the actions and perspectives of the UK government and the European Commission – but how do the perspectives of other major EU member nations feed into the process? British history has often been deployed by participants in the debate, but how might other national histories have brought us to this moment? And what does the political class in France make of the post-Brexit future?

SPEAKER: Dr Sophie Loussouarn is an Assistant Professor in British History at the University of Amiens and a Visiting Professor at the University of Alicante in Spain where she gives a seminar on Brexit. She is an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and Oxford (Wadham College). She graduated from the Institute of Political Science in Paris and published a biography of Tony Blair (2009) and of David Cameron (2010). Sophie is often interviewed on British politics and Brexit on French television and radio. She organized an international conference on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in Amiens in December 2015. Her article on “Gillray and the French Revolution” was published in National Identities in June 2015.

RESPONDENT: The Rt Hon. Dominic Grieve QC MP is Conservative Member of Parliament for Beaconsfield and has taken a prominent role in the Brexit debate both within and outside Parliament. He is President of the Franco-British Society and a recipient of the Légion d'honneur.

Note: Mr Grieve has unfortunately had to withdraw from the event and has sent his apologies.

CHAIR: Michael Jay, Baron Jay of Ewelme is a crossbench member of the House of Lords, and previously served as the UK Ambassador to France and Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.