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AH Run-downs, summaries and general gubbins

The ?:
Malcolm MacDonald: The MacDonald family seem to harbour grudges and Malcolm, the handsome continuation of that grudge has put his foot through the door to reclaim his birthright so cruelly stolen by Clynes. But this MacDonald ain’t like his Dad. Coming back from the political wilderness (and a tour of the various other Labour Parties in the Anglo-sphere like New Zealand) he’s now preaching some odd mixture of Monetary reform and CoOperative values. MacDonald seems to be appealing to the...odder MPs as expected like Baldwin who’s running his campaign actually. No MacDonald won’t win but the support he’s won with such a small amount of time must be a cause of concern for folks like Morrison.
woop woop
 
Oswald Mosley: Right so Mosley is an oddball but his bizarre Keynesian style pitch of Social Democracy and Labour is appealing to folks on the Right who despise Morrison, folks on the Left who think that the Left needs to adapt to a changing world and the folks in the Centre who like lost lambs have joined Mosley’s campaign. Now all he has to do is not come across like a weirdo with authoritarian tendencies and...oh great he’s just done a speech about how Britain must establish itself again on the world stage but not waste her lives of her brave boys fighting more Wars. Yay?

 
woop woop
Nothing like Malcolm MacDonald, Social Credit/monetary reform believer. Also I think this is what would have likely happened if MacDonald entered politics without the guiding influence of his Dad, he would gained some other political philosophy along the way, probably one that contradicted the Fabian Socialism that was all the rage in the Labour Party that had ousted his Dad (Sidney Webb seemed to despise Social Credit so yeah).

I think that's Mosley's theme no matter what he does, in any timeline.
 
Herbert Morrison doesn't get a lot of love, but he had some interesting ideas and might in some ways have made a better PM than Attlee. He was drawn to nationalising the railways as separate enterprises rather than one monolith which would have made trialling new business models and benchmarking a lot more transparent and he had a more holistic regional approach to implementing a national health service which would have at least partly eliminated the gaps between health and social care at the institutional level.
 
Herbert Morrison doesn't get a lot of love, but he had some interesting ideas and might in some ways have made a better PM than Attlee. He was drawn to nationalising the railways as separate enterprises rather than one monolith which would have made trialling new business models and benchmarking a lot more transparent and he had a more holistic regional approach to implementing a national health service which would have at least partly eliminated the gaps between health and social care at the institutional level.
Herbert Morrison is an interesting in terms of ideas, particularly in the 1930s. Very much influenced by the Municipal Socialism of his LCC days and more Morrison's vision of Socialism is influenced partially by that and it's interesting...but, well just in the 30s he also seems to have caught the Corporatism/Managerial bug as well. So we have a Socialist who's also a bit technocratic and has an obsession with Managerialism too, in a Labour Party that supposedly believes in Worker Control.

He's very Webb/Fabian in his outlook really, which isn't bad but it ain't my cup of tea. Also Morrison was a bully and a dick, so good ideas or not, I won't be a big fan.
 
Herbert Morrison is an interesting in terms of ideas, particularly in the 1930s. Very much influenced by the Municipal Socialism of his LCC days and more Morrison's vision of Socialism is influenced partially by that and it's interesting...but, well just in the 30s he also seems to have caught the Corporatism/Managerial bug as well. So we have a Socialist who's also a bit technocratic and has an obsession with Managerialism too, in a Labour Party that supposedly believes in Worker Control.

He's very Webb/Fabian in his outlook really, which isn't bad but it ain't my cup of tea. Also Morrison was a bully and a dick, so good ideas or not, I won't be a big fan.
Oh, Attlee was a much more decent man, no question but his state capitalist nationalisation policy and centralising policies for the NHS haven't stood the test of time particularly well. In some ways Morrisonian policies might have actually worked slightly better and thus endured a bit longer, look at Sweden for instance.
 
Morrison pursued a compromised managerialism in public ownership, accepted massive cuts to welfare to fund foreign wars, literally wanted to build a ‘British African Army’, and organised the 1953 coup plot against Mossadegh (Eden just dusted off the documents from Morrison’s time in office). He was a petty imperialist with a vindictive streak who wanted councillors in control of everything because municipal leaders were his base and he controlled all the ones in London.
 
Ah yes, because our healthcare system has worked consistently brilliantly over the past few decades.
One of the major institutional problems of our healthcare system has been a lack of attention to preventative medicine and another has been a disconnect between health and social care. With all his faults (and undoubtedly any healthcare system would develop problems over time) Morrison's preferred approach was at least slightly more holistic than the one we took OTL, it might also have reduced the post 1945 erosion of civic pride and drift to centralisation of services.
Morrison pursued a compromised managerialism in public ownership, accepted massive cuts to welfare to fund foreign wars, literally wanted to build a ‘British African Army’, and organised the 1953 coup plot against Mossadegh (Eden just dusted off the documents from Morrison’s time in office). He was a petty imperialist with a vindictive streak who wanted councillors in control of everything because municipal leaders were his base and he controlled all the ones in London.
I did acknowledge that he wasn't a nice man but you will have seen my points above about the health service and indeed about local government generally. A British African Army sounds bad to our modern sensibilities but the UK didn't decolonise Africa until after Morrison had left politics. He stood down in 1955 OTL and African decolonisation took place 1957-1966 with the modal year 1960. Assuming Britain is going to maintain a military presence in Africa for the next twenty years, a British African Army is arguably a cheaper way of doing it than the more piecemeal arrangements of OTL and might just have butterflied away Idi Amin Dada and some of the more unpleasant Nigerian generals of the 1960s and 1970s.
Arranging a coup against Mossadeqh? Not very nice behaviour but rather typical of the time period. Leaving aside the USSR land grabbing and sponsoring Communist coups in Eastern Europe, we have the USA in Central and South America, France in Indochina (and later France in the French African Community- Bob Denard was of course a mercenary with no connection to the government of the Republic. None whatsoever. Absolutely none). And even OTL Attlee's determination to get out of India quickly and to screw over Pakistan to India's advantage cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Not to mention the SIS with the acquiescence of Ernie Bevan sabotaging shiploads of Jewish refugees heading for Palestine.
Something of a bully, yes potentially damaging. In my view Labour is still recovering from Gordon Brown's intolerance of opposition.
Acceptance of welfare cuts, not good but Morrison was also less economically naive than the majority of his Cabinet colleagues who thought that, after an initial surge, spending on the NHS and welfare system would start to fall.
Morrison interests me because his municipal model is a departure from the standard approach of state capitalism and would have marshalled the significant state intervention in the economy, health and welfare systems rather differently to OTL. Bevin, Bevan, Cripps or Greenwood would have essentially followed the Attlee model to a greater or lesser degree. You need to go to Morrison (municipal socialism) or A V Alexander (co-operatives and beginnings of industrial democracy) if you want to actually see a significantly different model of socialism to OTL.
 
Ooh now, your taking shots at my boy Bevan and that won’t do.

Joking aside, Bevan was actually genuinely interested in the economic models of Yugoslavia in particular the whole ‘Workers Ownership’ model it tried to implement (but hit the brick wall of being constructed in a dictatorship). So Bevan wasn’t just a mindless Central Planning Marxist and in a lot of ways was more pragmatic than even Morrison was. Yes he did have his moments but so did everyone in the Labour Cabinet from 45-51.
I have to wonder if Morrison isn't the British Nixon.
You know that ain’t too bad a comparison, you even have the whole being a bigot thing too. I think we haven’t mentioned Morrison’s racism enough, like he was a man who worried about African American G.I.s having mixed race children and seemed to have racist streak to him it seems.

If he were Prime Minister as the Windrush Generation appeared things would be pretty disastrous.
 
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Speaking of which, I’m really getting reminded here of the way people often talk about Nixon elected in 1960 on the other site: “Nixon elected in 1960 wouldn’t be a crook at all, oh and he’d overthrow Castro easily and do civil rights easier”.
That's what woke the thought in me, yes. And really, never mind Nixon elected in 1960, half of them seem convinced he'd have solved all America's problems had he not been turfed out of office in 1974.
 
Speaking of which, I’m really getting reminded here of the way people often talk about Nixon elected in 1960 on the other site: “Nixon elected in 1960 wouldn’t be a crook at all, oh and he’d overthrow Castro easily and do civil rights easier”.

Still not as bad as the "George Wallace was secretly a beautiful progressive" phenomenon
 
Speaking of which, I’m really getting reminded here of the way people often talk about Nixon elected in 1960 on the other site: “Nixon elected in 1960 wouldn’t be a crook at all, oh and he’d overthrow Castro easily and do civil rights easier”.

MLK literally called Nixon a coward in 1960 but I'll guess he'll make African-Americans all vote Republican
 
Speaking of which, I’m really getting reminded here of the way people often talk about Nixon elected in 1960 on the other site: “Nixon elected in 1960 wouldn’t be a crook at all, oh and he’d overthrow Castro easily and do civil rights easier”.
That's what woke the thought in me, yes. And really, never mind Nixon elected in 1960, half of them seem convinced he'd have solved all America's problems had he not been turfed out of office in 1974.
MLK literally called Nixon a coward in 1960 but I'll guess he'll make African-Americans all vote Republican

It's mainly just contrarianism. "Do you think that Nixon was a bad person because of Watergate? Well you're WRONG! Based on my wikipedia research, one can see his support for Civil Rights, and this will be the basis of my new TL".
 
Smallest brain: the Democrats and Republicans have always had their same ideologies since time immemorial
Slightly less small brain: the Democrats and Republicans switched in 1964!
Bigger brain: the ideological relationship between the Democrats and Republicans has always been the result of complex economic trends, compromises, patronage, and political alliances of convenience, see if you look at this chart of the urbanization rate of the South---
Galaxy brain: shut up nerd, try writing a TL about something other than elections or wars for once
 
MLK literally called Nixon a coward in 1960 but I'll guess he'll make African-Americans all vote Republican
I just remembered that AM radio talk show I heard in rural Colorado which argued that Kanye West would lead a mass exodus of African-American voters back into the fold of the Party of Lincoln. It’s also the only place I’ve ever heard seriously talk about Spygate other than Donald Trump himself.

I have to assume it’s an open question whether either host had ever talked to a black person.
 
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