RobinCarmody
Active member
In 2007 Neil Clark - most of whose opinions I strongly disagree with, btw - was commissioned by the Guardian (actually, probably his mate Seumas Milne) to write one of the perennial "if there had been a 1978 election" pieces when it looked like Gordon Brown would call the first election off the spring/early summer cycle since October 1974 (which kept going through my mind first when the snap election in 2017 was called, and then when we *did* have an election off that cycle very recently). He ended with the following words: "it's a sobering thought that had Jim Callaghan simply done what everyone expected him to do on that September day 29 years ago, 'Thatcherism' is a word the world would never have heard of". We could, I think, say something similar about the word "Brexit" now in the context of the 2007 counterfactual which has become its latterday equivalent.
One PoD that keeps playing on my mind is the fact that, in the summer of 2007, the Lib Dems almost won Bromley in a by-election, with its usual victors the Conservatives only just scraping home. Bromley, I should explain, is a solidly Conservative suburban area which is officially in Greater London since 1965 but remains spiritually in Kent, right down to its selective education system. Its council has been Tory-controlled in all but one election (High Blair 1998, when I believe the Tories were still the largest party but didn't have overall control) since it became a London borough, it brought the case that saw an end to Ken Livingstone's cheap bus fares policy in the early 1980s, and seemingly did quite a lot of pushing for the abolition of the GLC. Most symbolically of all, it was Harold Macmillan's seat when he was PM, so embodies the One Nation myth, the Land of Lost Content. For this historic reason its loss would have been bigger, especially after the Conservatives had been out of power for a decade, than many of the similar seats which had fallen earlier (and in some cases - Wimbledon going back from Labour to the Tories in 2005, Guildford likewise from the Lib Dems - already had been won back under Michael Howard's leadership). It would have had huge power to be used against the fraudulent arguments we're so used to now from the New Etonians that they are in the true One Nation tradition. In all likelihood, the Lib Dems *would* have won it had some of the constituency's disheartened Labour minority not been feeling relatively optimistic about Blair finally going and someone perceived as more in the party's tradition replacing him.
So if Bromley had fallen, would that have been the catalyst that pushed Gordon Brown into going all out for an autumn 2007 election, that convinced him that Cameron was weak and there for the taking? (Note also that an MP defected from the Tories to Labour that summer; I cannot now recall his name, and that was in OTL.) I think it is overwhelmingly likely. And then what? The main problem with the idea of such a government responding to the changed economic climate post-2008 is, of course, what Brown previously had been associated with and still was linked with in the public mind (not to mention that he is said to have talked Blair into leaving rail privatisation essentially untouched). But if he had been able to recover something deeper in his soul ...
One PoD that keeps playing on my mind is the fact that, in the summer of 2007, the Lib Dems almost won Bromley in a by-election, with its usual victors the Conservatives only just scraping home. Bromley, I should explain, is a solidly Conservative suburban area which is officially in Greater London since 1965 but remains spiritually in Kent, right down to its selective education system. Its council has been Tory-controlled in all but one election (High Blair 1998, when I believe the Tories were still the largest party but didn't have overall control) since it became a London borough, it brought the case that saw an end to Ken Livingstone's cheap bus fares policy in the early 1980s, and seemingly did quite a lot of pushing for the abolition of the GLC. Most symbolically of all, it was Harold Macmillan's seat when he was PM, so embodies the One Nation myth, the Land of Lost Content. For this historic reason its loss would have been bigger, especially after the Conservatives had been out of power for a decade, than many of the similar seats which had fallen earlier (and in some cases - Wimbledon going back from Labour to the Tories in 2005, Guildford likewise from the Lib Dems - already had been won back under Michael Howard's leadership). It would have had huge power to be used against the fraudulent arguments we're so used to now from the New Etonians that they are in the true One Nation tradition. In all likelihood, the Lib Dems *would* have won it had some of the constituency's disheartened Labour minority not been feeling relatively optimistic about Blair finally going and someone perceived as more in the party's tradition replacing him.
So if Bromley had fallen, would that have been the catalyst that pushed Gordon Brown into going all out for an autumn 2007 election, that convinced him that Cameron was weak and there for the taking? (Note also that an MP defected from the Tories to Labour that summer; I cannot now recall his name, and that was in OTL.) I think it is overwhelmingly likely. And then what? The main problem with the idea of such a government responding to the changed economic climate post-2008 is, of course, what Brown previously had been associated with and still was linked with in the public mind (not to mention that he is said to have talked Blair into leaving rail privatisation essentially untouched). But if he had been able to recover something deeper in his soul ...