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((Is EVERYONE in Paradox Forums a goddamn teetotaler?
Also, I like the idea of Tommy being the owner of the place, but maybe we can come up with something better than "Tommy's"? Hum-hum. I mean, the simplest road would be to name the place "The Westminster", but I think we should let the writer do his/her thing.))

No, I drink like I vote. Early and often. And usually before handling heavy machinery and/or firearms.
 
Presenting the history of British elections, 1945-1969.
8qgNoXs.png
Oddly enough, this chart demonstrates the one value I've seen in the CPGB throughout this AAR; stability.
The Liberal party is even better represented in its role as "That yellow stain in the middle".
 
I was thinking of making graphics like these at the end of the AAR. They are great for looking at an overview of our electoral history. At the moment I've just been recording PMs, Leaders of the Opposition and Party Leaders in an excel document.

I'm going to link the two in the contents.

Presenting the history of British elections, 1945-1969.
8qgNoXs.png

I got bored and done a thingy!

qx1dw8.jpg

I especially like the pretty graphics you put into this one. Would you be willing to make another one at the end of the AAR? Either linking with this one or putting the entire period in a long line?

Another question, how will you handle Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party gaining seats?

They are just considered to either independents or affiliated to the Liberals, there was no adequate way I could think of for representing them (at least at the moment).
 
They are just considered to either independents or affiliated to the Liberals, there was no adequate way I could think of for representing them (at least at the moment).

We could just assume that I'll always be Plaid Cymru... :p
 
Fantastic graphic Foresti! :)

Oh, am I the only one who thinks Enewaldball looks Austrian?
 
We could just assume that I'll always be Plaid Cymru... :p

Plaid Cymru already exists in game. It's called the Labour (Llafur?) Party! (no we do not support separation, and neither do the Welsh!)
 
;)

Coincidence? Austrian flag, Austrian school of economics, Anarchist flag, Anarcho-capitalism...

It fits you perfectly.
 
No, it means you're always on about either feminism or the free market and Enewald considers you a poser for not going on about the free market all the time :p

So I can only be about one thing? :eek: And I don't need acceptance from Enewald ;)
 
The Sick Man
1969-1974

Enoch Powell and the Conservative Party returned to power at a difficult moment in British history. With domestic violence making a return to the political scene, the country’s economic decline accelerating rapidly and its international influence coming under threat it was during the early 1970s that commentators first began to refer to the United Kingdom as ‘the Sick Man of Europe’.


The first great challenge faced by the Powell administration was the breakdown of social order in Northern Ireland. Through the latter 1960s the province had seen political tensions escalate and violence start to plague the province as the Nationalist Civil Rights movement clashed with Loyalists. Following the split in the IRA between its dovish Marxist wing (the Official IRA) and a more militant Nationalist one (the Provisional IRA) in early 1969 the situation became even more drastic. In March a large Catholic area in Derry proclaimed itself ‘Free Derry’ and successfully ejected all government authority from the part of the city under its influence. The efforts of the Royal Ulster Constabulary to re-establish government control over Free Derry would lead to the Battle of the Bogside from July 4th to July 7th in which Derry Nationalists clashed with the police force. In solidarity with the Bogsiders Nationalists across Northern Ireland launched major Civil Rights protests which were attacked by Loyalists leading to smaller clashes across the Six Counties. With a series of pogroms being unleashed by a mixture of Loyalist paramilitaries and the RUC the Ulster Unionist Party controlled Stormont government appealed to the British government to deploy troops to Northern Ireland.

The British soldiers who arrived in Northern Ireland in July 1969 were initially greeted as heroes by large parts of the community – Catholics and Protestants alike regarding them as neutral arbiters who could bring an end to the violence. However, the troops did not remain ‘neutral’ for long as they were placed under the authority of the Stormont government and soon began to turn against the Nationalist community by becoming involved in many of the same practises as the RUC – with the focus of their operations being overwhelmingly directed against the Nationalists and their communities.

Across the Irish Sea, the Conservative Party’s economic policies sought to directly attack the foundations of the post-war consensus that promoted a mixed economy with a substantial state sector (as much as 1/5 of the economy as a whole) and a robust welfare state. Despite the popularity of newly introduced immigration controls, which limited legal immigration into the UK to a maximum of 120,000 a year, the Tories’ economic programme opened up an era of social strife. The Conservatives moved quickly to slash public spending in every area except defence, where major investments were made in equipment modernisation and the construction of modern vessels for the navy. The cuts were accompanied by a deflationary economic policy. These policies were identified by the government’s opponents as the direct cause of Britain’s sinking into a sharp recession from 1970, Hugh Gaitskell accusing the Conservatives of using Britain as an economic experiment. By the start of 1971 unemployment had surpassed 1,000,000 for the first time since the Second World War, marking the end of the era of full employment, whilst inflation remained stubbornly high.


With the country suffering the Powell government, resisting the calls from One Nationists to turn away from its present economic course, made the drastic decision to take on the fearsome British labour movement directly – becoming the first British government to do so on a large since Anthony Eden had faced down the Steel Workers’ Strike in 1951. Just as in 1951, the field of battle was the steel industry where Powell intended to introduced full privatisation to the notoriously, and increasingly, unprofitable sector. The Steel Workers’ Strike of 1971 would last for a tense and dramatic five months over the spring and summer and have a huge impact on British politics. With both Labour and the Communists attempting to assert themselves as the leading force behind the strike, the CPGB, with its militant industrial leadership, was far more successful in winning the support of the steel workers and establishing its hegemony over the strike.

The fate of the People’s Army was also, in large part, decided during the 1971 Strike. Having rapidly risen in profile after 1969 the PA was at the height of its influence with substantial support within elements of the working class and Communist movement – this despite the CPGB’s denunciation of the organisation. During the Steel Workers’ Strike the group attempted to form contacts with striking workers as a means of spreading their armed struggle to the factory floor. Although in the majority of cases PA delegates were chases off by the workers in a number of relatively isolated cases the PA won a small degree of support. When in the late summer of 1971 Powell was facing open rebellion from parts of his own party and Hugh Gaitskell was calling for new elections the ‘Battle of Ravenscraig’ changed everything. The Ravenscraig steelworks in Motherwell, Central Scotland, were the largest steel works in Western Europe and home to some of Britain’s most militant workers. Here around 30 strikers, armed with guns by the People’s Army, clashed with similarly armed police resulting in the deaths of 18 individuals and mass hysteria. The Battle of Ravenscraig killed off any hope of victory for the striking workers as public opinion swung irreversibly against them nationally – leading to their union leaders being forced to accept total defeat within two weeks of the incident. The steel industry was sold off, major wage cuts and redundancies would follow, whilst the People’s Army would never again come close to becoming an organisation with any sort of mass appeal.

Left to Right: Denis Healey and Michael Foot​

In the aftermath of the defeat of the Steel Workers’ Strike of 1971 the Labour Party’s prestige and that of its leader was badly damaged. At the age of 65 Hugh Gaitskell retired from the party leadership to the back benches. In his place Gaitskell’s protégé and fellow Liberal and Labour Party member, the luxuriantly eyebrowed Denis Healey, defeated left wing challenger Michael Foot with relative ease. Healey was clearly chosen as a continuity candidate offering a continuation of the Gaitskell era leadership that had seen the Labour Party return to the forefront of British politics.


Overseas, Britain’s influence over Southern Arabia was under threat from Marxist and pro-Ba’athist guerrillas in both Oman and Yemen. In 1970 the British organised the transfer of sovereignty over the whole of Yemen to the Sana’a based Kingdom of Yemen on the condition that Britain be granted the right to maintain control over military bases in Aden in perpetuity. At the same time British military personnel were transferred to the region to assist the local governments in their wars against revolutionary movements.


Further to the North, major shifts were occurring in Middle Eastern geopolitics. In 1969 Syria and Iraq, both under the governance of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, unified to form the United Arab Republic. The UAR terrified the conservative, monarchical and pro-British, governments of the region. In Jordan the government initiated a violent crackdown against pro-Ba’athist socialist groups as well as against the Palestine Liberation Organisation (also deemed pro-Ba’athist) which was mostly based in Jordan. With the country seething with unrest a violent incident occurred at Irbid, technically Jordanian territory but occupied by Syrian forces since 1948, which led to a UAR invasion of the Kingdom of Jordan. With Jordan in a state of collapse the Israelis moved to swiftly occupy the West Bank and Jerusalem. Following the collapse of Jordan tensions in the Middle East rose rapidly with a clash between the UAR and Israelis seeming inevitable.


Internationally, the early 1970s were a time when long existing Cold War tensions began to cool. The Western powers saw relations with both the Soviets and Chinese improve noticeably. The Soviet Union entered into agreement with the United States on limits to the proliferation of arms and Brezhnev visited Washington in 1972. In the saw year British Foreign Secretary Edward Heath travelled to China where he was entertained by Mao Zedong and negotiated a softening of Sino-Western relations, notably securing a huge contract for the construction of fighter jets for the Chinese air force as he worked in an unlikely partnership with CPGB leader Reg Birch to ensure that the French were not given the contract. A year later President Nixon travelled to China to put a seal on the new alliance between the Chinese and the Western world.


Closer to home, the British economy continued to suffer with the unemployment rising beyond 1,500,000 even as inflation started to fall and the recession ended in early 1972 growth rates remained paltry and the nation remained gripped by hardship. In this atmosphere the government faced down the praetorian guard of the British labour movement, the National Union of Mineworkers, with demands for wage cuts and the closure of the most unprofitable pits. The Communist dominated NUM flexed its muscles and prepared for battle. Britain’s miners were not only a vanguard of radicalism; they possessed a uniquely powerful hold over the British economy through their ability to cripple the country’s energy supplies. As the struggle between the miners and the Powell government raged from the late summer of 1972 fuel shortages led to the introduction of a three day working week from the start of October. As public opinion started to shift away from the government Labour chimed with the popular mood in blaming the disturbances not upon the miners, who were protecting their jobs and wages, but on the government for pursuing a supposedly ideologically motivated economic restructuring. With strikes spreading to other parts of industry and the prospect of a Christmas without electricity drawing nearer in December the government supported the arrest of dozens of trade union leaders of shaky legal grounds, most for allegedly participating in violence, whilst deploying troops to break the strike by entering pits – actions that in turn led to genuinely violent clashes with miners. With the government under extreme pressure it came to an agreement with the unions that saw jobs preserved and a freeze rather than a reduction in wages agreed to. The lonely Christmas of 1972 marked the nadir of Enoch Powell’s government’s popularity with many opinion polls predicting that the Tories would suffer their worst result since 1945 in the next election.


It was around this time that the National Front rose to prominence in British politics. Initially founded in 1967 after small Neo-Nazi and Neo-Fascist groups united with ultra-conservatives disgusted as Powell’s turn away from the Tory Right at the 1967 Conservative Party Conference, it was not until after Powell’s Conservative Party rose to power that the Front started to make gains. With the government new immigration controls, which had been waived in early 1972 to allow for the immigration of 60,000 Asian forcibly expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, deemed insufficient, its counter-terrorist activity seemed as pitiful, its foreign policy weak and its industrial relations pathetic the NF had grown from little more than a series of ultra-right gangs that attacked Communists and immigrants into the largest Neo-Fascist political institution outside of Southern Europe. With the National Front intending to field candidates across Britain in time for the next election there were fears that its emergence could have disastrous consequences for Britain’s social stability.


1972 was also the worst year of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. As violence only grew more extreme from 1969 Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries became extremely powerful. In early 1972 the British Army began a series of major offensives that would eventually result in the ending of Free Derry’s autonomy and the capture of numerous high ranking IRA chiefs, as well as a lesser number of Loyalist paramilitary leaders, that would gravely weaken the paramilitaries’ power. However, the period is best remembered for the Bloody Sunday massacre of over a dozen civilians by British soldiers that stained the British government’s relations with the Catholic community for decades to come. Yet, from the end of 1972 there was a clear downturn in violence in Northern Ireland.

Domestically, the People’s Army continued to grow even after the 1971 Steel Workers’ Strike with government estimates claiming that as many as 1,500 militants were directly involved in the organisation with ten times that number having some degree of indirect involvement. Through 1972 the PA escalated its actions; however civilian casualties remained relatively negligible. This would change in 1973. In April the Secretary of State for Industry, Reginald Maudling, was kidnapped by the People’s Army with the group demanded the release of all PA prisoners in exchange. With the Powell government refusing to negotiate with the PA Maudling remained in captivity for 60 days before his body was discovered in the boot of a car in East London. From that moment onwards what public support the People’s Army still had rapidly began to sink away as its actions became more extreme – through the rest of the year a series of bombings claimed almost 100 civilian lives, whilst an attempted assassination of Enoch Powell instead resulted in the death of two of his aides. At the same time government actions against the group accelerated with most of its leading militants seized during 1973 and much of its organisation structure destroyed. The People’s Army would continue to fighting an increasingly lost battle for years to come.


That same year, the pro-British Libyan monarchy was overthrown by a cabal of pro-UAR, pro-Soviet, left wing officers under the leadership of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Rather than accept the loss of the vital oil producing nation from its area of influence the British sponsored a revolt of monarchist military units – even deploying air and naval units from Malta to ensure that the monarchy was restored. Following Gaddafi’s defeat the restored Libyan government was ‘encouraged’ to grant the British military bases near Benghazi and renegotiate oil extraction rights in favour of British firms.


In South East Asia the Indonesian War, which had been raging in one form or another since the Japanese first arrived in the East Indies in 1941-2, was beginning to draw to a close. From the first years of the decade the Americans and their allies began the staged withdrawal of foreign troops from South-East Asia with the responsibility for waging the war being passed down to the massively enlarged and extremely well equipped National Army of Indonesia. In Malaysia, the Powell government had eventually ruled against sending troops directly to Sarawak but had instead increased the financial support given to the Malaysian government to wage the war whilst also deploying air units to the Commonwealth nation. In the other states of South East Asia smaller scale Communist insurgencies continued to threaten the region’s governments.


Prime Minister Powell’s government had presided over a time of hardship for Britain. Yet with domestic terrorism being brought under control, the country asserting itself overseas once more, and much more importantly 1973 showing encouraging signs of economic growth with unemployment falling whilst inflation remained in check, at the same time 1973 saw industrial action decline in relation to the previous year for the first time since the early 1960s, the situation appeared very different that it had scarcely a year before with the government’s defeat in the Miners’ Strike of 1972. Over the Christmas of 1972 Powell’s administration appeared doomed to failure and defeat in the next election, however by the following Christmas many on the Right believed the country was starting to see the beneficial effects of the government’s reforms. Perhaps the ‘Sick Man’ had found a cure?


During the early 1970s the Liberal Party was the sick man of British politics. In 1969 the Liberal party had been dumped out of government entirely for the first time since 1940 – finishing fourth behind both Labour and the Communists for the first time since 1945. After the election the party was left paralysed by infighting. Young radicals of the 1960s generation entered the party in large numbers whilst the older Orange opposition continued to clash with more conservative elements within the party. Haunted by the ghost of Jo Grimond, who remained close to the party leadership, Jeremy Thorpe found himself incapable of bringing back the party’s dynamic spirit of old. At the same time, Roy Jenkins appeared to be creating a parallel leadership, almost a parallel party, as he derided the authoritarianism of the old Yellow Liberal leaders and called for the adoption of his idea of the ‘broad party’. Despite remaining on the verge of collapse throughout the period the Liberals somehow managed to hold the party together in preparation for the next election. Just as the Lib-Lab coalition of 1964-67 had been held together in large part by fear of Conservative radicalism, the Liberals retained their unity on the almost Jenkinsite grounds that only a unified Liberal Party could defeat Powell and the Tories at the polls.

After a full five year term of Conservative government, the people of Britain were called upon again in March 1974 to elect a new parliament.
 
The massive inflation and unemployment we saw are not the cause of the monetarist policies. It have been building up since 1945. Since then inflation managed to grow without any restraints, and artificial market was created and a giant bubble. The bubble cracked now however, and it is not the fault of the Tories. They just happened to come into government at a very unfortunate time, but they handled it well, they handled it better than those who created it. One more term and inflation will be virtually non existatent and we will be back with high employment.

And this new arab monster is most conserning, just wait and see. Soon they'll invade Israel and rest of the area. We need to stand together with the democracies in that region in solidarity against the totalitarian fascist UAR.
 
And this new arab monster is most conserning, just wait and see. Soon they'll invade Israel and rest of the area. We need to stand together with the democracies in that region in solidarity against the totalitarian fascist UAR.
Eh, not a single British man should die for the jewish scum.
 
Yes, then we can fight them. But I refuse to send a single man to Palestine.

I didn't necessairly said we should fight them. Just to stand with the only democracy in that region against totalitarianism and fascism.

What happened to British industry? Is still 1/5 under state control? Or is it all privatized, or just some elements?
 
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I don't get it, if a mine is making losses, why keep it operating?

Otherwise, I hope some party will soon abandon the fallacies of Keynesianism and monetarism. Can someone listen to Professor Hayek soon? (first British winner of Noble prize for economics afaik)
 
I don't get it, if a mine is making losses, why keep it operating?

Otherwise, I hope some party will soon abandon the fallacies of Keynesianism and monetarism. Can someone listen to Professor Hayek soon? (first British winner of Noble prize for economics afaik)

Powell is influenced by Hayek. But it is better to have Monetarism than Keynesianism right? But I wouldn't mind having him as an economical advisor for our ministers.
 
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