AQA 2024
A-level
HISTORY
7042/2S
Component 2S The Making of Modern
Britain, 1951–2007
Question paper and Mark scheme
Merged
,A-level
HISTORY
Component 2S The Making of Modern Britain, 1951–2007
Friday 7 June 2024 Afternoon Time allowed: 2 hours 30 minutes
Materials
For this paper you must have:
• an AQA 16-page answer book.
Instructions
• Use black ink or black ball-point pen.
• Write the information required on the front of your answer book. The Paper Reference is
7042/2S.
• Answer three questions.
In Section A answer Question 01.
In Section B answer two questions.
Information
• The marks for questions are shown in brackets.
• The maximum mark for this paper is 80.
• You will be marked on your ability to:
– use good English
– organise information clearly
– use specialist vocabulary where appropriate.
Advice
• You are advised to spend about:
– 1 hour on Question 01 from Section A
– 45 minutes on each of the two questions answered from Section B.
IB/M/Jun24/G4006/E3 7042/2S
, 2
Section A
Answer Question 01.
Source A
From a major televised debate on the state of the Labour Party by the moderate MP,
Stephen Haseler, March 1980. Haseler was expelled from Labour and joined the SDP,
1981.
I joined the Labour party, the party of Attlee and Gaitskell, over 21 years ago, seeing it as
a vehicle for achieving social progress for working people. Now that party is changing
fundamentally. It is being taken over, unrecognisable with its past. We on the right of the
party have warned of this development for years. The moderates in the party are
increasingly intimidated by the extremist infiltrators. What to do about it? What is the 5
position of people who stand in the moderate tradition of social democracy? Some,
understandably, will fight on within the party but I believe that once the Left has
completed its takeover of the party our nation is finished. We’re doomed forever to a
struggle to the death between a Marxist-based party on the one hand and a party of the
privileged on the other. I believe the country is yearning for some escape from the two 10
extremes, for the birth of a new radical centre social democratic force to bring hope and
national unity.
Source B
From ‘The Downing Street Years’, an autobiography by Margaret Thatcher, 1993.
Thatcher is commenting on the state of the political opposition at the time of the 1983 UK
general election.
The opposition itself was divided between Labour and the new SDP, which claimed to
have truly broken the mould of British two-party politics. But we were the mould
breakers. I always felt that the leaders of the SDP would have done better to stay in the
Labour Party and drive out the Far Left. SDP support had peaked by 1983. As for
Labour, it had continued its unstoppable leftward shift. Michael Foot is a highly principled 5
and cultivated man, and was invariably courteous in our dealings. In debate and on the
platform he has a kind of genius. But the policies he adopted were not only
catastrophically unsuitable for Britain, they also provided an umbrella beneath which
sinister revolutionaries, intent on destroying the institutions of the state and the values of
society, were able to shelter. The more the public learned of Labour’s policies and 10
personnel the less they liked them. There was no doubt that in the extreme form adopted
under Michael Foot’s leadership Labour was easier to beat.
IB/M/Jun24/7042/2S
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