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Comment Central has a fun competition to determine the greatest mistake in British history. I hate to be dull, but if one is judging post war mistakes, I think Graham Stewart nails it with the very first contribution: Circular 10/65: When Tony Crosland, Secretary of State for education in 1965, requested local authorities to scrap grammar schools and institute one-size-fits-all comprehensives across the country. This meant having to pay for selective education.I'm not supposed to be giving any details away, but I have a chapter of my fothcoming book on the infamous Circular 10/65. (It's forthcoming in two senses: that it'll be out this autumn; and that it has still to be completed!)
Mind you, there are some terrific other entries from Times writers. It's difficult to disagree with Matthew Parris (not something I often write!): 1) The First World War
2) The Boer War
3) The failure of the Irish Home Rule Bill And Nigel Hawkes is spot on: And the 1948 centralised structure of the NHS (the high watermark of Stalinist planning) has damaged health care delivery for 60 years. Astonishingly, many people still think this was a good idea. But I have to echo Daniel Finkelstein's ultimate choice: Appeasing Hitler in his early years and allowing him to believe that he could get away with expanding his power. My undergraduate thesis was on British policy towards Eastern Europe in the 1930s, and I studied it as my special subject for my degree. I found that the more I read and discovered, and the more official documents I saw - Cabinet minutes, FO memos and such like - the more wilfully blind to reality Chamberlain and his followers seemed to be. Somewhat weirdly, if I was asked to name my political villain I would name the son of my political hero - namely Neville Chamberlain, son of Joe Chamberlain, not merely the greatest Prime Minister we never had but one of the greatest political figures of all time. And all the more complex for being very right for most of his career and very wrong for the rest of it.