Making British Policy, Using and Ignoring History

Abstract

In theory, the use of past experience recorded through history should enable ministers and officials to improve both policies and methods. For Peter Nailor, a historian with a background of working in government, history offered British policymakers the ability ‘to devise something better than a one-dimensional response’ to complex multi-dimensional problems:

More often than not, the problem that faces government today has its roots in the past; it has grown out of circumstances that will have created problems for governments before. And insofar as there will have been some discussion in the past about which of several optional policies to follow, it will be sensible to find out what the options were, and why one rather than another was chosen. When you have done that — which comes close to what social scientists call ‘policy analysis’ — it does not mean that you have either discovered, or eschewed, a novel solution. All it means is, to use a rather old-fashioned term — that you ‘have done your homework’.¹