Greens urge second pref for Livingstone

[nino_savatte]

No, it isn't - the LRC as a body was never in the Liberal party so couldn't "break from" it. When it was founded (in 1900), Hardie said it aimed to form "a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy.."

Some individual Lib-Lab MPs might have come over in the following years, but the Labour block going into the 1906 election fought it independently (albeit with some non-aggression agreements),

IIRC, the LRC originally took the Liberal whip in the Commons.

 

[nino_savatte]

Unbelievable. Literally. A few minutes ago you wrote:



Tied yourself up in knots nino.

You're talking out of your arse again. I don't think I've ever met anyone as small-minded (or as narrow-minded) as you.

 

[nino_savatte]

Entirely different question. Probably not very and I don't see Nick Clegg being so either. But the Liberal party teetered on the brink of serious radicalism at times in the first half of the 20th C and is certainly a candidate for being the founder of the welfare state.

That may be true but they were never going to become a serious socialist party, were they?

 

[articul8]

Whole pages of irrelevant point scoring on these kinda threads acheives what?

It isn't irrelevant - I'd have thought you would see that

The question - politically relevant for today - boils down to how did a party which claimed to represent workers independently as a class emerge to contest the main capitalist parties. If it was purely a "break" from the Liberals, then this implies that it only takes forces in a major bourgeois party wake up, to found a succesful alternative.

This is a misprepresentation of the history

 

[nino_savatte]

But this thread is actually about the London mayoral election. Apron came here to hijack it for his own egotistic ends (as usual).

 

[articul8]

IIRC, the LRC originally took the Liberal whip in the Commons.

You are confusing the 12 Lib-Lab MPs in Parliament from 1885, with Labour MPs (ie. the result of the LRC platform) of which only Hardie himself was elected in 1900.

1 MP can't whip himself (cue self-flagellation gags). Did he vote with the Liberals sometimes - of course. Was he a LIb-Labber from 1900 - 1906? No, no, no.

 

[cockneyrebel]

It isn't irrelevant - I'd have thought you would see that

I mean the point scoring is irrelevant. And that's what threads like this become. It's not about debating and the issues just get swamped by pedantic threads about people having to admit they're wrong.

 

[articul8]

But not to challenge a point which has misleading political implications so we can all get along together would make for a dull board.

 

[cockneyrebel]

I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that rather than challenge things for the sake of clearing up political mistakes or whatever it just becomes a childish point scoring exercise where certain posters show off how intellectual and knowledgeable they are and patronise people (this isn't aimed at you by the way). And it's even more ironic given that in some cases these posters are obsessed with pointing out that the far left always tell the working class what to do rather than listen to concerns.

 

[butchersapron]

Whay are you arguing that the BNP should be 2nd prefs in the Mayoral election CR?

 

[cockneyrebel]

I think you've just proved my point.

 

[audiotech]

In point scoring?

 

[Meltingpot]

Butchers, thanks for coming to my assistance in this thread but to be fair to nino he was right to point out my error in claiming that the Lib Dems existed in 1906.

 

[butchersapron]

:d

 

[co-op]

That may be true but they were never going to become a serious socialist party, were they?

Depends as ever on your definition of a "serious socialist party"....

After WW1, the Liberals under Lloyd-George were a far more radical party than Labour. They actively espoused the Keynesian economics + welfarism that we now associate with the 'post-WW2 consensus' established by Labour in their 1945 govt. The Labour party in the 20s and 30s was timorous in the extreme around economics - absolutely buying the conventional view that Britain needed to return to the Gold Standard and that wages were too high and needed to be "corrected". Frankly they might as well have been in the conservative party, hence the attempt at National Govt with the tories in the 1930s.

Had the Liberals won a decisive victory in 1919, we might have seen pretty much the policies of the Attlee government but under a Liberal banner. However Lloyd-George was utterly hamstrung by constant opposition from tory members of his National Govt and in the end was toppled by them in the 1922 backbench revolt that ushered in 20 years of hardship for the British manufacturing working classes, but boomtime in London and the south-east - a perfect dummy run of Thatcherism 60 years later.

 

[Tom A]

However it WAS the Tories that gave women the vote, something that the Liberal government of the early 20thC would not do.