This moment is the culmination of all other moments, so let's look at what brought the Callaghan Government down.
1: We were still paying for WWII.
2: Within industry and the Unions were the second generation of men who had been sent, like veal calves, in trucks across Europe to die, in order to create a Land Fit For Heroes. They'd languished in POW camps, watched their mates die in Normandy, seen the might of the British Empire trampled in hours by the Japanese,
and then watched the Victory in Europe turn into the Cold War. They then saw that their children were faced with, not another war, but Nuclear Extinction. They wanted and needed a certain amount of security, Job security, a security from war, freedom from the fear of illness causing ruin.
It sounds as if I've done everything, but I was a Union rep for the clerical workers union in Chrysler. I used to go to meetings in which the older reps would do nothing but vent their anger against a company that no longer resembled the one that caused their anger and a country that never came up to the one they thought they were fighting for. Unfortunately, the next generation caught the 'We've done our bit' mentality.
It was that mentality that caused the downfall of the '79 Labour Government.
There wasn't enough of anything to placate 2 or 3 generations of people whose suffering and dying seemed to be for nothing.
Even my family were devastated by war. My mother's first husband was an engineer in a ball bearing factory in Nottingham. Her second was a bomber pilot, then came my Dad (literally). When I went to a children's home in 1953, I went in a pair of wellingtons borrowed from next door. I went because my mother couldn't afford to keep me. My sisters, from her second marriage went to a different children's home and my older brother joined the forces.
Most of the kids I spent my early years with were ones whose parents had been either killed fighting or in the Blitz. Slightly later, my fellow inmates were kids from all over the comonwealth. We were black, white and brown, but mutually identifiable as 'Kid's home kids' by the uniform. We were, all of us, an 'ethnic minority'.
Leonard Cohen...Suzanne 'He spent a long time looking from his lonely wooden tower'.
I'm never really sure if I'm right, but I have spent a long time looking.
If you get a chance, read the Ben Fogle interview in the Daily Mail, with Gordon Brown. Even the Mail couldn't make Brown anything other than what he is.
In the land of the blind, the 'one eyed man' is King. Eh, Gordie? ;-l
