At the very least, just not Volcker. That being said, I don't know enough about other potential Fed Chair candidates a 1980s PresiDem would have gone with, so who knows.
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
You'd probably have to pull financial figures from the LBJ Cabinet like Gardner Ackley (who warned that not raising taxes for the Vietnam War would raise inflation, advise which LBJ pointedly ignored, so this would suit well with the fiscal restraint of the Carey administration), but I think a more plausible candidate, courtesy of @Yes who is inmensely knowledgeable, especially regarding the New York of the 70s, is financier Felix Rohatyn. In short, he was a Carey ally and confidant who knocked heads together so the Big Apple could come out of the crisis it fell into in '75, so it would play well with the administration having a trusted man at the Fed who nevertheless will not be a yes man to them. Just some thoughts.
Dividends of the North Sea
Dividends of the North Sea
The massive ramp-up of North Sea drilling platforms during the 1970s, in part a response to European fears about the accessibility of affordable (and maybe more than affordable, reliable) oil supplies in the long, uncertain shadow of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, was anticipated not just as a geopolitical security feature but also a future economic boon. In the 1980s, for instance, Norway would transform from the poor, redheaded stepchild of Scandinavia to far and away the wealthiest Nordic state, financing its ambitious welfare state goals with the petroleum boon and leaving Sweden and Denmark ruing that they had not agreed to enter into co-development deals with Statoil when they'd had a chance. The gas fields at Groningen in the Netherlands had already proven for nearly twenty years the benefits that flowed to countries in Europe with easily exploitable natural resources in terms of social improvements, and Norway went above and beyond that.
In the UK, the exploitation of North Sea oilfields had thus been eyed as a surefire economic winner for whoever won the last election before the major cash and oil flows began in 1980, which partially explained the acrimony around the 1978 contest Callaghan had called at the most advantageous moment and Tory anger at Thatcher "blowing" it - it was broadly presumed that whoever in Westminster won the 1978 election was well-set to win in 1982 or 1983, when the Dividend, as it came to be called in official government white papers penned by the Exchequer, began really paying. Despite the general admiration the British people had for him and his talent in PMQs, one thing that always bedeviled Willie Whitelaw's leadership in opposition was that the Conservatives had broad internal disagreements on what exactly to spend the Dividend on if they were in power. Labour did not have that issue in government, even if the appearances of Labour unity were just that - appearances.
Many UK political observers had tensed ahead of the spring of 1981 when Peter Shore was due to unveil his first budget. Shore had briefly contested the previous year's leadership contest and been included by Healey as a major and substantive olive branch to the soft-left and even the Bennites, who badly mistrusted him as an austerian thanks to his infamous 1976 budget revisions and agreement to place Britain under IMF stewardship. Shore was a curious character even by the standards of the British left, who had been denied the Exchequer by both Wilson and Callaghan previously due to his unorthodox left-wing views on autarky, limiting the ability of the party to use his brilliant rhetorical skills and sharp wit on the frontbenches. Indeed, Shore had perhaps better been suited for the Foreign Office - Healey's preferred landing spot for him - after his renunciation of his previous support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but his professed belief in withdrawing en toto from the European Economic Union sans referendum mere years after Labour had stuck its neck out on holding a referendum on staying in made that a difficult, and Owen had demanded a return to the Foreign Office as his price for dropping out and clearing Healey's path to Number 10 the spring before.
Shore formed part of what became known in Cabinet as "the Troika" - he, Home Secretary Michael Foot, and Education Secretary Neil Kinnock, the three soft-left champions Healey had appointed to key positions to keep the Tribune Group happy after Benn's ignonimous defeat and their champion's retreat to the backbenches with the likes of Eric Heffer and Dennis Skinner. Thus, he had two very influential friends in important ministries to help him drive what came to be known as the Shore Programme, based off of ideas charted out in his informal budget speech of the previous spring and then unveiled on Budget Day in 1981. Fundamentally, what Shore proposed from the Exchequer fell short of his previous support of autarky, nationalization and protectionism, but nonetheless had a firmly left-wing tint to it. The Dividend was to go into the National Public Wealth Fund, a new sovereign wealth entity, that would lend at fixed bargain-basement rates in three areas - one, inner cities that needed revitalization; two, the "roads, rails and bridges" that needed repair; and third, schools, with Kinnock championing the Bullock Report's suggestions for improving British education. The hope was that targeting unemployment both through jobs programs, expanded welfare programs, and spending on education and infrastructure would "end the loop of misery and despair" and "invest the dividends of our natural resources where they belong, in our human resources."
The debate over the Shore Programme saw a major loss to Labour when Roy Jenkins, a former rising star within the party, very publicly defected to the Liberals shortly after and declared in a tense speech, "A party which took lump after lump to get Britain's fiscal house in order in the Wilson and Callaghan years now abandons its rigor for starry-eyed utopianism!" Shore shot back that nothing in the budget was unpaid for, and mused that Jenkins was simply "bitter that having been rejected for his beliefs by this party, he now needs to find one as irrelevant to modern Britain as himself." The truth was, though, that many in Labour were quietly skeptical of Shore's spending plans, which while not out of the mainstream did have a sense of profligacy to them after the "tough medicine" that had begun in 1967 with the currency devaluation. That there were reports that both Healey and Owen were personally opposed to the budgets did not help, as rumor-mongering spread throughout Westminster.
The televised worldwide spectacle Royal Wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and the visit of President Hugh Carey - a man temperamentally similar to Healey - did help distract from the infighting in part by instilling a broad sense of national spirit and pride, and the budget was quietly passed shortly thereafter. By late in 1981, unemployment had begun to indeed tick down significantly and inflation looked moderately under control, though Labour's lag in the polls behind Whitelaw's Tories still remained stubbornly in the high-single, low-double digits after recovering from apocalyptic numbers the year before. Healey was well-liked but his party was not; Shore was hugely popular with the left, but gave the public pause. Labour had begun to claw its way back from the difficult Winter of Discontent and horrific economy of 1979, but the road to the elections due by September 1983 was long and arduous...
This was precisely what I was looking for, thank you! Rohatyn strikes me as exactly the right fit
You're very welcome, indeed. I'm glad it helped.
I loved the newest British chapter, too. Labour is such a fun mix of personalities to let them play off each other while in power. Shore evokes mixed feelings in me; I do like a true socialist at court while also not being too soft on the Soviets, but dislike his position on European unification and autarkic tendencies (though I see where he's coming from). Labour can plant the seeds of British prosperity for all, yet at the same time sow the seeds of their own destruction, not helped by Healey not being the smoothest conciliator. Lovely, truly.
My best regards, thank you for your work and your effort.
Thank you!!
Yeah, a Labour majority in the 80s would have been quite the combustible thing. Too many blood feuds between the various factions, too many colorful personalities. Anemic as OTL Dems were in the Reagan era they at least broadly got along (self-devouring has always been more of a thing on the GOP side) even if it was a bit of a disorganized mess. A lot of these Labour guys *loathed* each other. A Healey majority in particular would provide endless entertainment
Oooh! Here we go, something from my own patch this time around!
Yeah, Roy Jenkins being destined to jump ship from Labour really does make sense. I'll be curious to see if that pays dividends for him in the end, perhaps the Liberals will become a Clinton-esque third way party this time around. I really like Peter Shore (His anti EU stances not withstanding) but I can definitely see that he'd be something of an aggravation to some members of the party. If I've got my sums right, then Labour has been in power for all but a four year period between 1964 and the present day. In short, the itch may need to be scratched at some point and a potential split betwixt the factions of Labour could be chaotic.
Roll on the Falklands, lads!
Yeah, Roy Jenkins being destined to jump ship from Labour really does make sense. I'll be curious to see if that pays dividends for him in the end, perhaps the Liberals will become a Clinton-esque third way party this time around. I really like Peter Shore (His anti EU stances not withstanding) but I can definitely see that he'd be something of an aggravation to some members of the party. If I've got my sums right, then Labour has been in power for all but a four year period between 1964 and the present day. In short, the itch may need to be scratched at some point and a potential split betwixt the factions of Labour could be chaotic.
Roll on the Falklands, lads!
Argentina lost a war with Chile which collpased their military junta and left the country rather destabilzed, so the Falklands are likely to be safe.
Roy Jenkins trying to snake the Liberal leadership from David Steel - who if I recall correctly was fairly left-wing? - would certainly be an entertaining storyline to follow.
The hardness of Shore's left-wing bonafides I think are oversold a bit, he absolutely detested Benn (though I think Foot did too) and his merry gang and on foreign matters was actually pretty close to Healey. IIRC Shore's big complaint with Foot was that Labour shifted in more esoteric directions like disarmament and other priorities of the international left, rather than combating unemployment and my extrapolation on what a Shore budget might look like is based in part on that. So some of his head-butting with Healey is more about personality than ideology, I'm sure.
The character in this bunch I actually think is most interesting is a David Owen who doesn't blow the very real potential he had on his ego. This also creates room for David Steel to breathe, with Steel rebuilding the Liberals throughout the 1980s into something more viable, which might be an interesting hook and not entirely unreasonable. By the time Healey hangs it up, whenever that is (he was already in his late 60s by this point and Callaghan had just shown you could sit in 10 Downing Street for a few years as a career-capper without overstaying your welcome), you've got a very interesting potential leadership battle between Owen and Shore with people like Hattersley, Kinnock, etc as potential second-tier candidates plus some younger rising stars in the party.
But you're right that Labour has basically already held government for 13 of the last 17 years. I can very credibly chart a course where they could win a no-Falklands 1983 where the monetarist Thatcher shock therapy hasn't ballooned British unemployment and the 1978-81 recession is mostly in the rearview and you've got all that sweet Scottish oil money to spend, but whether they can drag on past 1987/88 I'm a little skeptical of, especially since with the early 80s economic turmoil ending earlier but the recovery not having the same kind of heat to it, there'd probably be a string of OECD recessions circa 1986/87 rather than 89/90 as IOTL. Who from the Tories emerges in this alt-1987/88 period is an open question though, maybe somebody like a Heseltine or a Ken Clarke?
Losing to Chile rather than the UK probably better for Argentina in the long term, by dumping the junta way earlier and having a government that can actually respond to the debt crisis aggressively, even if Italo Luder as a Peronist will probably still indulge a lot of populist stuff
Infamously, Theresa May once gave a speech deploring the image of the Tories as being 'nasty' which is one of the few things I actually agree with her on. So someone like Clarke or Helseltine would work well at perhaps rebuilding the Tories back up. One of the reasons, in my humble opinion, that Clarke struggled so much in OTL is because his standing with the general public was far better than his standing with his colleagues. Even assuming that Clarke plays his social views a lot more right-wing than they are actually are, I suspect that his chances of holding a majority would be quite awkward to say the least. Of course all of this depends on what exactly the British Public actually feels like at this point in the timeline, without Thatcher crushing the miners and with Labour weathering the Winter of Discontent, perhaps there wasn't such a migration to the Tories as there was in OTL. Heseltine might get an easier job solely because he doesn't have the massive albatross around his neck of knifing Thatcher in the back, and his focus upon renewal might win him accolades here.
Depending on the development of the European question, which to my mind seems likely to stick around and get offered up again and again as per OTL, Anthony Meyer might be an interesting choice. In OTL he'll make a longshot bid for the Leadership in 1990, and in doing so proving that the Iron Lady was beginning to rust a little, but he's got a good (As in for the person who'd vote Labour) mixture of values that could prove to be a tonic for any undecided voters. And with the trade unions still intact and still with a decent amount of power, Jim Prior could do a decent enough job if he felt inclined to stay a little longer.
Ultimately, to what extent these could work comes down to where the Liberal and Labour parties are going to turn to. But the question is whether or not Steel succumbs to his OTL mistake of ignoring the sexual abuse issues in his party. Cyril Smith is ultimately what forced him to resign from the Lords but another prominent figure is Clement Freud who is far, far more well known to the public at large thanks to his appearances on Just a Minute and the like. Something to consider at the very least.
My fear with Heseltine is that so many TLs use him as an alt-PM, but perhaps for a reason. Prior seems to me somebody who’s time had come and gone by the 80s (perhaps even true of Whitelaw), those men of the generation groomed by Rab Butler who came up alongside Enoch before he decided to go in a, uh, different direction are probably not forward looking enough to mark a decisive breach with what’s going to be a very long-in-the-tooth generation of Labour heavies by the time they’re back in power. Meyer is an interesting suggestion though, somebody I’ve never heard of, so I may take a peek at him. I do want to use Patten at some point, too.
My thinking on both sides of the pond is that the Left essentially trades a monetarist, union-busting New Right in the 80s for a more middle class soft-nationalist populist law-and-order right in the 90s (think more of May’s initial posture after becoming PM), and that the big internal dust up on the left arrives in the 90s after a fairly successful 80s between its more professional college wing and the Old Left element, but on the heels of running out of steam than being beat down. This is probably more important in the UK, since some of the circumstances that made the British left more Europhilic may not have been present sans Thatcher creating the sense that only a strong EU can defend the worker (plus no Delors on the Commission sans Mitterrand, the USSR not collapsing, etc. but Shore’s views on Europe weren’t out of the mainstream, even Healey had a Euroskeptic streak and Foot’s 1983 manifesto was explicitly calling for exiting EEC unilaterally)
Absolutely, hence the reason why I did want to try and track some people down who weren't Heseltine. On the one hand, a Parliament with him in it will probably see him push his way to the front at some point, but on the other everyone does use him. And Clarke is the most obvious (From my perspective as a member of the UK) choice for a Tory leader who could have been. And Patten's a really interesting choice too, definitely one to consider.
It certainly seems a plausible outcome to me. With that in mind, another name you might want to consider looking up is Douglas Hunt. He's a very underrated politician, his one blunder of attempting to secure more money for a funding project notwithstanding, and he certainly could be seen as a 'safe pair of hands'.
This sets up a very big problem for democrats because they are going to have a lot more rural and socially conservative working class voters that will hate this switch
I do like the idea of Heseltine as a sort of British reverse Bill Clinton - a slick, charismatic smooth talker who draws some pretty polarizing opinions both inside and outside his party.
Hurd seems a good choice too, though a Tory party out of government for twenty aggregate years when discounting the un-mourned Heath interregnum probably feels they need more than "safe hands." Hurd seems an obvious choice at the Exchequer for a Heseltine government, though.
Granted that wing of the party, without all the defections of the Reagan Democrats, will have much more to say about such a potential transition and can gum up the gears more, though especially in the North and West a less evangelical-tinged GOP will have an easier time attracting them, so that cuts both ways.
I can see the GOP evolving into a ideological Chris Christie-like party
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
Actually, I could see Trump still emerging at some point in this timeline (as early as '88), but more of a law and order Rockefeller Republican with a populist tint. Not trying to get into Current Politics, but there's room for a Frank Rizzo/Chris Christie/Trump style tough talker in the late 80s, especially when you take Hugh Carey into account.
Trump or Pete Wilson as an american Pim Fourtyn in an alt-1996 or 2000 is underused in AH
That's sort of where we're headed, though Rizzo/80s Trump types would definitely still fit best in the Democrats for now (indeed that's where we'll run into DT when he makes his appearance ITTL)
That's... yeah, actually, a decent idea. Wilson especially fits.
Probably not, but no decision made yet.