Modern Britain

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), a grocer’s daughter from Grantham in Lincolnshire, became a Conservative MP in 1959. As Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, she led the Conservative government from 1979 to 1990, the longest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century. Her government privatised nationalised industries and imposed legal controls on trade union powers, and she worked closely with US President Ronald Reagan. In 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and a British naval taskforce recovered the islands. John Major succeeded Thatcher and helped establish the Northern Ireland peace process.

In 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour government introduced a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly (now called the Senedd). In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 and the Assembly was elected in 1999. Gordon Brown took over as Prime Minister in 2007. Abroad, Britain played a leading role in the 1990s in coalition forces that liberated Kuwait after Iraq invaded it in 1990, and in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Since 2000, British armed forces have been engaged in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq; British combat troops left Iraq in 2009.

In May 2010, no party won an overall majority and the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties formed a coalition, with Conservative leader David Cameron as Prime Minister. The Conservatives won a majority in 2015. The Conservative government called a referendum on EU membership, held on 23 June 2016: the UK voted by 51.9% to 48.1% to leave. Theresa May became Prime Minister after the referendum, followed by Boris Johnson in July 2019. The UK formally left the European Union on 31 January 2020.

The EEC had become part of the European Union when the EU was formed in 1993. The UK was a full member but did not use the Euro currency, and its departure on 31 January 2020 left 27 member countries in the EU.

Roald Dahl (1916–90) was born in Wales to Norwegian parents. He served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. His best-known works include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and George’s Marvellous Medicine. Several of his books have been made into films.

Britain and France developed Concorde, the world’s only supersonic commercial airliner, in the 1960s. It first flew in 1969, began carrying passengers in 1976 and was retired from service in 2003.

Britain has produced many important inventions. The television was developed by John Logie Baird in the 1920s, and in 1932 he made the first television broadcast between London and Glasgow. Radar was developed by Sir Robert Watson-Watt, who proposed that enemy aircraft could be detected by radio waves; the first successful test was in 1935. Sir Bernard Lovell built the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, for many years the biggest in the world. Alan Turing invented the Turing machine in the 1930s, a theoretical device that was influential in the development of computer science. John Macleod was the co-discoverer of insulin, used to treat diabetes.

The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 through work at British universities in London and Cambridge; Francis Crick (1916–2004) was one of those awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery. Sir Frank Whittle, a Royal Air Force engineer officer, developed the jet engine in Britain in the 1930s. Sir Christopher Cockerell invented the hovercraft in the 1950s. The Harrier jump jet, capable of taking off vertically, was designed and developed in the UK.

In the 1960s, James Goodfellow (1937–) invented the cash-dispensing ATM. The first was put into use in 1967 by Barclays Bank in Enfield, north London. IVF therapy was pioneered by Sir Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe; the world’s first ‘test-tube baby’ was born in Oldham, Lancashire, in 1978. In 1996, Sir Ian Wilmut (spelt ‘Wilmot’ in the official handbook) and Keith Campbell led the team that first cloned a mammal, Dolly the sheep. Sir Peter Mansfield co-invented the MRI scanner.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British inventor, created the World Wide Web. Information was successfully transferred via the web for the first time on 25 December 1990.

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