The Entire History Of The United Kingdom - A History Thread

Part 13: The Edwardian Era

In 1859, The Whig Party, The Radical Party, and the Peelites united: they formed The Liberal Party. It was the Conservative Party that dominated the next few decades, however: in 1874, they were returned to government under Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, the first and only Prime Minister to be of Jewish descent. The modern day Conservative Party operates a 'broad church', essentially functioning with multiple parties within it, and 'One Nation Conservatism' is one of them - Disraeli was the father of it.

The Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act was passed under the first year of his government, granting loans to British towns and cities to construct nicer housing for the working class. His Public Health Act was also passed that year, alongside the Protection of Property Act (legalised picketing) and the Employers And Workmen Act, allowing workers to sue their employers.

In regards to foreign policy, Disraeli jumped at the chance to purchase Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal when Egypt went bankrupt. On top of that, he purchased France's shares using a loan from the Liberal Party's Nathan Rothschild, a Jewish banker, rather than the Bank of England. He passed the Royal Titles Act in 1876, crowning Queen Victoria as the 'Empress of India' and put British India under the direct control of the British government as a colony.

Disraeli resigned as Prime Minister after losing the 1880 election. William Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal Party, was re-elected Prime Minister. He was referred to by the people as 'Grand Old Man', but Disraeli mocked that and called him 'God's Only Mistake'. Gladstone revolutionised political campaigning during the election by delivering speeches across the country to crowds of people, the first time someone had done such a thing. He passed the Third Reform Act in 1884, which made it so that constituencies could only elect one Member of Parliament. He attempted to push for Irish Home Rule in 1886, but the House of Commons rejected the motion. He would eventually pass it through in 1892, but the House of Lords rejected it. He resigned in 1895 and died in 1898. The issue of Irish Home Rule split the Liberal Party in half.

Home Rule was a movement within Ireland that advocated for Irish self-government within the United Kingdom. It had a political party called the Irish Parliamentary Party that was founded in 1882. It was the dominant party in Ireland until 1916.

Another movement was taking hold across the United Kingdom, particularly in Wales, Northern England, and Scotland. In 1884, the Fabian Society had been founded in London. It advocated the renewal of Renaissance ideas and the spread of socialism through democracy rather than revolution. Early members included H.G Wells, Ramsay MacDonald, Beatrice Webb, Bertrand Russell, and George Bernard Shaw. In 1900, it was this group that brought most of the socialist parties in the country, all of the trade unions, and united into a new party: the Labour Party.

The Labour Party combated their first election in the year 1900. Their total campaign expenses were just £33. They fielded fifteen prospective Members of Parliament, but only two won a seat: Keir Hardie became the MP for the Welsh constituency of Merthyr Tydfil, and Richard Bell became the MP for the English constituency of Derby. In 1901, the Taff Vale Case effectively outlawed strikes and the trade union representing some railway workers was ordered to pay £23,000. The Conservative Party supported the case's judgement, angering the Labour Party and the Liberal Party. In 1903, the Labour Party and the Liberal Party formed an electoral alliance that agreed the Labour Party could field candidates in a select few constituencies, so the Liberal Party's vote wouldn't be split. At the 1906 election, the Labour Party gained twenty-eight MPs and the Liberal Party entered government. The 1910 election only saw the Labour Party grow: they were boosted to forty-two MPs. During the First World War, Arthur Henderson became the first Labour MP to serve in a cabinet position, being accepted into H.H. Asquith's wartime cabinet.

The issue of Irish Home Rule was bubbling, meanwhile. The third Home Rule Bill was presented to the House of Commons in 1912. Northern Irish Protestants were angry that the thought was even being entertained, and founded the Ulster Volunteer Force, a terrorist organisation - they claimed that in the event an independent Irish Parliament was formed, they would use physical force to attack those who obey its authority and the Parliament itself. The Catholic Irish responded by setting up the Irish Volunteer Force that aimed to 'secure the rights and liberties of the people of Ireland'. The German Empire started sending both forces ammunition and weapons. When the Irish town of Curragh was set to be given its own government, the Ulster Volunteer Force attacked the town. The British Army shrugged its shoulders and the soldiers stationed there resigned from the Army. The Irish were, understandably, furious and questioned if Home Rule was a good enough measure when they couldn't count on their army to protect them. The implementation of Home Rule was delayed when the government turned its attention to World War I.

In April 2016, during Easter Week, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Irish Volunteer Force, the Irish Citizen Army, and the Cumann na mBan - a women's terrorist/paramilitary organisation - rose up in rebellion in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The British Army responded by bombarding Dublin to rubble with artillery and killed 485 people, arrested 3,000 people (most of them were innocent), executed their leaders, and placed the entirety of Ireland under martial law. For the past century the concept of Home Rule had been the popular way forward for Ireland: now they were absolutely convinced they needed independence. Sinn Fein won seventy-three Irish seats in the 1918 election - they didn't take them and declared independence, founding the Republic of Ireland. This was the Irish War of Independence.

Part 14: Irish Independence: 1918 - 1923

The First Dail (the I is accented, sorry, I can't do that character on my keyboard) met on January 21st, 1919. During this meeting they reissued the 1916 Irish Declaration of Independence, renamed the Irish Volunteer Force to the 'Irish Republican Army' (IRA for short), and announced that there was now a 'state of war between Ireland and England'. The same day, the IRA attacked Royal Irish Constabulary (the British-controlled police) officers who were escorting explosives. They planned to kill six of them but only two were actually there - the attackers went on to say that their only regret was that there were only two officers.

In response, the British government declared Limerick and the surrounding area, where the attack had been carried out, a 'Special Military Area'. The workers in Limerick went on strike in response - at one point, a special committee took control of the city for two weeks and set up the 'Soviet of Limerick'. Dock workers in Dublin refused to accept British goods and weapons, ammunition, and more. Irish train drivers refused to transport British troops. The IRA carried out raids for British arms and to steal British money. As well as this, they assassinated prominent members of the British administration. Irish shopkeepers began to refuse to sell Royal Irish Constabulary officers food, their recruitment levels dropped, and it was hit with a mass wave of resignations. Some officers even began to collaborate with the IRA. The IRA began to seize the RIC's barracks and burned them to the last speck of ash - the RIC was forced to retreat to urbanised areas, leaving rural Ireland in the control of the IRA.

In September 1919, the IRA killed a British Army officer. The British Army retaliated by, just a day later, sending two-hundred soldiers into the town of Fermoy and burning its main businesses to the ground. By the end of 1919, British forces had carried out almost 39,000 raids on people's homes, arrested nearly 5,000 people, assaulted almost 2,000 people, shot up and burned 102 towns, and murdered 77 people - including children. In March 1920, the British government ordered that the Mayor of Cork be assassinated - RIC members, with their faces painted black, shot him to death in front of his wife. These men were members of the 'Black And Tan' paramilitary force - ex-soldiers who had fought in World War I. The new Mayor of Cork was imprisoned in London and went on hunger strike - he starved to death in October; two IRA members who were imprisoned Cork did the exact same. The IRA killed fourteen people and wounded a further five in an attempt to kill British soldiers and police officers - civilians were caught in the crossfire.

The Royal Irish Constabulary responded with an action infinitely worse. They drove trucks to a football match and started shooting into the crowd. Fourteen civilians were shot dead - including one of the football players - and sixty-five were wounded. They then tortured two republicans and their friend - who was just a normal guy trying to get on with his life and was implicated - to death. This was Bloody Sunday.

The British government then placed the majority of Ireland under martial law. By January the British government was ordering their soldiers to burn people's houses down (previously the soldiers were doing it 'just because'). The Black and Tans set Cork's city centre on fire and then shot the firefighters who responded to it. The British executed twenty-four men by the end of February. The IRA started ambushing British Army patrols and trains. The British marched into Dublin and burned the city centre, killed five IRA members, and arrested over eighty of them. Running out of ammunition and weapons and just weeks away from surrender, they decided that they would take the war to England. Somehow they ended up attacking people in Scotland.

The British agreed to negotiate a truce. They didn't know the Republic of Ireland was so close to surrender and thought that the war would drag on forever. On top of that, the war had splashed international egg all over the United Kingdom's face for its horrific atrocities inflicted upon the people of Ireland, and the people at home really didn't like it either, especially those in Liverpool, who were now more Irish than English. King George V personally opposed the measures the Army was taking and the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, didn't exactly approve either. Lloyd George recognised Eamon de Valera, the elected leader of the Dail, as the leader of Southern Ireland. They all met at a conference with Jan Smuts, the South African Prime Minister. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on December 6th, 1921: it kept Northern Ireland (drawn based on pro-UK and pro-Irish majorities in different areas) in the United Kingdom's border and established the Irish Free State - a country free from the United Kingdom's direct rule, but still a part of the British Empire. Many in the Irish Republican Army did not accept this, however. They accused the Irish Free State of being a British satellite state and claimed that the IRA had been betrayed. Eventually the IRA violently took control of several buildings in Dublin, including the Four Courts, Ireland's main court building, and wanted the British to come and fight them. The Irish Free State made the decision to attack the IRA.

Civil war broke out all across the Free State. The cities of Cork, Limerick, and Waterford were held by the IRA as the Munster Republic. The Free State held all the large towns all across the country. They reclaimed Limerick and Waterford on July 20th, 1922, and Cork on August 10th. The IRA was forced to fight a guerrilla war again. They managed to kill the Free State's Commander-in-Chief, Michael Collins, in an ambush near his house. The Free State was enraged and so started killing IRA members quite brutally through prisoner executions and enacting revenge attacks. By late 1923, the IRA had been reduced to bombing roads and railways, burning Free State senator homes, and attacking the English aristocrats who lived on the island. A ceasefire was negotiated on May 24th, 1923. The Free State's first election was held on August 27th, 1923, and the pro-Free State party won.

The IRA was never truly defeated, however. More on that later. It also didn't stop the violence between the IRA and the Free State forever. But this is how the Irish Free State became independent, although still a part of the British Empire. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland rebranded itself to 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' and Parliament shrunk with the dismissal of the Irish seats.

Part 15: Post-Great War Great Britain

By the time the First World War was over, the value of the British Pound had fallen by 61%. It had become the world's biggest debtor, after being the world's biggest overseas investor, in 1918. Many countries had been cut out of the British market entirely and built up their own industries, becoming independent from British trade and becoming competitors. 3.1 million British soldiers had been killed or badly injured. Despite the British Empire now being at its territorial peak, the colonies knew that the United Kingdom couldn't afford to keep them for much longer and were now weak.

It wasn't all doom and gloom. The wartime government under the Liberal Party Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, passed the Representation of the People Act on February 6th, 1918. This extended the voting franchise to all men aged twenty-one and over, and to wealthy women aged thirty and over. It institutionalised the first-past-the-past method of voting, where the highest-voted for candidate in a constituency becomes the MP, rather than proportional representation where, if a party got 20% of the vote, it gets 20% of parliament's seats. The amount of people able to vote was increased from 5.2 million to 21.4 million (7 million more men, 8 million women).

The first election with this law in place was held on December 14th, 1918. The Liberal Party had split, with H.H Asquith leading the Liberal Party and David Lloyd George, the incumbent Prime Minister, running on a Conservative-Liberal ticket. The Conservative Party had fourteen million votes and 382 seats (winning 111 seats), the Coalition Liberals under David Lloyd George had one million votes and 127 seats, Sinn Fein won 73 seats (we know how that turned out), the Labour Party had two million votes and 57 seats (winning 15), and the Liberal Party had one million votes and just 36 seats (lost 236). David Lloyd George continued on as Prime Minister, having led the coalition to win an overwhelming majority, on a promise to 'build a home fit for heroes'.

Lloyd George passed the Education Act 1918, raising the school-leaving age to fourteen and increasing the powers of the Board of Education. He passed the Housing and Town Planning Act in 1919, which began the construction of state-owned housing - 500,000 new homes were planned to be built, but only 200,000 were. The Blind Persons Act was passed in 1920, providing monetary assistance to the blind. The same year he passed the Rent Act, which attempted to implement rent controls, but it failed horrendously. He extended the policy of national insurance to include 11 million workers, granting them all monetary aid. On top of that, he set up the Ministry of Health.

Lloyd George's government did not complete its full term. The Conservative Party was angered by Lloyd George accepting the Irish Free State's demands, and did not want him to give the British Raj (India) more limited independence. 1921 also saw the onset worst recession the United Kingdom has ever experienced and a wave of strikes by trade unions swept across the nation. The final nail in the coffin was the revelation that Lloyd George had been awarding wealthy people with lordship titles in exchange for cash that he attempted to hide. On October 19th, 1922, the Conservative Party voted to end their coalition with Lloyd George's liberals.

The ensuing election was held on November 15th, 1922. The Conservative Party remained the largest party, although they lost seats - they held 334 (lost 38) and five million people in the popular vote. The Labour Party grew to become the second largest party/the official opposition - they had four million people voting for them and won 142 seats (gaining 85). The Liberal Party continued its fall from grace, winning only 62 seats (gaining 26). Lloyd George's Liberal Coalition stumbled fourth across the finish line with just 53 seats (losing 74). The two liberal parties reunited in an effort to regain their previous glory, together having two million people in the popular vote and only 115 seats.

British politics was now irreversibly changed.

Part 16: The Depression

Bonar Law, a man born in Canada, became the Prime Minister after the 1922 election. However, soon afterwards he was diagnosed with throat cancer and resigned on May 20th, 1923. He was succeeded by his Chancellor, Stanley Baldwin, as Conservative Party leader and as the Prime Minister. Baldwin called an election which was held on December 6th, 1923. The Conservative Party lost 86 seats (reduced to 258 in total), the Labour Party gained 49 (increased to 191 in total), and the Liberal Party gained 43 (increased to 158). Baldwin resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Ramsay MacDonald - the Labour Party's leader and one of its founding members - who formed the first Labour government, and went into coalition with the Liberal Party.

This coalition completely collapsed in months, having done nothing more than increase worker's benefits. An election was called and was held on October 29th, 1924: the Conservative Party gained 154 seats (increased to 258 in total), the Labour Party lost 40 seats (declined to 191 seats in total), and the Liberal Party completely and utterly collapsed - they lost 118 seats and were reduced to just 40 seats in Parliament. Stanley Baldwin became the Prime Minister again.

During this term, Baldwin established the Central Electricity Board, which enforced the standardisation of the country's electricity supply - basically, it created the national grid. His Chancellor, the deeply-unpopular Winston Churchill, reintroduced the gold standard in 1925, which increased the price of British imports and skyrocketed interest rates. Protectionism was unsustainable, a fact that the British government did not recognise - it had mined all of its coal and was importing more coal than it was producing, and importing was now more expensive thanks to the gold standard. The recession turned into a depression and unemployment and poverty increased to higher levels than they were at before. Two million people were unemployed, and in the North of England and Wales, 70% of the working population had no jobs.

The people were incredibly angry. On May 1st, 1926, 1.2 million coal miners were locked out of their mines after their employers demanded that they work longer hours for less pay and the miners refused. By May 3rd, the Trade Union Congress (TUC) had called on workers all across the country to go on strike. Rail and dock workers, bus drivers, and people in the electricity, gas, and chemical industries went on strike. On the first day, 1.7 million people didn't go to work. Roads were clogged with traffic jams because public transport was utterly crippled, and the Army was called in to transport food. The police charged into crowds of strikers and beat them with their batons. The strikers derailed a train. The government sent a warship to the city of Newcastle to intimidate them. Winston Churchill, who was the editor of the government's newspaper, called the strike a sin, and Stanley Baldwin appealed to the nation on the radio and pleaded for volunteers and for the strikers to stop. The strike ended on May 12th, achieving nothing besides convincing Baldwin he had to outlaw mass picketing.

The second Baldwin government didn't do anything significant after this event, besides put women's voting rights on equal parity with men (all women aged 21+). The next election ran as scheduled on May 30th, 1929. The voters punished the Conservative Party considerably: the Conservative Party lost 152 seats (reduced to 260 seats in total), the Labour Party gained 136 seats (increased to 287 seats in total), and the Liberal Party gained 19 seats (increased to 59). Ramsay MacDonald was once again named Prime Minister.

MacDonald raised unemployment pay. He improved wages. He enforced the improvement of conditions in the coal mines. He ordered slum clearances. But then... the stock market crashed. His Chancellor refused to implement deficit spending to stimulate the economy, despite the economist John Milton Keynes, former Prime Minister and current Liberal Party leader David Lloyd George, and a Labour MP called Oswald Mosley urging him to.

Mosley went on to leave the Labour Party in 1931, formed the 'New Party', and converted to fascism. MacDonald himself resigned from the Labour Party after the party turned on him due to his failures, and he became the Prime Minister of a national government consisting of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. This government ended free trade and implemented a policy of protectionism. Military spending was cut. The emergence of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany rightly threatened him and he held conferences with the leaders of both nations. He was forced to manage two parties who didn't like working together, his old party hated him despite his belief he was still part of them, there was no way out of the depression, and his every move regarding the Fascist countries was criticised heavily as either too much or not enough. His mental and physical health deteriorated so badly that his speeches became incoherent ramblings that nobody could even understand the meaning of, and he began to suffer from severe memory loss.

MacDonald resigned as Prime Minister on June 7th, 1935. Baldwin took over again. The 1935 election saw him lose his Parliamentary seat to Labour MP Emanuel Shinwell. King George V died on January 26th, 1936 - he was MacDonald's best and only friend. MacDonald's health began to rapidly deteriorate even further after this, and he passed away at the age of 71 aboard a passenger ship, with his daughter by his side, on November 9th, 1937.

Part 17: Before The Storm And After

The death of King George V blew open a casket of crisis. King Edward VIII came to the throne. Edward did not really want to tow the line that monarchs had since the Glorious Revolution, which alarmed Parliament. Just a few months into his reign, he created a constitutional crisis by expressing his desire to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite who had been divorced twice. Stanley Baldwin told Edward that such a woman was not fit to be the country's Queen, and the Church of England, which Edward was now the head of, did not approve of remarriage unless the other spouse had died. Baldwin threatened to resign and call an election, which would have meant the monarch was not politically neutral anymore. Edward instead decided to abdicate in favour of his brother, Prince George, on December 11th, 1936.

Baldwin's final act as Prime Minister was to raise the MP's wage from £400 to £600, and give the Leader of the Opposition a salary. He resigned as Prime Minister on May 27th, 1937, being knighted and made the Earl of Bewdley. He was succeeded by Conservative MP Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain had no time for domestic issues: he pursued Baldwin's policy of appeasement, however he was also gradually raising military spending at a level the budget could support. He declared war on Hitler's Germany in September 1939, sent Edward and Wallis away to the Bahamas because they were Nazi sympathisers and personal friends of Hitler, oversaw several war mistakes, resigned and appointed Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. Churchill formed a coalition government with the Labour Party, and appointed Clement Attlee, its leader, into the new office of Deputy Prime Minister - this office held the exact same powers as the Prime Minister office did. Attlee took care of domestic issues, while Churchill took care of foreign policy and kept morale in the nation up.

The second world war, which I've already done a thread on so will not go into here, dominated everything until 1945. The most significant thing to happen was William Beveridge, a Liberal Party MP, publishing the Beveridge Report in 1942. It called for a fully fledged welfare state to eradicate poverty, disease, and more. It was overwhelmingly popular with the public.

When Germany was defeated, Clement Attlee refused to continue the Conservative-Labour coalition. Churchill called an election - the first in ten years - on June 15th, 1945. Labour campaigned on a promise to establish a 'Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain': a 'free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited' country, that had undergone 'a great programme of modernisation and re-equipment of its homes, its factories, machinery, its schools, its social services'. The Conservative Party, under the leadership of Winston Churchill, and the Liberal Party, under the leadership of Archibald Sinclair, promised similar platforms: however, the Conservative Party made several campaign blunders, focused too much on Winston Churchill's wartime successes, and totally refused to even entertain the fact that the British Empire had to go; on top of that, Churchill got very aggressive to Attlee, despite Attlee treating Churchill with respect. The Liberal Party were seen as an electorally dead movement and their welfare reforms were seen as half-measures.

The election was held on July 5th, 1945. The Labour Party gained 239 seats (winning 393 in total). The Conservative Party lost 189 seats (won 197 in total). The Liberal Party lost 9 seats (won 12 in total). Attlee took the bus to Buckingham Palace and was appointed Prime Minister by King George VI - the two quickly became good friends. The first Labour Party majority government would change the United Kingdom forever.

Part 18: Attlee

It took a few years for things to properly get into swing. The Bank of England, the United Kingdom's central bank, was nationalised in 1946. This allowed the government to enforce low interest rates to deal with inflation. Civil aviation was was nationalised alongside, quickly followed up by the coal mining industry, rail, canals, telecommunications, electricity, and gas in 1947. Workers in these industries were subject to the growth of their wages, a higher standard of workplace safety, and shorter working hours. The railways, however, were not good for consumers: trains were still running on coal rather than electricity, and Attlee did not wish to have to use oil instead of coal and thus destroy the coal industry, at the cost of higher prices for the consumers.

1946 brought a terrible winter upon Great Britain. The coal mines froze over, the railways and roads were blocked by snow, and electricity usage was rationed. Factories closed and over four million people claimed unemployment benefits, cereal and potato harvest was fell by 20% from the previous year, and a large number of sheep froze to death and one quarter of the sheep in the country died. Emanuel Shinwell, the Minister of Fuel and Power, became a scapegoat despite, you know, not controlling weather patterns - and was sacked from his position and had to be accompanied by police, as he was subject to death threats from the public.

The United Kingdom was now even more reliant on food rationing. Rationing that was in place during the Second World War actually got worse during the first years of peace. Domestic harvests were down due to the harsh winter and global imports were expensive and hard to get, especially since the global economy wasn't actually linked together as it is today yet. The problem of food was not unique to the UK, however - to the West, the United States was suffering a shortage of bread despite being labelled as the 'land of milk and honey' and for the exact same reasons the UK was.

The National Health Service's creation was plagued with problems. The National Health Service Act 1946 was finally passed on November 6th, 1946 - the Conservative Party had voted against it twenty-one times before it finally went through. They claimed universal healthcare was an idea formed in the mind of Adolf Hitler himself, and was the first step to turning the United Kingdom into a communist state. Furthermore, the doctors themselves heavily opposed it, believing that local councils rather than the government should control healthcare. Nevertheless, London County Council, the country's biggest council, gave control of their hospitals to the government with no protest, causing the rest of the councils all across the country to give theirs up too.

The NHS came into existence on July 5th, 1948. The Conservative Party's number one fear was that the service would be abused so the poor could get jewels put into their teeth and fake illnesses so they could get addictive prescription drugs. Spending on the NHS overshot the agreed budget in its first year, prompting many in the Conservative Party to claim they were right all along. The Minister of Health and mastermind behind the NHS, Aneurin Bevan, said that this was actually because the poor's health had been neglected for so long that they needed so much care now it was beyond what the government could have possibly imagined. Attlee's Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, made it so that people had to pay for spectacles and the dentist - Bevan resigned from his position, arguing that there should be a higher rate of National Insurance instead, and that anything else was a betrayal of the 'universal' part of 'universal healthcare'.

Deaths from diseases like tuberculosis rapidly declined in the following years. Doctors and nurses were paid more than ever. And the rush for healthcare died down by 1951, proving that Bevan was right - the working class were simply riddled with health problems because they couldn't get healthcare before. The National Health Service became sacred in the collective national consciousness of the United Kingdom, and any party that dared to touch it and not improve it would forever more be public enemies.

By the the next election, 20% of the British economy was nationalised - public services were affordable for the people and the railways completely recovered from German bombing. Unemployment was at a record low of 2%. Living standards improved by 40%. Output per person was increasing faster than it was in the United States. The British economy was the fastest growing economy in Europe.

On the matter of Europe... Prime Minister Clement Attlee was completely opposed to European integration. Many Labour Party ministers believed it to be a capitalist conspiracy. As such, the United Kingdom declined to join the European Coal and Steel Community, and as a result it suffered intensely from shortages of these resources. On top of that, many Labour Party MPs - the most prominent being Michael Foot - were enraged by Attlee helping to found NATO with the United States and accepting aid from the Marshall Plan, and criticised him heavily, demanding that he be neutral and play to both the Soviet Union and the United States.

The 1950 election was bad for Labour. An aging and infighting cabinet cost them 78 seats (total being 315). The Conservative Party gained 90 (total being 298). The Liberal Party continued its slow death and lost 3 seats (total becoming 9).

The government under Labour won, but it couldn't do anything. At the behest of the King, Attlee called a snap general election in 1951 - big mistake. The Conservative Party knew how to play the First Past The Post system - despite the Labour Party winning the biggest share of the popular vote ever recorded, they lost. The Conservative Party gained 23 seats (total now being 321), the Labour Party lost 20 seats (total now being 295), and the Liberal Party lost 3 more seats (total now being 6).

The Conservative government only rolled back Attlee's nationalisations, however. They didn't touch the NHS or council housing, or his changes to council houses, or the welfare state in general. This party loathed the idea of a welfare state just a few years before, and now they advocated it. And they would for the next forty years.

Part 19: Churchill

After World War II, the United Kingdom was in need of fresh blood for its workforce. All subjects of the British Empire were granted British citizenship in 1948, and that same year the Windrush, a seized German ship, brought 1,000 Jamaican passengers to England. By 1950, there were 20,000 people of African descent, mostly from the Caribbean, living across England.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill vowed to 'keep England white' and put a stop to this 'problem'. His cabinet, however, did not listen to him on this issue, much to his chagrin. He was instead forced to focus on the construction of council housing, ordering that their construction be sped up and a new target of 300,000 new houses per year be built. By 1954, he had also managed to end rationing after almost two decades of it. That's about all he did, domestically.

Churchill, as ever, was more interested in foreign policy and the maintenance of the British Empire. In 1952, the Mau Mau Rebellion erupted: the natives of the country rose up against the British. Churchill responded by deploying troops into Kenya. The Mau Mau Rebellion struggled as they were completely and utterly divided, thanks to the British policy of 'divide and rule' - sow division between native groups and then come in and rule over them while they're too busy fighting eachother. Suppressing the rebellion cost 12,000-20,000 lives, and £55 million, between 1952-1960.

Churchill wished to keep Anglo-American relations at an all-time high, and paid a visit to the United States and President Truman in January 1952. Truman wished to rearm West Germany in defiance of the Soviet threat and help the European countries form a European Defence Community - Churchill laughed at the idea and then asked for help in supporting the British colonies in the Middle East, and keeping an iron fist over Egypt. Truman basically told him to go away. Egypt rose up in rebellion in June 1952.

In February 1952, King George VI, the Emperor of India and Head of the Commonwealth, passed away. Queen Elizabeth II, twenty-five years old, succeeded to the throne and was crowned as the Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in May 1953, in the first televised coronation ever.

A month later, on 23rd June, Churchill suffered a stroke after he ate dinner - Tuesday night. On Wednesday afternoon, despite being completely paralysed in one half of his body, he attended a cabinet meeting. On Thursday, he was in such bad condition it was thought he would be dead by Sunday night. News of this was kept away from the public and Parliament, and Churchill was sent to his country home to recover. By 31st June, he had made a good recovery. A few days later, he said that the Soviets were right to violently respond to one million striking workers in East Germany. He then retired from public life but remained Prime Minister.

He made a return in October 1953, wishing to meet with the leaders of the Soviet Union. They were not as receptive as he would have liked. On top of that, his Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden, who wanted the Prime Ministerial position, had become a major figure on the world stage by negotiating a peace between France and Vietnam, compromising with Egypt, and helping the countries of Western Europe form an agreement after France refused to form the European Defence Community. He was a suitable successor. Churchill conceded that he was slowly dying in 1955 and resigned, naming Eden as his successor.

Part 20: Suez

While he was foreign minister, Anthony Eden and the United States negotiated with President Nasser of Egypt, and pledged $250 million to the construction of the Aswan Dam, a dam at the base of the River Nile, in exchange for Nasser resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nasser wished to modernise the Egyptian army to a standard that would allow Egypt to defend itself against Israel, after Israel attacked Egyptian forces in Gaza, but the United States refused. The Soviet Union, however, jumped at the chance, and in 1955 a Soviet-Egyptian arms deal was announced. The US and UK pledged to support the construction of the dam with a grant of $70 million.

The offer was quickly pulled after Egypt recognised the People's Republic of China diplomatically. As well, Turkey and Iraq were angry that Egypt was being offered so much money while they got relatively little. In June 1956, the Soviet Union swooped in with a loan of $1.2 billion. A month later, with the blessing of the Soviets, Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal and said that the revenues generated from it would pay back the loan.

The Suez Canal was responsible for the import of two-thirds of Western Europe's oil, and 15,000 ships passed through it each year - 5,000 of them were British. Anthony Eden, who was Prime Minister for barely a year at the time, demanded that the Canal be given back to the United Kingdom to secure Europe's supply of oil. Egypt refused.

Eden was infuriated. He labelled Nasser as a second Mussolini, demanded that Nasser be 'destroyed', and said that he 'didn't care if there was chaos and anarchy in Egypt' as a result of that. He and Guy Mollet, the Prime Minister of France, decided that something must be done. Eden was advised to consult the United States, but responded by saying that 'this has nothing to do with the Americans' and said that 'they have done enough damage already'. He hyped up the overthrow of Nasser using the BBC, the UK's state broadcaster, and planned to cut off the water supply of the Nile.

In October 1956, Israel invaded Egypt from the east Sinai (east of the Suez). The United Kingdom and France saw their chance and moved in from the west, saying that they were simply attempting to 'bring peace'. The United States and the Soviet Union condemned the invasion and the United States itself threatened to collapse the British economy. Combined with protests within London, Eden was forced to reconsider the invasion and stopped it on 7th November.

Eden's health, already frail, deteriorated during the episode, but he was determined to continue as Prime Minister. President Eisenhower refused to meet with him and 'reconcile their differences'. However, Winston Churchill commended Eden for the invasion, but was extremely annoyed that he decided to stop it. The Labour Party tabled a vote of confidence in Prime Minister Eden and his government, but Eden survived it.

He came down with a terrible fever over the Christmas period and his doctors warned him that he was going to die if he continued working. On 10th January, 1957, Eden resigned after having achieved nothing in his time as Prime Minister except showing that the United Kingdom was no longer a superpower, and Harold Macmillan - his Chancellor - became Prime Minister.

Part 21: Supermac

Eden's successor was Harold Macmillan, who had served as Eden's Chancellor since 1955, and he took office on February 10th, 1955. Macmillan wanted to appear calm and resolved, unlike Eden, who had been perceived as erratic and excitable. To do this, he took Edward Heath, the Chief Whip, out to a dinner on the evening of his inauguration; had the klaxon on the Prime Ministerial car silenced; made it known that he loved to read books, particularly those of the classic British feminist author Jane Austen; and he appointed his family members and lifelong friends into cabinet posts - done today, that is perceived as cronyism, but back then it was a respectable thing to do. Macmillan was a peaceful Prime Minister for a peacetime era. Despite his calm and collected public exterior, in his first meeting with the Queen, he told her he did not think he would last longer than six weeks in the job before his government collapsed. How did he fare?

Macmillan carved himself out as a One Nation Tory, seeking to emulate Disraeli and fit into the post-war consensus that Attlee had built, with policies like maintaining low unemployment, building housing, and high public investment. This was despite major protestations from his cabinet ministers, many of whom resigned - mass resignations are, usually, death blows to governments; for Macmillan, this was not the case - he referred to the crisis as a 'little bit of local difficulty' and quickly appointed new ministers to fill the roles.

In 1952, a thick layer of smog from coal chimneys, swept up by harsh storms that year, covered London's sky. 4,000 Londoners had been killed and a further 100,000 had their respiratory tracts severely damaged - the death toll was heightened in the months that followed, with the number of casualties rising by 6,000. Churchill and Eden had been inactive in tackling the causes of the smog, but Macmillan was determined to stop it from happening ever again - in 1956, he passed the Clean Air Act through Parliament, which introduced areas of cities where only smokeless fuel could be burned and shifted energy and heat reliance onto electricity.

In 1959, he granted orphaned children a taxpayer-funded allowance to support them.

Relations were rocky after the Suez Crisis. Macmillan was forced to rebuild the British-American relationship. Thankfully, he was already great friends with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as they had both served together in World War II. The rebuild was further bolstered by Macmillan's commitment to decolonisation: he granted independence to the African nation of Ghana, as well as to Malaysia and Singapore. He also saw the testing of the first exclusively British hydrogen bomb in 1957, after demanding that the workers in the nuclear power plant speed up - to meet the targets he was setting, they rushed their work and accidentally caused a fire, spreading nuclear fallout all across southern England and scattering it across mainland Europe. Well done. He then suppressed a report of the investigation that researched the causes and effects of the fire to keep public opinion on his side. It was later found that the government knew of 30 deaths directly related to the fallout, and some numbers say that over 1,000 people developed cancers caused by it.

Macmillan led the country at the time of the 1959 general election. He won 365 seats in the House of Commons, a gain of twenty; the Labour Party continued its poor performance and lost nineteen, being reduced to 277; and the Liberal Party stagnated at 6.

Macmillan's government was struggling to go on by this point, however. The confidence in his government limped over the line until 1962, when he sacked six of his cabinet ministers and replaced them, believing that they were about to backstab him over his plans to take the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community, a decision sparked by economic struggles beginning to choke the country. He then tried to make the country's railway service profitable, cutting off hundreds of towns from train travel and allowing entire lines to fall to ruin. His image was now slipping away from the public eye, and he seemed out of touch with the electorate's wants and needs.

In January 1963, France vetoed the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community, on the basis that the UK was 'not committed to the European project' and were 'an American infiltrator'. It was at this point he lost all hope that he could continue in the job - that night, he wrote in his diary that 'all of [his] plans lay in ruin'. He did, however, mediate the negotiations between the United States and Soviet Union that resulted in the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. And that was it.

John Profumo, Macmillan's Secretary of State for War, forty-six years old at the time, had been in a relationship with Christine Keeler, a nineteen year old model, in 1961. Keeler was a honey trap for a Soviet diplomat, and was supposed to be relaying information the diplomat told her to the government. Two years later, the Soviet government recalled the diplomat and Keeler went to the newspapers to tell her story. An investigation ensued. In March 1963, Profumo appeared in front of the House of Commons and denied that the affair had ever taken place, calling it a silly rumour. He appeared to the House of Commons again a few weeks later, and said that the affair had indeed taken place - he promptly resigned for both the affair and lying to Parliament.

The investigation's full report was published in September 1963. After undergoing a surgical procedure to get rid of his newly diagnosed cancer, Macmillan resigned in October 1963. He was succeeded by Alec Douglas-Home, Macmillan's foreign secretary. Douglas-Home was attacked by the Labour Party and the media as an out-of-touch aristocrat, and he also actively devolved domestic affairs to his cabinet members and only participated in foreign affairs.

Prime Minister Douglas-Home led the Conservative Party into defeat at the 1964 general election, after only a year in the job. The Labour Party under Harold Wilson won with a narrow majority, gaining 59 seats, bringing their total to 317; the Conservative Party lost 61 seats and retained 304; the Liberal Party made a minor gain MAJOR SURGE of 3 seats, bringing their total to 9 seats.

We now enter the decade of the flip-flops.

Part 22: Flip

The Labour Party had a very narrow majority of just four seats in the House of Commons. Wilson's first order of business was to create the Secretary of State for Wales and create the Welsh Office in order to satiate the growing demands of Welsh nationalism. He granted independence to the African nation of Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia. Before the year was over, his government had abolished the death penalty.

1965 opened up with news that Winston Churchill had died after suffering a stroke, just three months after retiring. Harold Wilson hosted a state funeral for what Britain believed to be its wartime hero, and it was attended by 112 other heads of state, as well as Queen Elizabeth II. For many, this marked the death of the British Empire - not losing Ireland, not losing the Suez, but the death of the man who had led the United Kingdom through World War II and had embodied the nature of the British 'stiff upper lip'. He was also an expert at killing Indians and stealing their tea, a national past-time.

Afterwards, Wilson set to work on fixing the economy and battling the devaluation of the Pound. He introduced Corporation Tax and stopped businesses from paying Income Tax. He then nationalised British Steel, as Clement Attlee had done in 1950. He increased education spending, and ended up investing in the United Kingdom's education more than its military for the first time in its history. He also expanded the opportunities for adults to continue their education and earn new skills at university. Under Wilson's orders, the United Kingdom was introduced to Capital Gains Tax. His economic plans did not work to achieve his goals, but he managed to cut the number of unemployed by 29,000 by 1966.

Wilson found himself constrained by his tiny majority of just six, which had been further cut down to two Members of Parliament that had defected. He called a snap election with the intention of fixing this unworkable majority. The results were very good for him.

• The Labour Party: 364 (+47)
• The Conservative Party: 253 (-51)
• The Liberal Party: 12 (+3)
• Republican Labour (Irish Republican Socialists): 1 (+1)

This was the year that the Swinging Sixties came into force. The British youth had begun to idolise and listen to The Beatles, the mod subculture was the mainstream (gimps with Beatles mopheads who drive around on crappy little mopeds), and the youth were more accepting of race and homosexuality than their parents; it had come about because national service had been done away with in 1960, giving young men more freedom than before, and there was also now a lotof young people. London was transformed from the gloomy post-war ruin it had been since 1945 and exploded into a vibrant, consumerist centre of culture and economy. It was, unfortunately, mostly limited to London - the working class youth outside of the capital saw little change. The economy was still performing poorly elsewhere.

To fix this, the United Kingdom was determined to join the European Economic Community. Despite the Labour Party's opposition to the capitalist organisation, in January 1967, they started negotiations to join it once again despite being rejected during Macmillan's tenure. Italy and the Netherlands pledged their support to the United Kingdom's joining of the EEC and urged it to be allowed to go ahead this time. Together with the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom formally reapplied in May 1967. France vetoed the application once again in November that year.

The government decriminalised homosexuality in 1967, as well as also legalising abortion. On top of that, they permitted the use of Welsh in official government documents, hoping to further declaw the calls for independence.

The extent of social liberalism was limited, however. The government hoped to reduce immigration from non-white countries and in 1968 restricted the rights of Commonwealth citizens, who were largely from Africa and Asia, former territories of the British Empire, in large part due to the amount of Kenyans fleeing the Kenyan government. Wilson also did not believe in the decriminalisation of homosexuality or the legalisation of abortion, and simply caved to internal party pressure - similar to how he did not actually want to commit the United Kingdom to the European Economic Community, thanks to his belief that it was a purely capitalist invention, and was only along for the ride, being pulled along by the whims of the suffering British economy. This half heartedness in his policies seemed to be showing to the British public, as the Labour Party was now slumping in the polls and being overtaken by the Conservative Party.

The attempt to reduce immigration was likely viewed with widespread favour among the Conservatives and the public, however. Enoch Powell, a Conservative Party Member of Parliament serving in Edward Heath's Shadow Cabinet, made a speech criticising immigration and complained that his constituents were living in fear that 'the black man will hold the whip over the white man in ten years time'. The speech was made in response to the proposed Race Relations Act, which made it illegal to refuse a person housing, employment, or a service on the basis of their skin colour. Powell predicted an up and coming race war, the likes of which he believed was raging in the United States.

"As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal."

Powell was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet immediately, despite the country agreeing with his view. Thanks to the speech, the Conservative Party enjoyed a further boost to their opinion polling.

Enoch's prediction of 'race' war and foreboding, and troublesome times, was correct: 1969 saw the opening of something terrible. In Northern Ireland, tensions between the Irish Catholics and the British Protestants had reached their boiling point. The Six Counties appeared to be on the verge of civil war. Northern Ireland's second largest city, Derry, broke out into a riot. Irish citizens and Royal Ulster Constabulary officers/Northern Ireland's police force, as well as local British citizens, fought in the streets, after a Protestant parade marched into the Catholic side of the city. 1,350 people were injured, and the British Army was deployed to restore order. Rioting broke out across Northern Ireland for several days afterwards. The Troubles had begun.

It should come as no surprise, with all of these developments, that Harold Wilson and the Labour Party, ruined their winning streak. Labour actually did better than expected, likely because this was the first election in which eighteen year olds were allowed to vote and the pollsters underestimated them. This election also showed another storm brewing: the issue of Scottish independence. The results of the 1970 election are...

• The Conservative Party: 330 (+74)
• The Labour Party: 288 (-76)
• The Liberal Party: 6 (-6)
• Unity (an Irish Republican alliance): 5 (+5)
• Protestant Unionist (a right-wing pro-British Northern Irish paramilitary): 1 (+1)
• Republican Labour (Irish Republican Socialists): 1 (+/-)
• The Scottish National Party: 1 (+1)

Part 23: Flop

The first problem of Edward Heath's time as Prime Minister erupted almost immediately after his election. On July 15th, 1970, dockers across the country went on strike, demanding that their wages be raised to £11 a week (£109 in 2019 - approx. £2.70 an hour). By the next day, the United Kingdom feared a shortage of food and Queen Elizabeth II declared a state of national emergency. Despite this, the dock workers co-operated with the British Army and kept the shipments of food coming in, and by July 30th, the strike had been put to a peaceful end, with the workers agreeing to a 7% weekly wage increase.

Meanwhile, the first ever Glastonbury Festival was held in August, with headlining acts such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and The Who. Just two years later, it was attracting the biggest names of the day like David Bowie. In 2019, it is still one of the largest music and arts festival in the United Kingdom, attracting over 175,000 festival-goers a year, and is an integral part of British culture.

And to top the year off, The Beatles ended after Paul McCartney filed a lawsuit against the other members of the band, signalling the end of the Swinging Sixties.

1971 started off with a bang. Literally. 'The Angry Brigade', an anarchist-communist terrorist organisation, bombed the Secretary of State for Employment's house, and also planted a bomb in the headquarters of the Department for Employment; the group had previously organised marches against American involvement in the Vietnam War, and had thought about bombing the United States' London embassy. At the same time, post office workers across the country went on strike, demanding a pay raise of 20% - it ended in failure after 47 days. Despite this, more workers went on strike and marched in London and Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, demanding that the government 'kill' the Industrial Relations Bill, a law that would greatly neuter the power of trade unions.

On April 19th, 1971, the government announced that unemployment was at its highest point since the Second World War - almost one million people were out of work; on top of that, inflation was at its highest point since 1941 while wages were stagnant, hovering at 8.6%. In response, the Angry Brigade bombed a fashion store in London on May 1st, International Worker's Day. This government was not one for making things any better for itself - Margaret Thatcher, Edward Heath's Secretary of State for Education, passed her law through the House of Commons that would stop supplying free milk to children in school; Labour-controlled councils across the country increased their council rates to act in defiance of the law. At the same time, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, a Scottish shipbuilding company, announced that it was closing down - shipbuilders who had been working under it refused to acknowledge that their jobs no longer existed and took control of the shipyards and continued working.

On September 7th, 1971, a fourteen year old girl, Annette McGavigan, was caught in the crossfire between Irish Republic Army 'soldiers' and the British Army and became the 100th person to be killed in The Troubles; on October 13th, the British Army started destroying the roads that linked the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland together, and on October 23rd the death toll rose by two, after the British Army killed two women who were driving a car at a checkpoint in Belfast. In what is widely regarded as a bad move by everyone living in the incumbent Conservative-DUP government in 2019, Reverend Ian Paisley, a Northern Irish Unionist, rebranded the Protestant Unionist Party (which currently had 1 seat in the House of Commons) as the 'Democratic Unionist Party' on October 30th - they were a party of Protestant extremists that were funnelling money to several Protestant terrorist organisations across Northern Ireland. And on December 4th, the Ulster Volunteer Force bombed a bar in Belfast, killing fifteen people and injuring a further seventeen. There was no longer any doubt: Northern Ireland was in the midst of a civil war.

There was one good thing crystallising though: earlier in 1971, the United Kingdom had applied for membership of the European Economic Community once again. And on October 28th, the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly in favour of joining. The British economy was at a breaking point, and entry into the EEC was sure to alleviate a massive amount of weight.

1972 opened with yet another strike being called: this time, the coal miners of the country went on strike on January 9th. And on January 20th, the one millionth person in the country registered as unemployed - this was the first time that had happened since the Great Depression, and showed that unemployment had doubled under Heath's administration, which started two years ago. A state of national emergency was declared once again on February 9th.

The situation in Northern Ireland continued to worsen. The British Army was rounding up suspected Irish Republican Army members and putting them in internment camps. Naturally, the Irish population in Northern Ireland were being unfairly targeted - they began to protest as the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association. On January 30th, 1972, the British Army opened fire on a group of unarmed protesters; most people tried to run away and some tried to help the already wounded - the Army kept firing at both of them and even chased some with trucks and ran them over. Thirteen people were killed, and a few months later one man died of injuries that he sustained in the shooting. As retaliation, the Official Irish Republican Army (not the actual IRA) bombed the Aldershot Barracks, planning to get the soldiers inside, but killed seven female cleaners instead. In Ireland, protesters stormed the British Embassy in Dublin and burned it to the ground. On March 30th, the Parliament of Northern Ireland closed down. The soldiers involved the Bloody Sunday massacre were cleared of any blame just a few weeks later because "the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association was protesting illegally." Until 2019, they walked as free men.

On July 1st, the UK's first ever gay pride parade was hosted in London. I'm sure you know why that's noteworthy.

On January 1st, 1973, the United Kingdom finally joined the European Economic Community, alongside the Republic of Ireland and the Kingdom of Denmark.

On January 4th, four hundred Northern Irish children attacked the British Army. They were not so trigger happy when faced with angry kids. In an attempt to put the issue to rest, the British government organised a referendum on whether Northern Ireland should remain a part of the United Kingdom or not; 58% of Northern Irish people voted, and it returned a 98% vote to remain in the UK. This is purely because the Irish boycotted the referendum on the advice of the republican parties, who said that a referendum with any legitimacy would cause even more violence and called the referendum an 'irresponsible decision'. The Northern Ireland Assembly was opened soon afterwards in an attempt to restore government to Northern Ireland, after the collapse of its Parliament in 1973, with a power-sharing executive that attempted to balance the unionists and the republicans/British and the Irish. The Democratic Unionist Party boycotted the Assembly and so did the Ulster Unionist Party, and British/unionist workers across Northern Ireland went on strike in protest specifically against having to share power with the Irish/republicans. The Assembly quickly collapsed, just like its predecessor had.

On December 31st, the 'Three Day Week' came into force. As a result of the coal miners striking and a plethora of other workers involved in the electricity supply chain's strikes, the electricity that powered people's homes had to be rationed. People were only allowed to use 72 hour's worth of electricity a week. Power outages also became incredibly frequent.

On February 7th, Edward Heath's government collapsed of his own volition. He wanted to end the strikes. He called a snap election as his last resort. With a premiership marred by constant disaster, it should come as no surprise that he was utterly destroyed in the election.

• The Labour Party: 301 (+26)
• The Conservative Party: 297 (-37)
• The Liberal Party: 14 (+8)
• Scottish National Party: 7 (+6)
• Ulster Unionist Party: 7 (+1)
• Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party: 3 (+3)
• Democratic Unionist Party: 1 (+1)
• Plaid Cymru: 2 (+2)
• Social Democratic and Labour Party: 1 (+1)
• Democratic Labour: 1 (+1)

Wait... oh. The national vote had completely fragmented. The Scottish were beginning to shift towards wanting independence (Scottish National Party), and Wales was doing something similar (Plaid Cymru); meanwhile, Northern Ireland was so dire that the unionists had turned to three violent political parties (Ulster Unionist Party, Vanguard, Democratic Unionist Party), and the republicans had fragmented so badly that their representation was almost entirely removed besides for the Social Democratic and Labour Party.
Edward Heath resigned. His government was in ruins. Harold Wilson became Prime Minister again and the Labour Party entered its fourth government, but he was running a handicapped minority government and couldn't actually do anything. Another election was called in October - Labour promised a referendum on European Economic Community membership as their key policy. Labour hated the EEC and wanted to leave immediately, buuuut...

• The Labour Party: 319 (+18)
• The Conservative Party: 277 (-20)
• The Liberal Party: 13 (-1)
• Scottish National Party: 11 (+4)
• Ulster Unionist Party: 7 (+/-)
• Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party: 3 (+/-)
• Plaid Cymru: 3 (+1)
• Democratic Unionist Party: 1 (+/-)
• Independent Republican: 1 (+1)

Labour had a majority! That meant the British public hated the European Economic Community too. Right...?

Part 24: Callaghan

The referendum on the United Kingdom's continued membership of the European Economic Community was called in April 1975. The Conservative Party, now led by Margaret Thatcher, came out firmly in support of remain, as did the Liberal Party; meanwhile, the Labour Party was extremely fragmented - historically, the Labour Party had feared the EEC due to its inherent capitalist nature and widespread abduction national sovereignty on several fronts: as such, the Labour government didn't take an official side, supporting the vote to remain but not campaigning for it, but the party itself was split heavily between leave and remain and the party's membership actively hated the EEC. The Democratic Unionist Party and the Scottish National Party also campaigned to leave.

The referendum was held on the June 4th, 1975. 17.3 million people voted to remain in the European Economic Community against just 8.4 million voting to leave - 67.2% against 32.8%. The United Kingdom's membership of the EEC was guaranteed and the general population proved to be as enthusiastic as their French and West German counterparts.

With the European Question dealt with, the second Wilson government could get on with its domestic plan..right?Inflation across the UK had reached 24% - the highest level since 1800. The spectre of unemployment was back: 1.2 million were now living without jobs, an increase of 200,000 since Heath had left office in 1974.

Wilson didn't get very far into his second term. The Prime Minister had took up drinking to cope with the stress that his position had brought, and his wife did not like the added pressure either: furthermore, Wilson was developing both cancer and Alzheimer's Disease. He resigned in March 1976 and was replaced by his Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan.

Callaghan's government almost immediately ran into problems. They were trimmed down to a minority government soon after Wilson's resignation, after a series of lost by-elections that killed their 3 MP majority, and entered an electoral pact with the Liberal Party. It was short lived however, failing to be renewed as soon as 1978. Opinion polls showed opinion of Labour rising as inflation was crushed and unemployment fell. He was expected to call an election in September 1978, but never did, and wore that fact like a badge of honour.

Callaghan snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

His anti-inflation policies had annoyed the unions. A lot. They started going on strikes over the winter of 1978: gravediggers, binmen, and National Health Service workers refused to work and won all of the concessions that they had asked for. Callaghan gave an interview regarding the matter and said that he "didn't see a problem." He was ridiculed in the newspapers almost as soon as he said the quote. The economy was further beat up by the fact that the coldest winter for sixteen years coincided with the strikes and made some non-striking jobs unworkable and put them out of the commission for the winter. The UK came out on the other side in February 1979: the Labour Party did not.

On March 28th, 1979, Margaret Thatcher, the Leader of the Opposition and the Conservative Party, called a vote of no confidence in Callaghan's government. The Scottish National Party had been annoyed by Labour's dodging of devolution for Scotland and backed Thatcher: Callaghan said that they had doomed themselves for thinking that the Conservative Party was even less of a friend to them than Labour was and they had made a mistake (he was right).

The Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, the Scottish National Party, the United Ulster Unionist Party, the Democratic Unionist Party, and one independent MP voted that they had no confidence in Callaghan's government. There were thus 311 votes of no confidence.

The Labour Party, Plaid Cymru and the Ulster Unionist Party voted confidence. There were 310 votes of confidence.

Labour lost by one vote.

The ensuing election was even worse.

• The Conservative Party: 339 (+62)
• The Labour Party: 269 (-50)
• The Liberal Party: 11 (-2)
• The Ulster Unionist Party: 5 (-1)
• Democratic Unionist Party: 3 (+2)
• The Scottish National Party: 2 (-9)
• Plaid Cymru: 2 (-1)
• Social Democratic and Labour Party: 1 (+/-)
• United Ulster Unionist Party: 1 (+/-)

Welcome to the 1980s.

Disclaimer: This is where we cross the line into what I consider the modern day.

Margaret Thatcher ripped apart Attlee's Consensus that was in place between 1945 - 1979. She did it brutally and with intense hatred. I live in a city that she planned to completely abandon, ordered the police to shoot at us, and her reforms destroyed our economy. I am also half Northern Irish and Thatcher ordered the police and army there to 'shoot to kill' when dealing with Irish Republicans. The modern day Conservative Party turned to her ideology and abandoned the 'one nation conservative' ideology that Disraeli created in the early 1800s that they followed from their creation until 1974. In response to Thatcher, the Labour Party adopted the 'one nation conservatism' rather than socialism and Labour voters in the modern day don't like that they did this (I am one of them). Thatcher herself almost completely deregulated the economy and created the circumstances that allowed the 2008 financial crash to hit us so hard that 14 million British people now live in poverty and voted to leave the EU as a way to get back at the government. Thatcher died in 2013 - the only move of hers that was met with celebration from working class British people. I am one of those people - I think her legacy is disgusting and revolting and, while I've never met her, I hate her.

Prepare for bias.