[TW]Fox;17987780 said:
Mate, seriously - if you dont know something just dont post about it, it's less hassle and it's less embarrasing than trying so hard like this
Is there where all your opinions and knowledge come from, MrLOL? Or is this the first time you've done this?
Thing is, my grandmother is one of the children of that generation who blame the conservatives for the great slump.
I've had quite serious debates as to why she continues to vote labour, despite her possibly being worse off under them than with the conservatives and her and my grandfather both receiving sizeable pensions. My grandfather received an especially nice one, being a former warehouse manager.
The reason she gives for hating the conservatives and insisting on voting labour ? she blames the conservatives for the hardship she endured as a child. She was borin in '22 making her 9 years old when this was happenning. I'm sure as hell i can remember how easy / hard i had it at 9 so its no surprise she uses this experiences to form her current beliefs.
I' have an irrational hatred of the current generation spouting rubbish that the only way, and indeed the correct way to get out of a recession is spend your way out of it. I have an A level history, and one of the subjects we went into with great detail was the causes of the second world war, and the rise of Hiter in the Third Reich.
Did i use Wikipedia to help me jog my memory ? Yes i did. But it is all fact.
Lets have another look for some alternative sources.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/apr/04/electionspast.past6
In August 1931 Britain's second Labour government collapsed under the weight of its own self-doubt. Unconvinced by either their own record in office or their ability to steer Britain out of accelerating economic decline, Labour's two leading ministers - the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and the chancellor, Philip Snowden, - agreed to join a Conservative-led coalition, known as the National Government, that split the Labour party.
And to read on a bit more
The day before the summer recess began an "economy committee" under the leadership of a city businessman, Sir George May, reported Britain faced a £120m deficit: the country, his report implied, might not be able to pay its way.
In retrospect that was probably never the case - and Labour historians long blamed their government's collapse on a "banker's ramp", or swindle. But at the time, the May committee, established in February 1931 under cross-party pressure, was treated by almost everyone as an unquestionable authority. The reaction to the report brought down the government - and led to the election that followed.
On August 13 MacDonald met the leading Tories, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, to discuss the position. A week later leading politicians from all parties met again to hear MacDonald promise that Britain would balance the budget. Spending cuts would help bridge the gap, including salary cuts for teachers and the police.
That was what the opposition wanted to hear. But it was not what most Labour ministers, or MPs, believed they had been elected to carry out. On August 22, as the crisis worsened, the king returned to London from Scotland - broken summer holidays were a feature of political life that year.
The recommendations that the report made - of public sector pay cuts and income tax rises to reduce the deficit ring true today.
As does the debate as to whether this is the correct thing to do. The labour party now, just as then, argue that cutting public spending wasn't the way to go. The debate split the party in half and lead to the landside victory that gave the conservatives the carte blanche to do what they wanted to do in parliament.
The move to a means tested unemployement benefit is what the person i was quoting was referring to.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/alevelstudies/1930-depression.htm
Again i'll quote my sources here
The National Government of 1931 cut benefits of insured workers by ten per cent. The Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, faced the prospect of millions of workers relying on 'poor law relief', paid for by local ratepayers, who were hard pressed themselves. It became clear that the unemployed had to be supported from national taxation and not local rates - a process that was completed by 1934s
In order to qualify for dole, a worker had to pass a means test. The Public Assistance Committees (PACs) put the worker's finances through a rigorous investigation before they could qualify for benefit. Officials went into every detail of a family's income and savings. The intrusiveness of the means test and the insensitive manner of officials who carried it out frustrated and offended the workers.
The move away from the poor law paid for by rate payers onto a government funded system is what he referred to as "increasing benefits" but it wasn't. The system changed to one that was funded by the government, but the rates people received were reduced, and it was means tested making it seemingly harder to receive. The means testing would be considered an invasion of privacy in todays times i'm quite sure.
I found this be particularly enlightening
Conclusions
The experience of the Great Depression has cast a long shadow. The early and aggressive use of fiscal and monetary policy in the recent recession attests to that. In the 1930s policy activism meant leaving the gold standard, and abandoning the policy dogma that went with it. But these policy shifts did not come into effect until two years into the recession in the UK and nearly four years into the recession in the US, and they were insufficient to promote a vigorous recovery given the developments in the labour market. By that time the NAIRU had increased to around 10% in the UK and even higher in the US.
In the interwar years, as today, governments were put under severe pressure to do something to cope with the depression. Much of their effort went into maintaining high wages and ameliorating the plight of the unemployed in order to stave off unrest. These policy packages contained interacting elements that magnified the shocks and caused their effects to persist. In the current recession active demand-side policies have averted such pressures so far, although that might change with a return to austerity as the case of Greece shows only too clearly.
An important but neglected lesson from the Great Depression is that labour market policies should be firmly focused on fostering labour market flexibility and maintaining employability, and avoiding policies that cause unemployment to persist.
It is worth remembering that the Great Depression lasted for ten years and mass unemployment was not brought to an end by equilibrating adjustments in the labour market but by the massive boost to aggregate demand occasioned by WWII. Without that the depression would have lasted well into its second decade.
So not at all to do with increasing spending on benefits then ??
Since i wasn't alive in the '30s, you tend to have to rely on reading books and opinions of others. I am neither a historian, or an economists, so tend to have to rely on the opinions of others.
Here is another interesting source:
Robert Skidelsky's Politicians and the slump, published in 1967, is the first and only single volume study of the second labour government. For Skidelsky, the government's collapse was to be understood not in the context of the 1931 criss but in relation to its longer term failure to deal with the economic problems facing it from 1929. The key struggle during 1929-31, he argued was not between "left" and "right", or between "socialism" and "capitalism", but between what he termed "the economic radicals and "the economic conservatives". The crux of skidelsky's argument was that labour's "utopian Socialism" had prevented it from adopting the radical solution on offer to deal with unemployment - the keynesian programme of "interventionist" capitalism. In the form of deficit financing and extensive public works.
Source:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...&resnum=4&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
Sound Familiar ?
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In fact I dislike Labour equally as much - then again they aren't socialist either!