TLIAW: För Storbritannien i Tiden
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Harold Wilson (1950-1971)
Harold Wilson (Labour)
1950-1971
The New Man
Like no other figure in modern British history, Harold Wilson was The Prime Minister. There were children born on the day of his ascension who were mature adults by the day of his resignation. He presided over two decades of meteoric growth, and it no doubt helped ensure the extreme longevity of his premiership that in most years his government was able to point to increases in the standard of living for the ordinary British man and woman. As he dominated political life, so too did Britain's longest-serving Prime Minister become a stock figure in cultural life. Like few other men of his era, Wilson understood the importance of the media, and of perpetuating for oneself a media image, and the chipper Yorkshireman with his iconic pipe and amusing accent became a household figure across the nation. He frequently gave televised interviews and appeared on chat shows, where he cracked jokes and acted convivially, giving the impression of a leader in touch with his people.
However, as natural as Wilson's premiership seemed for the generation of Brits who grew up under him, its beginning came as rather a surprise. When Attlee died, a number of Labour grandees were thought likely leadership contenders, but most of their bids failed to materialise – either they were unable to get support among the parliamentary party or felt themselves too old to lead the party. In the end, the election came down to Aneurin Bevan, the Health Minister who had pushed for the creation of the NHS, Herbert Morrison, the Leader of the House of Commons, and Hugh Gaitskell, Cripps' replacement as Chancellor. The NHS, Bevan's brainchild, was proving one of the Attlee government's most popular achievements – but as for the man himself, his staunch leftism alienated much of the Parliamentary Party, and he quickly proved an unlikely candidate. Gaitskell and Morrison were both men of the right, but the latter was felt too old to be a viable leadership prospect, while the former was well-regarded but felt a little too untested.
When the first leadership ballot was held, the three candidates were almost equal in strength. A compromise needed to be reached, and with neither right-wing candidate willing to step aside in favour of the other, it came time to find a compromise candidate who could win the support of both left and right. That man was Harold Wilson, then President of the Board of Trade and one of few men whose ideological alignment was hard to pin down. Perhaps this was because he was even more untested than Gaitskell – in any case, he was nominated for the second round, and with both Morrison and Gaitskell stepping aside, the 34-year-old Wilson was elected leader by a large margin. Soon afterwards, he went on the Home Service to address the public and set out his goals in office. His high-pitched voice and soft Yorkshire accent was a change from the usual radio voices of the time, and perhaps brought him closer to the working man – either way, he was to have great success with the media as the years rolled on.
The 1950s, for Britain, was a time of unprecedented growth and economic welfare. Slowly but surely, the situation of the common man was improving. The average household suddenly found itself able to afford such luxuries as a television set and an automobile, both of which became cultural icons of the era and mainstays of life for the entire period since then. The NHS and the public education system meant that class divisions, once the predominant dividing line in British society, were fast disappearing, and the Labour Government made sure to drive this growth by pursuing investments in the public sector and the welfare state. Paid holiday time and improved workplace safety standards were passed, and motherhood allowance and child benefits were introduced to support British families. The housing subsidies introduced by Attlee's government were continued with equal vigour, and more council homes were completed with each passing year.
All of this came with a cost, however – Britain's commitments abroad were gradually reduced. India, once the jewel in the British Empire's crown, had been decolonised in 1947, and during the 50s, most of Africa would follow. Wilson himself was seen to lack strong opinions in foreign policy, but many of his Cabinet colleagues were strongly in favour of decolonisation, and Wilson largely welcomed these measures. The Conservatives, however, did not – as Opposition Leader Harold Macmillan, very much a man of the old Tory elite, bellowed at Wilson in a Parliamentary debate in 1959, “there is a wind of change blowing across this country and her overseas possessions. This decline in national consciousness is a political fact, but a preventable one – however, this government is not taking steps to prevent it”.
The big political conflict of the era, however, was not over the loss of Empire, but over the social security system. Labour had introduced a scheme to supplement the meagre existing state pensions with an added pension that would be paid out by the former employer as a statutory requirement. This did not resonate well with the Tories and Liberals, who ran mass campaigns against the “forced pension”, and proposed an alternative scheme whereby the individual employee and employer would be allowed to set pensions at levels suiting them. Labour in turn decried this as “unrealistic”, as it might potentially allow employers to cheat their employees out of any additional pensions whatever.
A group of High Tories, however, most of them representing rural seats, broke with their party leadership to endorse Labour's pension scheme. This caused something of a ruckus within the party, and the contentions between left and right came to a head – in the ensuing 1960 general election, the two sides in the pension conflict published separate manifestos. Although they would not run against one another until the following election, the seeds of the modern Centrist and National parties were born.
Wilson entered the 60s emboldened by his recent pension victory, and set about rebuilding the country from the ground up – literally. The introduction of the comprehensive secondary school, the most significant education reform since the tripartite system was introduced in 1944, moved significant planning responsibility onto local authorities, and the existing system of local government was felt too complex and uneven to handle such matters well. Legislation was brought before Parliament in 1962 to create a series of uniform council areas – initially a one-tier system was suggested, but this was changed to a two-tier one when the county councils vociferously protested – and the proposals were gradually implemented over the course of the following decade. England, Wales and Scotland moved from their previous intricate web of parish councils, town councils, boroughs, districts and so forth to a uniform system of regional councils and district councils, a system that despite its controversial nature has largely endured to the present day. Northern Ireland implemented its own one-tier local government system, foregoing the regional councils altogether, in 1970.
In 1965, Labour faced no unified opposition thanks to the Tory split, and were able to return to power with a comfortable majority. In the subsequent year's local elections, however, Labour were trounced – a fact attributed to Wilson's unusually poor television performance (being interviewed for the first time by journalists not sympathetic to his party might have helped) as well as the decline of the house-building programmes. Labour listened, however, and a bold new initiative was launched – until 1975, a million new homes were to be built each year. This, it was predicted, would solve the housing crisis once and for all, and a modern home was to be available for every British family that needed it. The “Million Programme”, as it has become known, was greeted with enthusiasm at the time, but many of the estates built under its auspices have since fallen into disrepair and disrepute, becoming havens of petty crime, magnets for social deprivation and, depressingly but hardly unexpectedly, centres for Britain's immigrant communities. Some see in the Million Programme the legacy of an era where it was felt that government intervention could save the country, some see it as primarily Labour's vanity project that ended up jeopardising the country's standard of living and laying waste to significant parts of the Green Belts.
Either way, the voters at the time would seem to have liked it, for in 1970 Labour was returned in a landslide of proportions unseen since 1945. Satisfied with his life's work, Wilson announced at the subsequent Party Conference that he was retiring from both the leadership and the premiership as soon as a successor could be found. This was not to take a very long time...
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Tony Benn?
Though I don't know if he and Wilson would have the same relationship Palme and Erlander had.
Anyway, brilliant stuff.
Good stuff so far! You admittedly are dealing with a very, very difficult task as it's virtually impossible to find good analogues. 
I'm going to guess Tony Benn as the Olof Palme analogue, though ideally you would want to have a person of High Tory stock who became a democratic socialist.
I'm going to guess Tony Benn as the Olof Palme analogue, though ideally you would want to have a person of High Tory stock who became a democratic socialist.
If the first Viscount Stansgate had been a Tory, it would work beautifully.
Good stuff so far! You admittedly are dealing with a very, very difficult task as it's virtually impossible to find good analogues.
That reminds me: credit where credit's due to Tayya and, especially, ESA for helping me work out some of the later analogies.
My lips are sealed.
That's part of the intent - hopefully ought to make you slightly less like the deer in the headlights when Makemakean and I get out our collaborative piece.
Anthony Wedgwood-Benn (1971-1978)
I expect there's scant point to me holding this back any longer-
Anthony Wedgwood-Benn (Labour)
1971-1978
The Class Traitor
Anthony Wedgwood-Benn was, in many ways, an unlikely Labour leader. His father and grandfather had both been prominent Liberal politicians (although the former went over to Labour), and his father had been made a viscount for his services to the wartime government. He went to Westminster School, not quite Eton but very nearly, and subsequently studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford. He was an officer in the Royal Air Force, and while never seeing combat, remained in the reserve for many years after the war. When the elder Benn died in 1960, Anthony became the 2nd Viscount Stansgate, a title he found deeply distasteful and disclaimed as soon as the law was changed to let him do so. He retained, however, distinctly upper-class mannerisms and modes of speech throughout his life, a bizarre contrast against his political beliefs. So how did this public-school boy, this RAF reservist with noble pedigree, end up one of the foremost icons of political radicalism?
No doubt one is making omissions in a retelling of Benn's career if one does not mention the fact that he was close to Harold Wilson. Wilson met Benn in 1955 while looking for a new private secretary, and was deeply impressed by the man – so impressed that, a few years later, he took him into Cabinet as Education Secretary. Benn was responsible for rolling out the comprehensive school, and undertook the task with great gusto. A firm believer in the levelling power of education, Benn was enthusiastic in his perceived attacks on the very institutions that had formed him – the Education Act 1966, largely Benn's brainchild, saw the overwhelming majority of independent schools nationalised, and what few ones remained were to be tightly overseen by the state. No longer would class determine who was educated where – instead, each child was assigned to a state school based on where he or she lived, and little wiggle room existed.
Benn made himself known as an orator, both inside Parliament and outside it – he frequently led the marches on the First of May, and during election campaigns he served as a sort of “attack dog” against the divided opposition. He made some headlines when, during the 1968 student riots, he entered the occupied LSESU building and spoke to calm the students within. The appeal was a failure, but the fact that he tried spoke volumes about Benn's political style. He was different from the previous generation of Labour politicians, who would probably have considered his actions rash and unnecessary. The fact that Benn seemed to be one of the only politicians who would actually respect the youth made him popular among them, moreso than probably any politician at the time.
So it was that when Wilson resigned, he proposed Benn as his candidate to succeed him. The election was unopposed, and Benn entered Number 10 in short order. His first priority was completing the constitutional arrangements begun by Wilson, and more specifically, Lords reform. Benn wanted the Lords abolished if possible and reformed to be more democratic if not. He proposed a scheme whereby half the house would be appointed by the sitting government through the issuing of life peerages, the other half elected by various sectional interests. The caveat to all this, of course, was that the Lords themselves would have to agree to it, and the overwhelmingly right-wing house wouldn't countenance such a radical reform. Where the Lords had consented to the expansion of the welfare state, the gradual dismantlement of Empire and the abolition of the public schools, here, they put their collective foot down. Hectic negotiations ensued, and ultimately it transpired that the Lords might be inclined to support the introduction of technocratic elements, but they wanted another reform in return – perhaps a slightly unexpected one: proportional representation for the Commons.
Fifteen years prior, the idea of the House of Lords imposing PR would've been a ludicrous one. However, the division of the right meant that Labour was essentially in power for all eternity under first-past-the-post, while the still largely hereditary Lords remained dominated by Centrists and Nationals. This situation became rather distasteful to them, and after six successive election losses to Labour, that the right should champion proportional representation became a less and less ridiculous concept by the day. Benn, unlike most in Labour, was not wholly opposed to the idea of PR, and after some consideration let it be known that he'd agree to the proposals. The Parliament Act 1972 would split the Lords into three categories: a hundred representative peers elected by the entire hereditary peerage to represent them, two hundred technocratic peers selected by “panels” composed of workers within specific social groups – this was inspired by the Irish Senate – and a maximum of two hundred life peers appointed by the Prime Minister. The Commons, meanwhile, would be elected by proportional representation in constituencies of no more than twelve members, coinciding with local government boundaries in most places.
In sharp contrast to Wilson, who'd been an eager reformer at home and at best a quiet safekeeper abroad, Benn was enthusiastic about his foreign policy views. Foremost of these was support for the liberation of various oppressed peoples, from Palestine to Angola to Chile to Vietnam. This latter point earned him the scorn of Washington – when the US Air Force firebombed Hanoi in late 1972, he referred to them in a televised speech as “murderers”, and linked their actions to those of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. The American reaction was not long coming, and days after the speech they recalled their ambassador to London. If any previous Prime Minister had made such statements, he'd have been forced out of office, but Benn was unflappable. In the first Prime Minister's Questions of 1973, when he was inevitably grilled about these events, Benn proclaimed his adherence to two principles: “firstly, the triumph of democracy over imperialism, whether that imperialism wears a swastika or a white star on blue, and secondly, the triumph of truth over lies and sycophancy, whether or not that truth is politically convenient at the time”.
On the home front, however, Benn's ministry is poorly remembered if it's remembered at all. Soon after the Vietnam debacle, Benn found himself in a domestic crisis when the Arabs invaded Israel in a surprise attack – the Foreign Office joined most of the West in condemning the attack, whereupon the Arab states in OPEC cut off their oil. At roughly the same time, industrial relations within the National Coal Board broke down, and the coal miners went on strike. Suddenly Britain found itself crippled by fuel shortages, and though exploitation of the North Sea oil resources was sped up in response, this was a long-term solution that would do little to bring people the fuel they desperately needed in the present. It wasn't long before Hugh Gaitskell, the long-serving Chancellor who'd first been minted during the early Wilson years, was forced to go on television to announce the introduction of a new rationing scheme for coal and oil. Private households would receive only a limited allocation of these resources per week, and as for industry, they were limited to three days a week of electrical supply. The “Three-Day Week” as it became known, was an unmitigated disaster for Labour, and coupled with the introduction of PR, they were widely expected to lose the next General Election in a landslide.
Proportional representation works in funny ways, however, and it was a huge upset when the 1975 general elections returned exactly 310 seats for Labour and their Communist passive supporters, and 309 for the combined opposition. Discount the Speaker, and the two “blocs” were equally powerful. The opposition clamoured for a new election – Benn, however, refused to call one. He claimed this was because his mandate technically wasn't gone, but in practice his reasons were almost certainly more prosaic – he feared (quite rightly) that a fresh election would lead to him losing power. So it was that the Benn ministry stayed in power, and the farce of the “Lottery Parliament” ensued. Labour would seek compromise where possible, but where this was not possible – such as for appropriations bills – the vote in the House of Commons would be decided by the drawing of lots. As a general rule, this method proved surprisingly equitable – the government won about 52% of draws, the opposition about 48 – however, this did little to change the incongruous nature of the fact that the governance of Britain was now decided by who picked the hand where the Chairman of Ways and Means was holding the pebble.
When the drawing for the budget of 1978 came up against the government, Benn decided to resign and contest an early election rather than sit through any more of this. The government had been able to curtail fuel rationing shortly after the previous election, and hoped that the people would've forgotten about the whole sordid affair by this point. They had not, however, and for the first time in over three decades, Labour was voted out of power. No clear successor was found, however, and so the choice of Prime Minister was a somewhat unconventional one...
Anthony Wedgwood-Benn (Labour)
1971-1978
The Class Traitor
Anthony Wedgwood-Benn was, in many ways, an unlikely Labour leader. His father and grandfather had both been prominent Liberal politicians (although the former went over to Labour), and his father had been made a viscount for his services to the wartime government. He went to Westminster School, not quite Eton but very nearly, and subsequently studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford. He was an officer in the Royal Air Force, and while never seeing combat, remained in the reserve for many years after the war. When the elder Benn died in 1960, Anthony became the 2nd Viscount Stansgate, a title he found deeply distasteful and disclaimed as soon as the law was changed to let him do so. He retained, however, distinctly upper-class mannerisms and modes of speech throughout his life, a bizarre contrast against his political beliefs. So how did this public-school boy, this RAF reservist with noble pedigree, end up one of the foremost icons of political radicalism?
No doubt one is making omissions in a retelling of Benn's career if one does not mention the fact that he was close to Harold Wilson. Wilson met Benn in 1955 while looking for a new private secretary, and was deeply impressed by the man – so impressed that, a few years later, he took him into Cabinet as Education Secretary. Benn was responsible for rolling out the comprehensive school, and undertook the task with great gusto. A firm believer in the levelling power of education, Benn was enthusiastic in his perceived attacks on the very institutions that had formed him – the Education Act 1966, largely Benn's brainchild, saw the overwhelming majority of independent schools nationalised, and what few ones remained were to be tightly overseen by the state. No longer would class determine who was educated where – instead, each child was assigned to a state school based on where he or she lived, and little wiggle room existed.
Benn made himself known as an orator, both inside Parliament and outside it – he frequently led the marches on the First of May, and during election campaigns he served as a sort of “attack dog” against the divided opposition. He made some headlines when, during the 1968 student riots, he entered the occupied LSESU building and spoke to calm the students within. The appeal was a failure, but the fact that he tried spoke volumes about Benn's political style. He was different from the previous generation of Labour politicians, who would probably have considered his actions rash and unnecessary. The fact that Benn seemed to be one of the only politicians who would actually respect the youth made him popular among them, moreso than probably any politician at the time.
So it was that when Wilson resigned, he proposed Benn as his candidate to succeed him. The election was unopposed, and Benn entered Number 10 in short order. His first priority was completing the constitutional arrangements begun by Wilson, and more specifically, Lords reform. Benn wanted the Lords abolished if possible and reformed to be more democratic if not. He proposed a scheme whereby half the house would be appointed by the sitting government through the issuing of life peerages, the other half elected by various sectional interests. The caveat to all this, of course, was that the Lords themselves would have to agree to it, and the overwhelmingly right-wing house wouldn't countenance such a radical reform. Where the Lords had consented to the expansion of the welfare state, the gradual dismantlement of Empire and the abolition of the public schools, here, they put their collective foot down. Hectic negotiations ensued, and ultimately it transpired that the Lords might be inclined to support the introduction of technocratic elements, but they wanted another reform in return – perhaps a slightly unexpected one: proportional representation for the Commons.
Fifteen years prior, the idea of the House of Lords imposing PR would've been a ludicrous one. However, the division of the right meant that Labour was essentially in power for all eternity under first-past-the-post, while the still largely hereditary Lords remained dominated by Centrists and Nationals. This situation became rather distasteful to them, and after six successive election losses to Labour, that the right should champion proportional representation became a less and less ridiculous concept by the day. Benn, unlike most in Labour, was not wholly opposed to the idea of PR, and after some consideration let it be known that he'd agree to the proposals. The Parliament Act 1972 would split the Lords into three categories: a hundred representative peers elected by the entire hereditary peerage to represent them, two hundred technocratic peers selected by “panels” composed of workers within specific social groups – this was inspired by the Irish Senate – and a maximum of two hundred life peers appointed by the Prime Minister. The Commons, meanwhile, would be elected by proportional representation in constituencies of no more than twelve members, coinciding with local government boundaries in most places.
In sharp contrast to Wilson, who'd been an eager reformer at home and at best a quiet safekeeper abroad, Benn was enthusiastic about his foreign policy views. Foremost of these was support for the liberation of various oppressed peoples, from Palestine to Angola to Chile to Vietnam. This latter point earned him the scorn of Washington – when the US Air Force firebombed Hanoi in late 1972, he referred to them in a televised speech as “murderers”, and linked their actions to those of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. The American reaction was not long coming, and days after the speech they recalled their ambassador to London. If any previous Prime Minister had made such statements, he'd have been forced out of office, but Benn was unflappable. In the first Prime Minister's Questions of 1973, when he was inevitably grilled about these events, Benn proclaimed his adherence to two principles: “firstly, the triumph of democracy over imperialism, whether that imperialism wears a swastika or a white star on blue, and secondly, the triumph of truth over lies and sycophancy, whether or not that truth is politically convenient at the time”.
On the home front, however, Benn's ministry is poorly remembered if it's remembered at all. Soon after the Vietnam debacle, Benn found himself in a domestic crisis when the Arabs invaded Israel in a surprise attack – the Foreign Office joined most of the West in condemning the attack, whereupon the Arab states in OPEC cut off their oil. At roughly the same time, industrial relations within the National Coal Board broke down, and the coal miners went on strike. Suddenly Britain found itself crippled by fuel shortages, and though exploitation of the North Sea oil resources was sped up in response, this was a long-term solution that would do little to bring people the fuel they desperately needed in the present. It wasn't long before Hugh Gaitskell, the long-serving Chancellor who'd first been minted during the early Wilson years, was forced to go on television to announce the introduction of a new rationing scheme for coal and oil. Private households would receive only a limited allocation of these resources per week, and as for industry, they were limited to three days a week of electrical supply. The “Three-Day Week” as it became known, was an unmitigated disaster for Labour, and coupled with the introduction of PR, they were widely expected to lose the next General Election in a landslide.
Proportional representation works in funny ways, however, and it was a huge upset when the 1975 general elections returned exactly 310 seats for Labour and their Communist passive supporters, and 309 for the combined opposition. Discount the Speaker, and the two “blocs” were equally powerful. The opposition clamoured for a new election – Benn, however, refused to call one. He claimed this was because his mandate technically wasn't gone, but in practice his reasons were almost certainly more prosaic – he feared (quite rightly) that a fresh election would lead to him losing power. So it was that the Benn ministry stayed in power, and the farce of the “Lottery Parliament” ensued. Labour would seek compromise where possible, but where this was not possible – such as for appropriations bills – the vote in the House of Commons would be decided by the drawing of lots. As a general rule, this method proved surprisingly equitable – the government won about 52% of draws, the opposition about 48 – however, this did little to change the incongruous nature of the fact that the governance of Britain was now decided by who picked the hand where the Chairman of Ways and Means was holding the pebble.
When the drawing for the budget of 1978 came up against the government, Benn decided to resign and contest an early election rather than sit through any more of this. The government had been able to curtail fuel rationing shortly after the previous election, and hoped that the people would've forgotten about the whole sordid affair by this point. They had not, however, and for the first time in over three decades, Labour was voted out of power. No clear successor was found, however, and so the choice of Prime Minister was a somewhat unconventional one...
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Yeay! The Lottery Riksdag! It's funny how everyone expected that Riksdag to dissolve early and that there would be an early election, but, as it appears to be the case that in Sweden in these days, there is an Iron Law of THE ELECTIONS WILL TAKE PLACE WHEN THEY ARE SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE, PERIOD.
So you made Gaitskell the Sträng analogue? Not too bad. I know from Erlander's memoir that he was very fond of Gaitskell, whom he regarded as more of a social democrat in the European mold in contrast to other British Labour leaders (even writing that Gaitskell would have made a better PM than Wilson).
Anyway, as for Thorbjörn Fälldin and Ola Ullsten. No clue. Absolutely no clue.
Though I anticipate that Enoch Powell will feature as the Gösta Bohman-analogue.
It's funny how everyone expected that Riksdag to dissolve early and that there would be an early election, but, as it appears to be the case that in Sweden in these days, there is an Iron Law of THE ELECTIONS WILL TAKE PLACE WHEN THEY ARE SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE, PERIOD.So you made Gaitskell the Sträng analogue? Not too bad. I know from Erlander's memoir that he was very fond of Gaitskell, whom he regarded as more of a social democrat in the European mold in contrast to other British Labour leaders (even writing that Gaitskell would have made a better PM than Wilson).
Anyway, as for Thorbjörn Fälldin and Ola Ullsten. No clue. Absolutely no clue.
Though I anticipate that Enoch Powell will feature as the Gösta Bohman-analogue.
Hmm, this certainly is interesting, as others have quite rightly pointed out. I'm just wondering how Mary Whitehouse, the Festival of Light, and the video nasty scandal would have played out in TTL.
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
Very well-written, Ares. My inner pedant can't help but point out that the Lottery Riksdag just doesn't translate, because in our system the Speaker breaks a tie by voting for the status quo, not by drawing lots. This means that a lot less gets done, of course. But I suppose we need to handwave some things otherwise it doesn't make sense.
Labour winning almost every election ever is completely plausible, though.
Labour winning almost every election ever is completely plausible, though.
Yeay! The Lottery Riksdag!
I considered scrapping it because of what U's M mentions, but it's just far too bizarre of an episode to leave out.
I considered making Gaitskell the Erlander, but their backgrounds are far too dissimilar, as opposed to Erlander and Wilson who were from really astonishingly similar backgrounds (born into the lower middle class in the provinces, got to study at a grammar school and then a fairly prestigious university (this is coming from someone who's currently inside that same university, so take it with a grain of salt), became a public official and impressed enough people to make it into cabinet). Now of course, Sträng and Gaitskell are scarcely better (Gaitskell's father was a civil servant, Sträng's father was a dump worker), but I think I can fib a bit when it comes to non-PMs.
If you've read the PMQs thread you should know who our Fälldin is - as for Ullsten, well, I wasn't too creative.
You're wrong, but that's actually something of a relief, because I was afraid you'd think the person I did choose was a bit too much of a stereotypical "HATES THE POOR" hard-right bogeyman. No such fears now.
The video violence debate was by no means unique to Britain, so I don't see why it should be significantly different.
Very well-written, Ares. My inner pedant can't help but point out that the Lottery Riksdag just doesn't translate, because in our system the Speaker breaks a tie by voting for the status quo, not by drawing lots. This means that a lot less gets done, of course. But I suppose we need to handwave some things otherwise it doesn't make sense.
Labour winning almost every election ever is completely plausible, though.
I had to give a few points up to make it fit together - for instance, if I hadn't gotten PR, then I couldn't have had the analogous party system, because the opposition would never have been able to win power.
I don't really know who Ullsten would be in British analogy. A thing with him was that he was never a particularly political individual, who first got involved in politics in his late twenties because, well, it was a career path that seemed reasonably promising. He never really had much ambition, and more or less became Prime Minister accidentally (Ahlmark resigned as Liberal leader after being diagnosed with clinical depression (something you couldn't be open with back in the days, so he said it was to spend more time with the family), and Fälldin's first government collapsed over the issue of nuclear power). His government was really more a caretaker affair than anything else. It is worth noting that Per Ahlmark resented the fellow and in his memoirs writes that he felt Ullsten was unqualified to be Prime Minister and that he had "delusions" of "leading a real government". Apparently, Ahlmark and Westerberg are good friends but both of them dislike Ullsten.
Say whatever you want about David Steel and his brand of liberalism that was virtually indistinguishable from Roy Jenkin's brand of social democracy, David Steel was a man of high ambitions and very strong convictions. He was an enthusiastic and energetic campaigner. Ola Ullsten was... well...
Likely whoever the British Ullsten was was an anonymous non-ideological civil servant.