The Dimbleby Lecture: Before Gareth Southgate, when the BBC disinvited E P Thompson in 1981
Former England football manager Gareth Southgate has given the 2025 Dimbleby Lecture. Southgate may be controversial with Lee Anderson but that aside he is known as a thoughtful and erudite individual even if opinions on his footballing strategies may vary
BBC One – The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Sir Gareth Southgate
In 1981 the socialist historian and peace campaigner E P Thompson was invited to give the Dimbleby Lecture but was then disinvited by the BBC. His views on Britain’s nuclear policy were censored, which Thompson, long someone who had pointed out the narrow range of official views which found their way into mainstream media quite probably anticipated.
The lecture went ahead unofficially however at Worcester Guildhall and was published as a pamphlet, Beyond the Cold War.
Below is a brief extract (and a link to the full document)which might well sum up the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years on
History never happens as the actors plan or expect. It is the record of unintended consequences. Revolutions are made, manifestoes are issued, battles are won: but the outcome, twenty or thirty years on is always something that no-one willed and no-one expected. Boris Pasternak, the great Russian poet, reflected in Dr Zhivago on the ‘indirect results’ of the Russian Revolution, ‘which have begun to make themselves felt, the fruits of fruits, the consequences of consequences’
https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/113717.pdf?v=ab87222b5505d946095b42b5abf757ce
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