Best Prime Minister we never had
- Thread starter George123457
- Start date
Well politics is a bit like the Mafia. The Mafia expect their chappies to steal. But stealing from the Mafia is totally unacceptable. Likewise party politicians expect their cohort to blur the truth to the electorate but not to the party leader and (where in government) not to the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Benn was so keen on rolling out worker owned co-ops that he tried to hide the fact that they weren't working in practice and to provide under the table funding to make them look successful. And was deceptive to the PM and Cabinet colleagues. Crossed a couple of lines.In other words, business as normal!
And I’ll give you another example, safety rules in a chemical plant. If a company says, we have good interplay between theory and practice, they mean they supervise and monitor their employees and make sure they follow the rules. It would be vanishingly rare to actually change the rules to reflect practice and experience. For example, deciding, okay, this part is some chickenshit stuff we can relax about, whereas this other stuff is the important stuff we should be even more serious about. Well, we can’t do this in part because we have external commitments. We have policies and practices we’ve put in writing, we have the EPA inspecting, we have legal liability. It’s far better to have the rules even if we know the enployees only partially follow them [except it’s not]. And when everything’s a priority, it’s just another way of saying nothing is a priority. [a friend of mine works in a plant, but I don’t]
And similar external commitments in politics, right?
I feel John Smith would have a superb PM. He would given Labour a much needed air of respectability.
Well yes, but some of the OTL PM's were fairly dodgy too, Churchill for instance was as racist as Mosley and probably more so than Powell, he just happened to be philosemitic and thus it didn't stick out as much. Mosley was also the author of what is regarded as the Labour Party's finest manifesto and had some very sound ideas about defence of the British Empire. Probably quite genuinely was the best War Minister the British never had. Powell was one of the UK's best health ministers and one of the foremost experts on constitutional and parliamentary procedures of his era.
Both were quite shitty people but both were remarkably able.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
Point well taken.
Okay, let me ask this, and I’m a Yank and might be tone deaf in some regards — but isn’t the slow and tragic decline of the middle class even a bigger issue in the UK than it is over here in the States?
And wouldn’t this, at least potentially, be just a pristine example of when good policy is good politics?
The decline of the middle class wasn't really an issue in the 1970s and 1980s, probably didn't really start to become one until the late 1990s and it is related to the rise of the internet and decreasing numbers of white collar administrative jobs in the financial, manufacturing and retail sectors and the lessened need for middlemen with specialised information like insurance brokers, travel agents and estate agents. No British politician of the 1960s to present time has been a big advocate of enhancing vocational training and non- academic education or of hugely expanding scientific education, the best means of sidestepping these issues.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
To me, auto manufacturing jobs plus the UAW union, Detroit, and a bunch a of other cities generally in the American northeast, yes, we can call it working class, but it is solid middle-income jobs.
Are you classifying things differently in the UK?
A bit. We would regard that sort of job as middle class now in 2020, but back in 1980 we would have called it blue collar unless you were actually an engineer or manager. Two waves of collapses in manufacturing jobs, one from the oil shock in 1973 and the second from Thatcher's economic reforms of the early 1980s. But the 1980s job losses, while they hit traditional manufacturing regions particularly hard, were essentially about taking already unsustainable businesses off life support.
Why did you include Eno
Agreed. Powell was a racist and Mosley a Fascist.
I'd say traditionally (in the fairly modern day at least) working class would be considered to be jobs where you either require strength (ie the 'traditional' working class jobs such as mining, ship building, farm labouring, building etc) or where you're working with your hands (trades such as electrician, plumber, gas fitter). Even today in the UK you'll hear "he's never had his hands dirty" about people who are perceived to have never worked for where they are by taking a management job without ever doing the entry level job. Usually with the connotation that he doesn't know what he's doing because he's never done the job he's now overseeing. A good tradesman could be earning £50,000+ a year but I reckon most people would still classify a bricklayer or plumber as working class.
Middle class would be office based or professional jobs in the main - solicitors, doctors, middle management, jobs like that. Upper class would traditionally (again, at least in the last couple of centuries) be land owners and the nobility with people such as successful merchants who'd made fortunes around the Empire maybe pushing themselves into that category (even if the 'real' upper class looked down on them for being 'trade').
There's a few grey areas, obviously. Women working has created a few - the typing pool and other admin jobs that were usually taken by women obviously don't "get their hands dirty" but they're entry level jobs which you wouldn't call middle class even though they don't fit with the stereotypical definition of working class. Similarly, in the modern day sports stars often have far more money than much of the nobility could ever dream about and generally live 'upper class' lives but they usually wouldn't be from what's considered to be an upper class background and their income still depends on their physical work, even if it is running around a field rather than digging coal.
The man did absolutely nothing to warn or help those who were affected by the thalidomide disaster while Health Minister. He refused to set up a public enquiry and offered no warnings to those who were at risk, refusing to meet with any of the victims whose lives he put in jeopardy and then refused to give any aid afterwards. To call him one of the best is ignoring all those who didn't put lives at risk of being harmed or killed.
