Francis Beckett – författare

Jeremy is a writer who is low on ideas and money. This changes when he contacts his ex-girlfriend, Ruth, and learns he may well be a father, so he needs to become financially stable - quickly! Proving it's not what you know but who you know, he soon has three important clients eager to hire him for some freelance editing. But is that really all they are after? Or do they have ulterior motives? This funny and clever play comments on social bureaucracy, government manipulation and fundamental flaws in the education system.

Flavia is a journalist who has been poached from the BBC by a tabloid newspaper, the "Daily Trumpet". Her brief: to dig up the dirt on her old friend Nicola Macdonald, now Secretary of State. Flavia exposes Nicola's affair with a younger man, Stephen, and the ensuing sordid headlines threaten to destroy both their careers and marriages. Flavia hopes that she will now be allowed to investigate the more serious corruption taking place in government: the acceptance of bribes from American company Omnicom.com. "The Daily Trumpet" editor, Miranda, and chief whip, Griff, have other ideas.

This highly controversial and compelling book exposes the government's city academies project: the ways in which companies and rich individuals have been persuaded to sponsor academies, their real reasons for sponsoring them, the lies that have been told in support of the academies project, and the disastrous effect it will have on Britain's schools. It brings together existing research, by the author and others, and adds new research, to build up a picture of a deeply flawed idea, which is educationally disastrous and inherently corrupt. In his provocative yet fascinating tour de force, Francis Beckett pulls the plug on the most high-profile educational scam for decades.

A history of the British left and its Communist Party.

John Beckett was a rising political star. Elected as Labour's youngest M.P. in 1924, he was constantly in the news and tipped for greatness.But ten years later he was propaganda chief for Mosley’s fascists, and one of Britain’s three best known anti-Semites. Yet his mother, whom he loved, was a Jew. Her ancestors were Solomons, Isaacs and Jacobsons, originally from Prussia. He successfully hid his Jewish ancestry all his life – he said his mother’s family were "fisher folk from the east coast." His son, the author of this book, acclaimed political biographer and journalist Francis Beckett, did not discover the truth until John Beckett had been dead for years.He left Mosley and founded the National Socialist League with William Joyce, later Lord Haw Haw, and spent the war years in prison, considered a danger to the war effort.For the rest of his life, and all of Francis Beckett’s childhood, John Beckett and his family were closely watched by the security services. Their devious machinations, traced in records only recently released, damaged chiefly his young family.This is a fascinating and brutally honest account of a troubled man in turbulent times.

John Beckett was a rising political star. Elected as Labour's youngest M.P. in 1924, he was constantly in the news and tipped for greatness.But ten years later he was propaganda chief for Mosley’s fascists, and one of Britain’s three best known anti-Semites. Yet his mother, whom he loved, was a Jew. Her ancestors were Solomons, Isaacs and Jacobsons, originally from Prussia. He successfully hid his Jewish ancestry all his life – he said his mother’s family were "fisher folk from the east coast." His son, the author of this book, acclaimed political biographer and journalist Francis Beckett, did not discover the truth until John Beckett had been dead for years.He left Mosley and founded the National Socialist League with William Joyce, later Lord Haw Haw, and spent the war years in prison, considered a danger to the war effort.For the rest of his life, and all of Francis Beckett’s childhood, John Beckett and his family were closely watched by the security services. Their devious machinations, traced in records only recently released, damaged chiefly his young family.This is a fascinating and brutally honest account of a troubled man in turbulent times.

First published in 2004, this book tells the stories of four remarkable British women, whose lives were scorched by Stalin’s purges. One was shot as a spy; one nearly died as a slave labourer in Kazakhstan; and two saw their husbands taken away to the gulag and had to spirit their small children out of the country.We think of the horrors of the middle of the twentieth century- the Holocaust in Central Europe, the purges in the Soviet Union- as something foreign: terrible, but remote. Rosal Rust, Rose Cohen, Freda Utley, and Pearl Rimel were all Londoners. Like hundreds of young, idealistic Britons in the 1930s, they looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration, for a way in which society could be run better, without the exploitation and poverty which unrestrained capitalism had created. They were less fortunate than most of us: they saw their dreams fulfilled. In this book, Francis Beckett draws on personal letters, interviews with surviving relatives and archivists to create a picture of four courageous, intelligent, and very different women. The result is a harrowing human document with vivid and unforgettable insights into the world of Stalin’s Russia: its secret trials, labour camps, random disappearances, and concealed executions.

First published in 2004, this book tells the stories of four remarkable British women, whose lives were scorched by Stalin’s purges. One was shot as a spy; one nearly died as a slave labourer in Kazakhstan; and two saw their husbands taken away to the gulag and had to spirit their small children out of the country.We think of the horrors of the middle of the twentieth century- the Holocaust in Central Europe, the purges in the Soviet Union- as something foreign: terrible, but remote. Rosal Rust, Rose Cohen, Freda Utley, and Pearl Rimel were all Londoners. Like hundreds of young, idealistic Britons in the 1930s, they looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration, for a way in which society could be run better, without the exploitation and poverty which unrestrained capitalism had created. They were less fortunate than most of us: they saw their dreams fulfilled. In this book, Francis Beckett draws on personal letters, interviews with surviving relatives and archivists to create a picture of four courageous, intelligent, and very different women. The result is a harrowing human document with vivid and unforgettable insights into the world of Stalin’s Russia: its secret trials, labour camps, random disappearances, and concealed executions.

First published in 2010, this book explores the legacy of the baby boomers: the generation who, born in the aftermath of the Second World War, came of age in the radical sixties where for the first time since the War, there was freedom, money, and safe sex.In this book, Francis Beckett argues that what began as the most radical-sounding generation for half a century turned into a random collection of youthful style gurus, sharp-toothed entrepreneurs and management consultants who believed revolution meant new ways of selling things; and Thatcherites, who thought freedom meant free markets, not free people. At last, it found its most complete expression in New Labour.The author argues that the children of the 1960s betrayed the generations that came before and after, and that the true legacy of the swinging decade is in ashes.

First published in 2010, this book explores the legacy of the baby boomers: the generation who, born in the aftermath of the Second World War, came of age in the radical sixties where for the first time since the War, there was freedom, money, and safe sex.In this book, Francis Beckett argues that what began as the most radical-sounding generation for half a century turned into a random collection of youthful style gurus, sharp-toothed entrepreneurs and management consultants who believed revolution meant new ways of selling things; and Thatcherites, who thought freedom meant free markets, not free people. At last, it found its most complete expression in New Labour.The author argues that the children of the 1960s betrayed the generations that came before and after, and that the true legacy of the swinging decade is in ashes.

In 2016 Labour burst into new life. The Westminster beltway of political insiders, pollsters, commentators and newspaper proprietors were left with egg all over their faces. Few took the trouble to ask how or why Labour, almost alone amongst parties on the left in Europe, had re-grouped, revived and successfully turned its back decisively on Tony Blair and Bill Clinton's 'third way'; how it had four times as many members as it had a few years before, and at last was appealing to the young.Labour England wasn't dead. It had been sleeping. For thirty years it had been kicked into near oblivion, first by Margaret Thatcher and then by Tony Blair. That strange, sentimental, almost mystical mix of the trade unions, adult education institutes, powerful Labour councils, the local comprehensive school and the local Co-op that sustained Labour governments for thirty years from the 1940s to the 1970s had been in full retreat. Now, against all the odds, it was back.Francis Beckett and Mark Seddon have been around Labour politics too long to be blind to the downsides of Corbynism. But they say that the Corbyn phenomenon has revived the spirit of Labour when it was on the brink of extinction and that Corbyn will be a Prime Minister in the best traditions of Labour England. And that those, in the Labour Party and elsewhere, who want only for an end to it, are on the wrong side of history.In this book they chart the forty-year decline of the Labour Party, and its extraordinary revival.

A controversial new investigation in the 1984 Miners strike and how it changed Modern Britain.The Miners' strike was a dividing line in Modern British history. Before 1984, Britain was an industrial nation, reborn from the ashes of the Second World War by Clement Atlee's vision of a welfare state. Most of the great industries were nationalised and the trade unions was one of the major forces in the land. After the strike, which ended with humiliating defeat in March 1985, Thatcher's Britain was born.In March 1984, the leader of the Miners' Union, Arthur Scargill, led his members out of the pits without a ballot to protest at planned pit closures; they would spend the next 13 months facing the utmost deprivations as they fought to keep their jobs. On picket lines the miners faced harassment and the police, which culminated in the violent Battle of Orgreave. Meanwhile Thatcher's government feared that Britain was on the verge of a civil war. It was a struggle of attrition that neither side could dare lose.Twenty five years after the strike, the debate is still controversial. Marching to the Faultline tells the full story of the strike from confidential cabinet meetings at Downing Street to backroom negotiations, and life on the picket line. The book draws on previously unseen sources from interviews with the major figures, private archives and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act to set the record straight.

Paradoxically his success with the USA jeopardised his efforts to get Britain into the European Economic Community, for it was one of the reasons why the French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed Britain's application to join in 1963.

Far from Winston Churchill's jibe that he was a "modest little man with plenty to be modest about," in this acclaimed biography, comprehensively revised in this new edition, Francis Beckett makes the case that Clement Attlee's reputation as Britain's greatest ever reforming Prime Minister is fully deserved. With new research, thinking and stories (many of them never published before) Beckett compelling shows Attlee's relevance to a new political generation. Far from being a dull, grey man, he was a poet and a dreamer. Here is an eloquent portrait of Attlee the man, not only his remarkable political life but also of the poetry he wrote, the poetry he loved, and more of the famous Attlee anecdotes.

The creation of the National Health Service was the most significant of the many reforms of the post-war Labour government. The man responsible was Aneurin 'Nye' Bevan. The son of a Welsh miner, he became a local trade union leader at only nineteen and in 1929 was elected as a Labour MP. Bevan believed the war was Britain's opportunity to create a new society, a position he maintained throughout the conflict. When war ended in 1945, the landslide Labour victory gave him the chance to make this vision a reality. Known for his impassioned oratory, Bevan's fundamental belief that the new NHS should be freely available to all was ultimately at odds with a government struggling to balance the books. He resigned in 1951 over the introduction of charges for prescriptions and glasses. With the NHS requiring an ever-increasing share of national income, this updated edition considers Bevan's legacy as the future of the health service he created is fought over as never before.

From Lord Salisbury to Tony Blair, the books of this twenty-volume set biographically profile the nineteen men and one woman who served as Prime Minister of Britain during the twentieth century. Each volume contains a chronological narrative that examines the life prior to arrival at 10 Downing Street, their activities while holding the premiership, and assesses their political legacy. Each volume also contains a chronology detailing international and domestic British political and cultural events during the prime minister’s tenure and a guide to further reading.