It is time to stop this constant harping on John Major and the parallels with New Labour's wipe-out. The true comparison is with Ramsay MacDonald.
"On August 24, 1931 MacDonald submitted his resignation and then agreed to form a National Government including the Conservatives and Liberals. MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas were expelled from the Labour Party and subsequently formed a new National Labour Party, but this had little support in the country or the unions.
Great anger in the labour movement greeted MacDonald's move. Mass riots by unemployed people took place in protest in Glasgow and Manchester...
MacDonald did not want an immediate election, but the Conservatives forced him to agree to one in October 1931. The National Government won 554 seats, comprising 470 Conservatives, 13 National Labour, 68 Liberals (Liberal National and Liberal) and various others, while Labour won only 52 and the Lloyd George Liberals four. This was the largest mandate ever won by a British Prime Minister at a democratic election, but it left MacDonald at the beck-and-call of the Conservatives. Neville Chamberlain became Chancellor of the Exchequer while Baldwin held the real power in the government as Lord President.
Effectively powerless at home, MacDonald involved himself heavily in foreign policy, and attended in two conferences in 1932; the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the Lausanne Conference, which was concerned with German reparations...' (Wiki, and anywhere else you care to consult).
Go on, look it all up. Here we go again.
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2 comments:
Apparently a talking horse is set to challenge Mr Brown.
Sorry, that should be "stalking horse". Some say it'll be Miliband.
Either way, Mister Ed.
Oh no, David not Ed.
Gosh, it's all so confusing.
The economic and financial collapse that is taking place, despite all the reassuring from the Bank and silence from the government, is what really has drained away the last acceptance of Brown an his gang.
If what has been used to build their client state had been left in our hands to use to rebuild a modern economy, and the government had stayed in its proper role of providing benign economic and financial climates for entrepreneurship, investment and encouragement of growth everyone would be, and feel, much safer.
It is irritating that having had a government with a statist mindset for the 11 years of world economic growth, that could have used its interventionist attitudes to help the rooting and flowering of a modern economy instead interfered in everything but.
The Third Way was their ideology. Weak, weak, weak.
(I like talking horse very much. Silver for prime minister!)
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