Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week as Britain struggles with Europe we look back at the drafting of the Maastricht Treaty which promoted a closer

union. We had all the hope that the kind of thing the union was doing, a sort of voluntary

cooperation and integration of sovereign states that that was a

direction the world was going in.

Also we'll relive the 1961 referendum in Cameroon that sewed the seeds of future tension and violence between

French and English speaking communities.

And commonplace now, but in the 1970s it took a few pioneering women to take the controls of commercial airliners.

I think it was just the mindset then and I wrote to every single airline and one airline did answer me back and said,

you know, we will never hire a woman woman so please don't write us again.

But she got there in the end.

That's coming up later in the podcast.

We're going to begin though with an event which sent shock waves around the world, the effects of which are still being felt.

We're taking you back to the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008,

but we're looking specifically at how one country decided to react. That country is Iceland and unlike many other countries, in fact most other countries, the Icelandic authorities took a very firm line with the senior bankers whose fast and loose attitude towards credit and lending

was seen as being central to the crisis. In fact, in the wake of 2008, Iceland prosecuted and jailed some of its top bankers.

Mike Lanchin has been speaking to the Icelandic prosecutor

Olafo Hoekson who led the investigations.

Tonight to 10 stock markets are sent into free fall by the latest fears about the financial

system.

Today, as the financial sickness spreads through Europe, the German government announces

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