Spartacus Educational

The Strange Appointment of Peter Mandelson

On 4th July Keir Starmer won a landslide victory at the 2024 general election, ending fourteen years of Conservative Party government with Labour Party becoming the largest party in the House of Commons. The major reason for this was the public was very angry with the Conservative Party who had been in power for 14 years. Starmer, with a 174 seat majority now had the freedom to pass any legislation he wanted. Then some very strange things began to happen. Straight away he started announcing some things that was not in the manifesto. For example, on 29th July 2024, chancellor Rachel Reeves, announced that the winter fuel benefit would only be given to those in receipt of Pension Credit or other means-tested benefits. This removed the benefit from around 10 million pensioners. The strangest decision of all was on 20th December 2024 Starmer announced that Peter Mandelson was to become the ambassador to Washington.

In September, 1997, Spartacus Educational founder and managing director John Simkin became the first educational publisher in Britain to establish a website that was willing to provide teachers and students with free educational materials.

According to a survey carried out by the Fischer Trust, Spartacus Educational is one of the top three websites used by history teachers and students in Britain (the other two are BBC History and the Public Record Office’s Learning Curve). The Spartacus Educational website currently gets up to 7 million page impressions a month and 3 million unique visitors.

As well as running the Spartacus Educational website John Simkin has also produced material for the Electronic Telegraph, the European Virtual School and the Guardian's educational website, Learn. He was also a member of the European History E-Learning Project (E-Help), a project to encourage and improve use of ICT and the internet in classrooms across the continent.

We have published six e-books, Charles Dickens: A Biography (October, 2012), First World War Encyclopedia (October, 2012), Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia (November, 2012), Gandhi: A Biography (December, 2012), The Spanish Civil War (December, 2012) and The American Civil War (December, 2012). He also contributed an article to the recently published book, Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History (December, 2012).