The vote in Britain was extended in a series of Acts. The Reform Act of 1832 set a standard franchise for £10 householders in the towns. In 1867, the vote went to working-class urban electors, on the basis of household suffrage. In 1884, Gladstone’s Act brought in large numbers of county voters.
In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to women over 30. The Equal Franchise Act of 1928 gave women equal voting rights with men. In 1969, the voting age was lowered to 18.
The Civil Partnership Act 2004 came into force on 5 December 2005. In England and Wales, same-sex couples could normally form a civil partnership from 21 December 2005.
Marriage came more than eight years later. Under the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, the first same-sex weddings in England and Wales took place on 29 March 2014.
On 29 April 2026, the Tobacco and Vapes Bill received Royal Assent. It makes it illegal to sell tobacco to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009.
The cut-off is a date of birth, not an age.
The Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper was professor of logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics from 1949 to 1969. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957), he contrasted two ways of reforming society.
Utopian engineering tries to remodel the whole of society according to a blueprint. Popper preferred piecemeal social engineering, because small reforms allow repeated experiments and continuous readjustment.
In 2010, the coalition government began a major reorganization of the NHS in England, although it had pledged “no top-down reorganisation.” On 18 November 2010, the NHS chief executive, Sir David Nicholson, told a conference: “It’s such a big change management, you could probably see it from space.”
The reforms became the Health and Social Care Act 2012. In October 2014, a senior Cabinet minister, speaking anonymously, said: “we’ve made three mistakes that I regret, the first being restructuring the NHS.”
Sitting by Nellie is British English for learning a job by watching an experienced worker do it. Nellie is simply a generic name for a trained worker.
In 1956, the Minister of Labour, Iain Macleod, complained, as quoted in the Birmingham Post: “There is too much ‘sitting by Nellie,’ or, more technically, ‘exposure training.'”
Since 2017, the Heritage Crafts Association has published a Red List of Endangered Crafts in the United Kingdom. In the 2025 edition, 72 crafts were classed as critically endangered, up from 62 in 2023. Crafts already extinct in the UK by 2023 included goldbeating and cricket ball making.
Often the cause is a shortage of people. A critically endangered craft has “very few practitioners, few (if any) trainees,” and lacks viable routes by which the skills can be passed on.
In January 2019, the Institute for Government published Moving On, a report on staff turnover in the civil service. Some departments, including the Treasury and the Cabinet Office, were losing a quarter of their staff each year. The report put the cost at up to £74 million a year.
It also found “weakened institutional memory damaging policy development in key areas.”
At Liverpool Football Club, the boot room under the Main Stand was where the coaching staff sat, drank tea and discussed the team. Bill Shankly, who became manager in 1959, made it the coaches’ meeting place. Its original six members were Shankly, Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan, Ronnie Moran, Tom Saunders and Reuben Bennett.
When Shankly left, Paisley succeeded him. Fagan, another of the original six, later succeeded Paisley.
The Statute of Artificers of 1563 made apprenticeship compulsory. No one could practice a trade without having served an apprenticeship of “seven years at the least.”
The apprenticeship requirement lasted until 1814.