I tried to switch this blog page to black, in mourning at the final demise of the 1945 settlement, that promises to come with today's government spending review. The Welfare State, the equal chance for the ordinary man or woman, everything that by the end of the war, people in this country were fighting for, that produced the Labour Landslide of 1945: all that comes to an end with Osbourne and Cameron's axe. It is, of course, the opportunity the Tories have been waiting for for decades, masked by a smoke-screen about a profligate Labour government. There will come a point in decades to come, when historians will look back at the social democracy of the period between 1945 and 1979, see it as a curious blip (34 years; 31 now since Thatcher started to dismantle the '45 settlement...), and wonder why the ordinary people of Great Britain, a democracy, threw it all away, how they could be persuaded to vote against their own interests. Unless, that is, we all act now.
A bit off the topic of this blog, but all history is political, and I firmly believe that the true politics of history are liberal, humanist and, essentially, those of the Left.
