Historians' impact

Question 1

Reid and Szreter, History and Policy (2008)

Answer 1

History & Policy website pitched its stall somewhere in the middle-ground betweenprofessional history, specialist research,popular history

consortium of Cambridge and London historians.

external-relations officeestablished 2006

website:
allows us to get material directly into the public realm

History and Policy has also run a myth-busting ‘Bad History’ feature, modelled on Ben Goldacre’s influential ‘Bad Science’ columns in the Guardian,

All our activity is promoted through the monthly newsletter and on Twitter.

regular media coverage
interations w national-lvl journalists
discussions in HoC
Articles in national press by Polly Toynbee, Simon Jenkins

Supplying commissioned research reports to govt enquiries
Has been enabling hists to contrib directly to proceedings of parliamentary select committees on topics incl pensions, NHS

Not a vehicle for research exclusively on ‘policy history’
Nor is it a body attempting to promote narrowly conceived, instrumental, policy-relevant research in history

Question 2

History and Policy stats

Answer 2

185 policy papers
236 opinion articles
500+ historians
founded 2002

Question 3

History and Policy media engagement

Answer 3

History and Policy also works with the BBC journalist Chris Bowlby to publish a monthly feature on topical issues in BBC History Magazine. Recent articles in the series have included: ‘Have we lost the spirit of the Hustings?’ (Bowlby 2010)

director Dr Andrew Blick, expert in constitutional history, interviewed on implications of snap general election for the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 - on BBC, CNN, Sky News

explaining Act, its intention - to prevent General Elections being called simply when politically opportune - and potential reasons for its failure - psychological, not wanting to seem like running away from election/ the people

Question 4

History and Policy recent seminar

Answer 4

Devolution and local government in the UK, 8 July 2016

designed around the recently published reportDevolution and the Union: a higher ambition, the outcome of theInquiry into Better Devolution for the Whole UK chaired by Bob Kerslake.
The group brought a number of areas of historical expertise to the discussion, which ranged over the high Victorian era of highly successful self-governing cities like Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow, local government reconstruction in post-war Germany by the British occupiers and the effects of 1970s political and economic reform on local communities and identities. Particular foci were the revealed tension between Parliamentary and popular sovereignty as revealed by the referendum result, and ways this might feed into the future devolution agenda, and the key question of finance and how much control areas with devolved governments should or could have over their own revenues.

Question 5

History and Policy Forum

Answer 5

Trade Union Forum meets several times a year, bringing together trade unionists with professional historians and other interested groups. It considers trade union issues against their historical background, exploring different perspectives on the past and the present in order to suggest new lines of policy for the future.

On 6 April 2017Noel Whiteside, Professor of Comparative Public Policy at the University of WarwickandSally Brett, Head of Equality, Inclusion and Culture at the British Medical Associationdiscussed flexible working now and in the past. Casual labour in the nineteenth century and zero hour contracts today have much the same downsides, and what we mean by “flexible working” today can vary, and advantage different groups

Question 6

History and Policy impact limits

Answer 6

Seminars - oft several months apart

Consultations - last one on 26 Feb 2015

Question 7

MBS Birmingham Blog

Answer 7

March 20, 2017

Civil -

highlights pervasiveness of aspiration to turn Britain into a ‘Meritocracy’ among its leading politicians, most recently Theresa May.
Then reveals origins of term. Its creator, British sociologist Michael Young, catapulted the term into mainstream political discourse through his 1958 book,The Rise of the Meritocracy.

By the end of Young’s narrative it has become a distant, heartless and rigid ruling caste.

Despite Young’s warnings Britain’s political elite began a frenzied battle to appropriate the concept and to infuse it with a positive, popular meaning

InThe Rise of the Meritocracythe integral role played by grammar schools makes private provision as well as the education of the masses redundant. In an age of automation, comprehensives teach functional skills which allow those excluded from the meritocracy to better serve the new elite.

Question 8

Twitterstorians

Answer 8

Will Pooley, almost 4000 followers

tweeting often several times a day. However, many of these followers = historians. Twitter as echo chamber

Question 9

Wellcome Trust research fellowships in the humanities and social sciences

Answer 9

Dr Jenny Bangham
University of Cambridge
FlyBase: communicating Drosophila genetics on paper and online, 1970–2000
Dr Bangham is tracing the early history of ‘FlyBase’, an online genetic database that orders and communicates genetic information about the fruit fly Drosophila

Its history contributes to our understanding of that transformation, and captures the rise of genomics, the emergence of Drosophila as a model for biomedical research, the early days of the internet, and the publication of the Drosophila melanogaster genome sequence in 2000. By exploring the politics, infrastructures and professional expertise produced by database technologies, Dr Banghamis investigating what difference these have made to biology and biomedicine

Question 10

History REF Case Study Bristol

Answer 10

The Cabot Project, led by Dr Evan Jones at the University of Bristol, has raised public awareness
of England’s contribution to early maritime exploration, in the process challenging perceptions
among both the public and schoolchildren about how history is researched and written. The
Project’s research has generated massive international news coverage, including numerous followup
stories, written as a result of the positive response to earlier coverage, in both the mainstream
press and popular history publications
Since 2013, the Project’s ‘Schools
Group’ has used the team’s research findings to contest accepted readings of history in local
schools

Question 11

Case study from Oxford, highest scoring uni for History in REF

Answer 11

After losing the 2010 general election the Labour Party began an important debate about the
Party’s future direction, focusing in particular on how to advance Labour’s traditional redistributive
commitments at a time of economic austerity. Ben Jackson’s research has informed some of the
key discussions on this subject among politicians, advisors, commentators, and think tank
researchers. His analysis of the ideological roots of these debates, especially of the distributive
politics generated by economic austerity, has provoked and informed debate, and has contributed
to the development of Labour’s new direction under Ed Miliband.

The Left’s most successful and creative periods of
policy-making, according to Jackson’s analysis, have been popularised via a language that has
framed welfare provision and progressive taxation as serving the broad national interest of low and
middle-income citizens, and by contrasting this national interest with the sectional interests of
wealthy elites.

Question 12

York University REF example

Answer 12

What: the history of disease control and the social determinants of health

How: develop the World Health Organisation’s ‘Global Health Histories’

Impact: changed institutional practice in WHO headquarters/ regional offices

Question 13

Grammar Schools

Answer 13

Mandler and Todd, using date from schools and historical income level and biographical info - grammar schools little impact on life chances of ppl who attended them. Reason we think of grammar school period as period of incr stability is because there simply were more jobs then. Seek to use historical data to break common assumption grammar schools can be mechanisms of social mobility - grammar schools oft did inverse, suppressing life chances

Todd, 2014 article in the Guardian insisting Comprehensive schools give best history training, not grammar

Question 14

History Workshop Movement

Answer 14

‘history is not the prerogative of the historian, nor even, as postmodernism contends, a historian’s invention. It is, rather, a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance, of a thousand different hands’

HW brought together feminists, other activists, etc

1st HW held 1967 Oxford, on hist of Chartists. 50 present, collaborative event. Ppl discussed archives and doing history together

10 yrs later 700 ppl went to HW meetings

HW primarily social history

Question 15

Example of sort of community history group spawned by HW

Answer 15

Bristol Radical History Group - collaborative, local, research on marginalised/ w-c histories in Bristol

Atm research into conscientious objectors in WW1 and history of Eastville workhouse

Hannam, The Bristol ILP during the First World War to mark WW1 centenary
Also biography of local CO Walter Ayles

Imbuing local past w meaning and showing local ppl across SW have story worth telling

Local hist groups’ emphasis on sharing skills and collaboratively building project

Question 16

History and Policymaking Case Study:

Helen McCarthy, Contextualising the past, enriching the present

Answer 16

Kennedy scholar at Harvard
tookcourses on policy making in the European Union, contemporary women’s social movements and theories of democratization
Worked briefly for thinktank Demos

senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London

‘Thinktanks tend to focus on the communication and presentation of issues and how they might win political support, whereas my historical training at Cambridge had taught me the importance of exploring the substance of an issue from first principles and with scholarly rigour.’

‘Nowadays so many academics – from research students to senior professors - are blogging or on Twitter or getting involved in public or policy engagement activities of one kind or another.

policy engagement began when she was working on her second book, on women and diplomacy. She wrote to Sir Peter Ricketts, then Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office (FCO), to make them aware of her work on women diplomats

I found it very useful to be able to say in my letters and emails to former diplomats that the project had theFCO’s blessing – I think it made respondents more likely to agree to be interviewed

McCarthy was invited to give a seminar on her research at the FCO:
‘Many of those attending,
found the seminar interesting and relevant. Most FCO staff are so focussed on day-to-day business and short-term deadlines that they don’t have time or space to reflect on the bigger picture of change and continuity over time.

Assessing the ‘impact’ of my work on policy makers remains a challenge.’

As a result of her work with the Foreign Office, she secured an AHRC collaborative doctoral award in 2013 for the project, ‘Representing and Belonging: Social and Cultural Change in the British Diplomatic Service since 1945’.

Media activities:

interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, the BBC World Serviceseveral times on Women’s Hour

Woman’s Hour alone has three million listeners.

Media training acquired earlier in her academic career, including a course organised by History & Policy, was useful, and enabled her to approach her interviews with confidence

‘Sometimes interviewers might oversimplify a point I was trying to make, but historians have to accept that the way journalists approach an issue will always depend on their understanding of the interests and attention span of their audience.’

As an academic, it’s gratifying when people outside the field take an interest and seem to find your research enlightening. That said, it’s impossible to know what they are really taking away from it

2015 McCarthy was appointed Deputy Director of the Mile End Institute (MEI) at Queen Mary, which promotes debate on public policy issues and the UK’s role within the wider world.

The first event she organised, in March 2015, marked the centenary of the Women’s Peace Congress in The Hague, in April 1915. Contributors discussed the history of women’s peace activism and reflected on the past, present and future of women’s transnational organisations

Policy makers speaking at the event, including an international lawyer, a former ambassador, said they found the contributions from historians v useful

McCarthy said that her books and articles do not include policy recommendations
she provides historical background and rich context

‘For me, policy engagement isn’t about research driven by contemporary public policy concerns. If you want to do that, then you should work in government or for a thinktank.

Question 17

JohnTosh, ‘Indefenceof applied history: History and Policy Website’, Policy Papers, History and Policy Website (2006)

Answer 17

The influence of the History and Policy website depends to a considerable extent on the reputation and credibility of applied history the genre to which it unquestionably belongs.
• Applied history has generally been regarded by the historical profession as suspect and
inferior.
• A reading of the thirty-six papers posted on the site so far demonstrates that they adhere to the fundamental canons of historical thinking, and that they are best described as
practical historicism’.
• Many of them employ the processual mode which uncontroversially sees historical sequence and development as the way to explain the contemporary world.
• A surprising number of papers employ the analogical mode, often rejected by historians, but here practised in an open-ended way which respects the gulf between past and present.

in many cases both politicians and media employ a time-span which is too short to explain
the present

According to Ilan Pappe, American policy towards Palestine discounts any history before the Six Day War. But for the Palestinians the defining moment in modern history is not 1967, but 1948, when 250,000 Palestinians were expelled from Israel. Pappe’s point is that understanding
of the problem is drastically distorted if the base-line is set too recently

One of the most likely casualties of this kind of extended perspective is the belief in the new.

The war on terror’ is said to be waged against an entirely new kind of adversary, and to require unprecedented methods. Christopher Andrew explains how after 9/11 US intelligence measured the novelty of Al-Qaeda by measuring it against the
secular terrorism they knew well groups like the IRA which applied terror in order to persuade rather than destroy. Yet Holy Terror has a much longer history, dating back to the religious wars of early modern Europe: even before 9/11 Andrew was noting a resurgence of traditional and
cult-based terrorism’. The pool of experience available to those conducting the ‘war on terror’ runs much deeper than the intelligence world seems to be aware.

juxtapose old and
new, and to see whether the enabling conditions which accounted for the old pattern still obtain. That is the method adopted by Hera Cook in her wide-ranging survey of sexual and familial change in contemporary Britain. Her paper is a commentary on the demand from the right that the clock be turned back to the strict sexual morality and stable family life ‘before the 1960s’. As Cook points out, what sustained that traditional pattern was highly unreliable methods of birth control, combined with low wages for young people, particularly young women. The clock could only be put back if the advances in contraceptive technology could be
airbrushed away, The sexual revolution is a fait accompli, and the task of government is not to attempt its reversal, but to manage it. Hence
the title of Cook’s paper, ‘No turning back’

Arguing by analogy:

One good reason for historians to engage with analogical reasoning is that it is so prevalent in the media and among politicians

Drawing on his mastery of
recent Japanese history, Dower points out that - unlike in Iraq in 2003 - the Americans in 1945 enjoyed considerable legitimacy in the eyes of the defeated enemy; they were inspired by New Deal idealism; their actions were not distorted by a compelling economic interest; and they were able to transform the defeated ruler into a symbol of continuity between the old order and the
new.

best applied history does not depart from the canons of historical thinking, but rather amounts to a logical extension of the core principles of historicism.

should be vigorously disseminated

Question 18

VirginiaBerridge,’History Matters: History’s Rolein Health Policy Making’,Medical History,Vol. 52 (2008).

Answer 18

This discussion paper has its origin in part of Fry’s agenda. It looks at a little discussed sector of historical enthusiasm: the use made of history by politicians involved in health policy making and by those who advise them.

study involved a set of interviews with fifteen “key informants”

History was quite often used at the political level in the early twenty-first century in political debate and argument on health policy. Often this involved an invocation of the early history of the NHS and Nye Bevan

History was used in a different way in the strong political advocacy of local differentiation in health. This was justified by the history of mutualism. The argument of the then Health Secretary, John Reid, for foundation hospitals in the early 2000s was based on his view that they rejuvenated that mutual tradition

First we should differentiate the different levels at which history is and could be used in policy circles.

direct policy advice to ministers and policy thinking; the deliberations of expert committees; the media use of history with potential policy impact; or historical analysis feeding through at the local level in Primary Care Trusts and other organizations with responsibility for health

One informant pointed out that history had no formal role.
Policy makers find kudos in innovation, but often that is not evidence based.

A survey of senior Whitehall policy makers in September 2005 presented by Dr Phil Davies, head of the Social Researchers Office of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, itemized sources of information used by senior policy makers in order of importance

Special advisers came top of the list, followed by “experts”, think-tanks, lobbyists and pressure groups, professional associations, the media, and finally constituents and users. Academics and their evidence were “not on the radar”

ad hoc processes of using history in government.

expert committees

precedent was important

A similar process was described in the recent changes around the organization of health protection in the UK and the setting up of the Health Protection Agency.
There we have looked back at the PHLS [Public Health Laboratory Service] and how it was constructed and created.

high politics, a different process operated. During the early years of the twenty-first century when there was a focus of political attention in government on the NHS and a rethinking of direction. One adviser recalled:
… a good deal of reference to history. It was back to 1948.

Seminars were set up of around fifteen or twenty academics on issues such as patient choice or choice in key services, and the key issues would be distilled back to the Minister. “We didn’t specifically invite historians—but the people there had experience of historical context.”19
Different ministers had different ways of operating and also of using history. Whereas Milburn liked to go into detail,

Reid, wanted shorter submissions. Both ministers were historians by training. Reid had a PhD in West African history

current developments could thereby assume a veneer of respectability in political circles by their association with long established traditions. NHS reforms could be seen as part of a lineage from the past

Lack of institutional memory

one adviser found himself the only source of institutional memory in being able to think back to the Thatcher market reforms in health

The rhythm of working in government was also important, with many issues on the agenda at any one time. There were times when history might be inserted and others when it would be impossible.

gestation of a major speech would start with a seminar to which leading academics in the field would be invited: the Prime Minister would attend but would listen and not speak. Some participants would be asked to write three or four page comments on their research and views which then went into the PM’s reading for the weekend.

Role of Historians:

informants did not relate their activities to the names of specific historians or historical positions and interpretations

colleague researching maternal health and the safe motherhood movement drew attention to the importance of historical perspectives in forming the policy outlook of that movement. Loudon’s work was widely known and used, although the policy “message” drawn from his writing varied across the safe motherhood field.23Safe motherhood advocates drew different messages from Loudon, dependent on their own agendas in the present. The role of history seemed to be waning as the field developed a broader basis of research evidence. This was perhaps an example of the type of totemic role of historians—which also finds echoes in the drugs field, where the work of historians has seeped through over a period of time, but where historical “messages” can be misunderstood or used for particular policy purposes.24

Historians were also used who were high profile in fields unrelated to health. In 2006, the NHS Confederation had an historian as keynote speaker for its annual conference. This was the historian, David Starkey, speaking about the role of leadership

Historians who were cited or used were thus of three sorts: those with close existing connections to policy, who knew the policy scene; those with a media profile, whether appropriate or not; and those, like Loudon, who wrote accessibly and addressed a medical audience in health publications, who appeared to have a message for policy

Interpretation was a problem, but so, too, was time frame. The history which was used often focused on particular periods, and ignored others which might also have lessons to impart

NHS - little or no understanding that pre-1948 health service history had any utility for policy analysis.

difficult in politics to admit to something having been tried before.
tendency in government to justify new initiatives by reference to their lineage elsewhere in Europe rather than by analogy with recent history.34
“rebadging”

history was being used but mostly without historians being involved.
Statistics are a form of historical evidence with a better “fit” with established ways of thinking in health circles: their use seems to avoid the problem of historical interpretation. Recent research on the future of pandemic flu has drawn on data from the 1918 flu epidemic

develop interpretation in a collective fashion which is different to the process of competing or diverse interpretation, based on differing use of a range of archives and sources, as is common in historical method. Their work did not involve access to sources other than industry ones or knowledge of the historiography of the field.39

Yet the policy salience of such work has been considerable: the House of Commons Health committee report on the tobacco industry called in 2000 for access to industry archives to be a priority.41

Role of the Media:
Key conduit
At a seminar for BBC news editors attended by the author, the newsmen and newswomen defended their use of history. The examples they cited did use history as part of their coverage but mostly for foreign policy. Social policy coverage was largely history free

Some have seen the role of media historians as problematic, since they become the first port of call, with the apparent ability to write about every topic, whether they know much about it or not.47Nevertheless, research has demonstrated the key importance of the media in defining agendas to politicians.48
For health, medical journals are a key conduit for new stories in the general media,

Access can be difficult. Practical issues. Need for most hists to publish elsewhere for career purposes. Issues of language, contacts and networks in health

ESRC and AHRC have set up knowledge transfer mechanisms which have the potential to involve the work of historians

Recently, a wider range of funders have begun to use history and to fund it. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has funded work on temperance and alcohol policy,
Foresight initiatives, based in the Office of Science and Technology.
researchers are set to answer questions defined by the civil servants and policy makers and to provide reviews of historical material and interpretation,

history is being used in an ad hoc way, mostly without the involvement of historians. Historians are mainly seen as providers of the raw materials for analysis

There is little knowledge of the interpretative role of history, and views of history are dominated, in the view of historians, by out-of-date perceptions or by mistaken views of personalities and “great men”. Invoking Nye Bevan is a cottage industry among health ministers. But there are good reasons for this. It is not just because of lack of knowledge of anything else but also because of the necessary dynamic of policy making.

Blair had the image in the late 1990s of running a “history free” government, but by 2006 the political rationale dictated a changed role for the past.
History started to come in because we were at a particular point in the political cycle … We wanted to be able to survey what government had done and beyond that, how things have changed over a longer cycle

Ways forward:

Important role which networks play
Speaking to our allies in social science and in funding bodies
“knowledge transfer” mechanisms operate both formally and informally and these could be built on. Here I mean both formal mechanisms like seminars bringing the two sides together, and also the many informal means of transfer
issue of making sense of complexity, of communication and language across the history/policy boundary. The new open access policies being introduced for health history funded by the Wellcome Trust and by the research councils may help here.
, at least historical work will be included in the databases used by most researchers in the health field. History should begin to find its place in the health industry of systematic review,
files which summarized past developments.69Such reviews could also feed, in the present policy set up, into the work of enquiries and parliamentary committees.
70The Wellcome Trust public understanding programme

Such a funding body is potentially a key vector for the historical message about health and science, given its funding mix of historians, health personnel and scientists.
Timing is also a key consideration
cycles in the use of history
current use of history in policy is itself historically contingent, dependent on personal networks, self-help, and particular policy situations—sometimes a crisis where there is nothing apart from history to hold on to. Or history fulfils a rhetorical role
historians do offer a form of analysis which in its ability to segment and analyse the issues comprehensively and dispassionately over time, is matched by no other discipline. Health policy specialists have pointed to a failure to learn from experience as one of the main reasons for organizational failure in healthcare

Question 19

VirginiaBerridge, ‘Thinking in time: doeshealth policy need history as evidence?’, Lancet, Vol 375, No. 9717 (2010), pp. 798-799

Answer 19

Centre for History in Public Health, London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine, London WC1E 7HT, UK

History is the evidence-based discipline par excellence.

Much decision making in health policy is currently formed
in an absence, or partial use, of history.

British health adviser Lord Darzi’s promotion of polyclinics, for example, spoke of antecedents
in revolutionary Russia, but did not allude to the more
recent British history of the health centre as the intended
fulcrum of the early National Health Service (NHS),
In the UK, those involved
in the regular health-service reorganisations are often
unaware of past organisational histories

Do politicians
and commentators know that health services were once
located and managed within local government, or that
public health personnel were the intended coordinators of
primary care at the local level?

It is not always that history is ignored, but often that “bad
history” (on the model of “bad science”) is used. In the UK,
politicians in the health fi eld routinely invoke Nye Bevan as
a sounding board for what they want to promote

Alcohol prohibition in the USA, so we are told, did not work

is it correct? Historians don’t think
so. They have pointed out that the situation was more
complex. There was never complete prohibition. The USA
in the 1920s had a system of partial availability.

Beer drinking declined, there
was a rise in women’s drinking, and more consumption
of “shorts” and spirits

message cannot simply be summed up as a slogan,
and requires more careful interpretation.

Slogans and dates are often, however, what history
is reduced to

For historians are not always in charge of the historical message. Economists, political scientists, epidemiologists, health-service analysts, scientists, and social scientists perhaps sit more naturally at the health policy
table.

A cynic might ask whether it matters if history is used.
Politicians will always use the evidence that best suits their particular objectives and “evidence” alone cannot
be the only determinant of policy making. But there are
opportunities early on in that process of developing policy where historical understanding could be inserted.
And failure to use historical interpretation can lead to
restricted and less than optimal policy analysis. Measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccina tion provides one example. Public concern about MMR has been ascribed
to the effect of “bad science” and to the gullibility of the
media and public in believing it. But a historian might well point to a much longer history of public concern and resistance to vaccination. The anti-vaccination leagues of the 19th century were informed by a mix of working-class sentiment, religious belief, and hostility to received science
a history that needs to be analysed to understand public resistance.

can help enlarge the
boundaries and the terms of the debate on health issues.
In the USA at the moment, historians are doing this in the
debate on health-care reform, and British historians also
off er insights founded on the pre-NHS British experience
with health insurance.

Our understanding of pandemic influenza has been
informed by history, but that has largely been the scientific
history of the virus and its antecedents; there is a historical
literature that examines the response to influenza in terms
of the nature of public behaviour, the forms of public health
intervention considered appropriate. This too could be part of policy option analysis

Question 20

SimonSzreter, ‘History and Public Policy’, in, Jonathan Bate (ed.),The Public Value of the Humanities(London 2011).[availableonline]

Answer 20

Having done the painstaking historical research, we believe that the fruits of historians’ labours merit being shared more widely

Without this, the policy process can remain trapped by unexamined and misleading assumptions about the present and how it came to be. Policies for change in the future are much more likely to bring about their intended outcomes if formulated on the basis of an informed, open and critical perspective on the past

strongest general argument both for the importance of bringing history into dialogue with policy and policymaking and for historians to take it as their social duty to bring about this expansion in contemporary public discourse is that history is already there, all the time, in the policy formulating process. The only question is what kind of history is going to be used by decision-makers?

profound respect which all good historical research gives to three methodological issues: questions of context, the study of process, and questions of difference when addressing human and social affairs (Tosh 2002: 36–46; Tosh 2002: 9–12). To these we would add of course the discipline’s high level of critical sensitivity to the provenance of information of all kinds and its commitment to a self-critical, reflective awareness of the historian’s own time and place

Context, process and difference

History provides a way of thinking about society and its component parts, about the messy, conflicted and negotiated process of change

2007 I published an article in the policy-oriented journal, World Development, which primarily aimed to bring a historical perspective to bear on the contemporary issue of the scandalous neglect, from a human rights perspective, of identity registration at birth among around 36 per cent of the children born today in the world’s poorest countries (Szreter 2007). My historical contribution was to point out how the citizens of England, the world’s first successful ‘developed’ economy, had long benefited both from a universal identity registration system (the parish registers from 1538 onwards) and a universal social security system (the ‘Old’ Poor Law, 1601–1834), as precursors to economic development.

Firstly, I was asked to join a large team of public health epidemiologists and social scientists who were writing a commissioned set of articles on the current neglect of civic registration in the world’s poor countries. They did not have a historian on the team and the World Development article drew their attention to the potential significance of incorporating a historical perspective

one of my main contributions was to counsel extreme care in advocating the creation of new identity registration systems in the world’s poorest countries because they could be open to tragic abuse by maverick political regimes – as in Rwanda in the 1990s and Nazi Germany – and must be designed with this risk in mind
team’s work has borne fruit in a set of four articles in the Lancet’s online publication (‘Who Counts’). This publication has, in turn, been extensively cited in the final Report of the World Health Organization Commission on the Social Determinants of Health

Secondly, I was asked by the organizers to speak at the ‘Social Protection for the Poorest in Africa’ conference, sponsored by the UK Department for International Development (DfID), in Entebbe, Uganda.

They told me that what they found helpful and inspirational in my presentation was simply the fact that history showed that complex, large-scale welfare systems were not solely the property of rich nations
for my audience in Entebbe this was highly significant, new information

The practice of studying history is of course a two-way dialogue between past and present. History and Policy believes that it can only be helpful for historians to be as critically well-informed as possible about those aspects of the present which most preoccupy the policy world. The organization keeps network members updated with policy debates, particularly those which could benefit from historical reassessment.

History and Policy has just completed an evaluation of its services amongst its network of professional historians. All of those interviewed believed that a source of support to link historians and policymakers was probably or definitely important and 93 per cent said the need for an organization like History and Policy was probably or definitely increasing.

Some network members believed History and Policy was important because the organization, by its very existence, reinforced the importance of history to policymaking and justified the attempts of historians to become more involved

Further, History and Policy was credited with actually impacting on policy – several network members talked about their research being incorporated into policy debates. Others talked about the need for historians to dispel self-serving myths and assumptions about the past, used in misleading or simplistic ways to justify current policies, and to show how policy ‘disasters’ happened in the past to forewarn those at risk of taking a similar path in the present

The most glaring, recent example of policymakers’ failure to learn from history remains the Iraq War, on which Tony Blair confidently pronounced in his speech to the US Congress that, ‘There has never been a time … when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day’ (Blair 2003). History and Policy is proud to record that in spring 2003 it published two papers which, in retrospect, were prescient in their warnings about the coalition’s unrealistic approaches to winning the peace in Iraq (Dower 2003; Milton-Edwards 2003).

History and Policy has become an increasingly important forum for communication between historians and the policy world and both the AHRC and British Academy have cited History and Policy as an example of best practice in this respect

We have also quickly learned that the skills and energy of communications specialists are as vital to the effectiveness of this project in reaching its target audience in the policy world as the website with its high quality papers written by our historians

Question 21

Mark Roodhouse H&P case study

Answer 21

following the publication of his History and Policy paper on ‘Rationing returns: a solution to global warming?’ (Roodhouse 2007) and associated publicity in the press, Mark Roodhouse of the University of York was invited to submit a memorandum to the Environmental Audit Select Committee inquiry into personal carbon allowances.

Question 22

The Lancet - Elliman and Bedford, Should the UK introduce compulsory vaccination?’ (2013)

Answer 22

Used evd from hist and trans-national comparisons to argue compuls vac probs not good idea

Question 23

The Lancet

Answer 23

first launched 1823
Committed to applying scientific knowl to improve health and advance human progress
High impact content
Somewhere medical profs and policy makers might look for new info