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Recent content by Lucon50

  1. L

    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Alliance-Tory budget talks

    For Shirley Williams and David Steel, pre-budget negotiations with John Major’s Conservative Party would reveal not only the durability of their pact but the idea that adversarial politics could yield to a more European style of constructive co-operation. What had begun as an awkward arrangement...
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    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Growth

    Chancellor David Penhaligon, sleeves rolled up, marshalled HMRC’s largest administrative drive in decades. Inspectors leafed through documents, chasing unpaid dues from landed estates, property speculators and private investors. For Alliance backbenchers, this was the ethical purpose of their...
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    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Senate

    Constitutional clashes were on the way. The SDP-Liberal Alliance’s long-awaited plans to remake the House of Lords teetered on the edge of becoming law. The Great Reform Bill’s core promise - to replace the centuries-old, hereditary-and-life-peer body with a modern second chamber - passed by a...
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    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Peace, Retrenchment and Reform

    On 7 March, the Comprehensive Education Bill came to its final Commons readings. It would ban any new grammar schools, expand state funding and phase out the 11-plus altogether. For many Liberals and Social Democrats, this was the fulfilment of a long battle for equal access to learning. Major...
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    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Lights, camera, action

    At the end of February 1989, the House of Commons chamber opened to television cameras. For the first time ever, the British public could watch their MPs argue, jeer and rise to make their voices heard - not just read about it in the papers or catch clipped quotes on the radio, but see it unfold...
  6. L

    Who would be the King of Poland in 1918?

    Were there any prominent Poles, from the aristocracy maybe, who would be likely collaborationist candidates for the throne of a puppet state?
  7. L

    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Good employment

    Westminster prepared for another test of the fragile Alliance-Conservative confidence-and-supply arrangement in late February. The National Minimum Wage Bill was reaching its final Commons hurdle. The measure promised to set a statutory wage floor for the first time in British history. David...
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    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Fight the right

    “The Alliance,” David Steel declared, “will not allow the extremists of Labour or the reactionary Unionists to drag Britain backwards into bitterness and division.” In a BBC Radio 4 interview, Denis Healey settled into the role of SDP elder statesman, killing the Bennites with kindness. “Tony’s...
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    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Mid Glamorgan by-election

    By the end of the 1980s, the political temperature in South Wales was running high. Mid Glamorgan, a 4-seat constituency, was a heartland of Labour power - deep Valleys country, mining tradition, union halls at every crossroads. But the once-solid bloc vote was beginning to crack. The...
  10. L

    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: People and planet over profit

    1989 was a packed year in British politics. As the Conservatives reeled from their three-way split on House of Lords reform, John Major acted swiftly to shore up his base of support. With gusto, at a press briefing the Tory leader threw his weight behind the government’s moves to expand civil...
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    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: "Stick to the deal"

    For months the Great Reform Bill had wound its way through Parliament. Hereditary peers were already gone. The bill’s final shape offered a hybrid second chamber: half of the new Lords to be elected by proportional representation, the other half appointed by a statutory independent commission to...
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    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Stormont

    Six years in office had given the Alliance plenty of time to realise first-hand that the quietest corner of the UK could become the loudest at any moment. Ministers’ desks were piled high with reports from Northern Ireland: sectarian reprisal, punishment beating, border ambush. The Anglo-Irish...
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    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Big picture

    After years of industrial decline, soaring unemployment and fierce arguments over Europe, neither the divided Conservatives nor Labour’s warring factions offered a hopeful alternative for moderate voters. Into this vacuum stepped the Alliance to chart a new way forward. Their pitch resonated...
  14. L

    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: Fair winds and following seas

    Inside Birmingham’s latest flagship infrastructure renewal project, Housing Secretary Roy Hattersley (SDP) stood with a group of regional planners, railway engineers and news reporters. “It’s not enough to talk about productivity,” he pointed out. “We need to lay bricks, pour concrete, dig...
  15. L

    Breaking the Mould Redux: A Wikibox Timeline
    Threadmarks: New towns

    Policymakers collaborated with the devolved governments, civil servants, police forces and local authorities to implement an amnesty, granting legal status to long-settled undocumented families. Home Secretary David Owen framed the move as “humane, economically sound and vital for restoring...
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