January:
- The pilot episode of Hone and Away airs
- The Phantom of the Opera opens on Broadway
- Margaret Thatcher becomes the longest serving 20th century UK Prime Minister , having been in power for eight years and 244 days
February:
- The Winter Olympics are held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; the Soviet Union top the medal table with 11 golds and 29 total
- The first Red Nose Day telethon airs, raising £15 million for charity
March:
- Operation Flavius: An SAS team shoots dead three unarmed members of a Provisional IRA active service unit in Gibraltar
- During the funeral of the three IRA members at Milltown Cemetry, Belfast, a loyalist paramilitary carries out a gun and grenade attack on mourners, killing three and wounding seventy
- Two British corporals are abducted, beaten and shot dead by Irish republicans after driving into the funeral procession of the IRA members killed in the Milltown cemetery attack
- African National Congress representative Dulcie September is assassinated in Paris
- The Social Democratic Party amalgamates with the Liberal Party to form the Social and Liberal Democratic Party, ending the Liberal Party’s 129 year existence
- The Bank of England £1 note ceases to be legal tender
- Plans are unveiled for Europe’s tallest skyscraper to be built at Canary Wharf, costing around £3 billion and to open in 1992
April:
- Kuwait Airways Flight 422 is hijacked en route to Kuwait from Bangkok. The hijackers demand the release of 17 Shiite Muslims held by Kuwait, the subsequent refusal leads to a 16-day siege across three continents. Two passengers are killed before the siege ends
- Abu Jihad of the Palestine Liberation Organisation is killed by Israeli commandos in Tunisia
- Far-left Italian guerrilla group, the Red Brigades, kill advisor to Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita, Senator Roberto Ruffilli, in Forli
- Luton Town beat Arsenal 3-2 in the League Cup final at Wembley
May:
- François Mitterrand is re-elected as President of France
- The world’s first Pendolino train enters regular high-speed service in Italy
- General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) exams are sat for the first time, replacing the O-level and CSE
- Three off-duty British serviceman are killed in the Netherlands by the IRA
- Wimbledon beat league champions Liverpool 1-0 in the final of the FA Cup
- Local Government Act is introduced, Section 28 of which states that local authorities are prohibited from promoting “the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”
- Liverpool’s Albert Dock is reopened by Prince Charles as a leisure and business centre, including the Tate Liverpool art museum
- Hello! magazine is launched in the UK
June:
- UEFA Euro 1988 is held across West Germany, Ruud Gullitt and Marco Van Basten score the winning goals in the final as the Netherlands defeat the Soviet Union 2-0. More than 100 English fans are arrested in connection with incidents of hooliganism as England lose every game at the tournament
- NASA scientist James Hansen testifies to the US Senate that man-made climate change has begun
- 80,000 people attend a concert at Wembley Stadium in honour of Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday, who has been imprisoned since 1964
- Six British soldiers are killed by the IRA in Lisburn
July:
- Freeze art exhibition is held at Surrey Docks; organised by Damien Hirst, it’s considered significant in the development of the Young British Artists
- Paddy Ashdown is elected the first Leader of the Social and Liberal Democratic Party
- Paul Gascoigne becomes the most expensive player signed to a British club after his transfer from Newcastle United to Tottenham Hotspur for £2 million
August:
- 8888 Uprising: thousands of protestors in Burma are killed during anti-government demonstrations
- Al-Qaeda is formed by Osama bin Laden
- A ceasefire effectively ends the Iran-Iraq War after eight years and one million lives lost
- A 6.9 magnitude earthquake in Nepal kills between 700 and 1500 people, leaving thousands more injured
- Seventy-five people are killed and 346 injured in one of the worst air show disasters in history at Germany’s Ramstein Air Base, after three Italian jets collide sending one into the crowd of spectators
- A soldier is killed and Inglis Barracks in London is damaged in a bombing
- Tony Cottee’s transfer from West Ham United to Everton breaks the British record set weeks earlier when he signs for £2.3 million, which is broken again just two weeks later when Ian Rush rejoins Liverpool from Juventus for £2.7 million
- Six British soldiers are killed by an IRA bus bomb near Belfast, 28 others are injured
- The first child of The Duke and Duchess of York is born, Beatrice; she is fifth in line to the throne
September:
- The International Olympic Committee awards Lillehammer the 1994 Winter Olympics
- The 1988 Summer Olympics are held in Seoul; the Soviet Union dominate the summer games too with 55 gold and 132 total medals
- NASA resumes Space Shuttle flights, two years after the Challenger disaster, with Space Shuttle Discovery
October:
- Thousands riot in Algiers against the National Liberation Front government; within days the army has tortured and killed approximately 500 people in crushing the riots
- Five Israelis are killed and five more wounded in a Palestinian bus bomb attack in the West Bank
- As Pope John Paul II addresses the European Parliament, Protestant and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party Ian Paisley heckles and denounces him as the Antichrist
November:
- The Morris worm, the first computer worm distributed via the internet, is launched from MIT
- Republican candidate George HW Bush is elected President of the United States ahead of Democratic rival Michael Dukakis
- The Fairtrade certification initiative is launched in the Netherlands
- Singing Revolution: the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR declares Estonian laws are supreme over those of the Soviet Union, the first declaration of sovereignty from Moscow of any Soviet or Eastern Bloc entity
- Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988 prohibits civilian ownership of virtually all semi-automatic firearms from January 1989, in response to the Hungerford massacre of 1987
December:
- The first World AIDS Day is held
- A cyclone in Bangladesh leaves five million homeless and thousands dead
- In Soviet Armenia, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake kills nearly 25,000, injures 31,000 and leaves 400,000 homeless
- The United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances is signed in Vienna
- Lockerbie bombing: Pan Am Flight 103 is blown up over Lockerbie, killing a total of 270 people – all 259 on board as well as 11 on the ground
- The last shipbuilding dockyards on Wearside are to close, resulting in the loss of 2,400 jobs
Other:
- The first official Internet connection to Europe from the US is made between Princeton, New Jersey and Stockholm
- Tim Berners-Lee discusses his plans for what would become the World Wide Web at CERN
- The Communist Party of Britain is founded by a Marxist-Leninist faction of the Communist Party of Great Britain, after its leadership embraces Eurocommunism
- Roald Dahl’s Mathilda and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time are published
- Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe and Wine is the best-selling single of the year
- Rain Man earns $355 million worldwide, making it the highest grossing film of the year
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