Britain since 1945

The welfare state

Britain won the war but was exhausted, and voters wanted change. In 1945 they elected a Labour government under Clement Attlee, who promised the welfare state set out in the Beveridge Report. In 1948 Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, the Minister for Health, led the creation of the National Health Service, giving everyone health care free at the point of use. A national benefits system offered 'social security' from the cradle to the grave, and railways, coal mines, gas, water and electricity were nationalised.

• William Beveridge — economist whose 1942 report attacked five 'Giant Evils': Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness
• Clement Attlee — Labour PM 1945–51, Churchill's wartime deputy; led Labour for 20 years
• R A Butler — Conservative; his Education Act 1944 (the 'Butler Act') brought free secondary education in England and Wales
• Aneurin (Nye) Bevan — Minister for Health who set up the NHS in 1948

Decolonisation and the Cold War

In 1947 nine countries, including India, Pakistan and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), became independent, and many colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific followed over 20 years. Britain built its own atomic bomb and joined NATO against the Soviet threat. Conservatives governed from 1951 to 1964, a time of recovery and rising prosperity; Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's 'wind of change' speech addressed independence for the colonies. Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Under Milk Wood) was a famous voice of the period.

Migration in post-war Britain

Rebuilding needed workers. The government invited people from Ireland and Europe, and from 1948 from the West Indies. In the 1950s industries recruited abroad — bus companies set up centres in the West Indies, and northern and Midlands textile and engineering firms sent agents to India and Pakistan. For about 25 years people came from the West Indies, India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh. Laws in the late 1960s restricted immigration, but in the early 1970s Britain took in 28,000 people of Indian origin expelled from Uganda.

The Swinging Sixties

The 1960s brought booming fashion, cinema and music — The Beatles and The Rolling Stones — and more people owned cars and consumer goods. Divorce and abortion laws were liberalised in England, Wales and Scotland, and new laws gave women equal pay and banned sex discrimination at work. Britain and France developed Concorde, and high-rise concrete and steel buildings spread.

Great British inventions of the 20th century

• Television — John Logie Baird (Scottish), 1920s; first broadcast London–Glasgow in 1932
• Radar — Sir Robert Watson-Watt (Scottish); first successful test in 1935
• Radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, Cheshire — Sir Bernard Lovell
• Turing machine — Alan Turing, 1930s; foundation of computer science
• Insulin (diabetes) — co-discovered by Scottish physician John Macleod
• Structure of DNA — discovered 1953 in London and Cambridge; Francis Crick shared the Nobel Prize
• Jet engine — Sir Frank Whittle, RAF engineer officer, 1930s
• Hovercraft — Sir Christopher Cockerell, 1950s
• Concorde — with France; first flew 1969, carried passengers 1976–2003
• Harrier jump jet — vertical take-off aircraft designed in the UK
• Cash machine (ATM) — James Goodfellow, 1960s; first used by Barclays in Enfield in 1967
• IVF — Sir Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe; first 'test-tube baby' born in Oldham in 1978
• Cloning — Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, 1996
• MRI scanner — co-invented by Sir Peter Mansfield
• World Wide Web — Sir Tim Berners-Lee; first used 25 December 1990

Exam tip: the handbook says you do not need inventors' birth and death dates — learn who invented what. Baird = television, Watson-Watt = radar, Whittle = jet engine, Cockerell = hovercraft, Berners-Lee = World Wide Web. Penicillin (Fleming) is covered in the 20th-century section.

The 1970s

In the late 1970s the post-war boom ended: prices rose sharply, the pound was unstable and imports cost more than exports earned (a balance-of-payments problem). Strikes caused conflict between unions and government. Northern Ireland saw serious unrest; in 1972 its Parliament was suspended and direct rule from London began. Some 3,000 people died in the violence after 1969. In 1972 Mary Peters, an athlete who grew up in Northern Ireland, won Olympic gold in the pentathlon.

The European Economic Community (EEC) was founded in 1957 by West Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The UK at first stayed out, but joined in 1973.

Conservative government, 1979–97

Margaret Thatcher, a grocer's daughter from Grantham, became Britain's first woman Prime Minister in 1979 and served until 1990, the longest of any 20th-century PM. Her government privatised nationalised industries, legally limited trade union powers and deregulated finance, boosting the City of London, while shipbuilding and coal mining declined. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, a naval taskforce recovered them. She worked closely with US President Ronald Reagan. Her successor, John Major, helped establish the Northern Ireland peace process.

Labour government, 1997–2010

Tony Blair's Labour government, elected in 1997, created a Scottish Parliament with substantial law-making powers and a Welsh Assembly with fewer law-making powers but control of many public services. Building on the peace process, it secured the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The Northern Ireland Assembly was elected in 1999, suspended in 2002 and restored in 2007; most paramilitary groups have given up their weapons. Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007.

Conflicts and the 2010 coalition

In the 1990s Britain helped lead the coalition that liberated Kuwait after Iraq invaded in 1990, and took part in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Since 2000 British forces have fought international terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, including in Afghanistan and Iraq; combat troops left Iraq in 2009. In May 2010 no party won an overall majority — the first time since February 1974 — and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed a coalition with David Cameron as Prime Minister.

Notable people

Dylan Thomas (1914–53) was a Welsh poet from Swansea, known for the radio play Under Milk Wood and the poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night. Roald Dahl (1916–90), born in Wales to Norwegian parents and an RAF pilot in the war, wrote children's books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Mary Peters, born in Manchester and raised in Northern Ireland, won Olympic pentathlon gold in 1972 and was made a Dame in 2000.