The post below this was about putting lights-out for the good; this blogpost is about lights-out of a completely different kind; albeit, in my humble opinion, it indirectly led to the good. Strikes, strikes, strikes: The Winter of Discontent. For those too young to remember, 30 years ago
today was the day that The Labour Party suffered a vote of no confidence; a setback from which they never recovered fully
...And the truth is you've lost uncle Jimmy...until of course they morphed into the "
boneless wonder". Incredibly they lost by a single vote and there was one Labour MP (Sir Alfred Broughton) on his death-bed, too ill to attend.
Update 29th March: I've just had my attention drawn to the yesterday's Blue Blog and an event that I remember well but not as being in the same week - such is one's memory! "
Triumph and tragedy: the Conservative Party went through both within the space of two days in the last week of March thirty years ago." Alistair Cooke is writing a
special series of blog posts to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the 1979 election. Cooke was political adviser to Airey Neave, murdered by the IRLA March 30th 1979.
4 comments:
My only real memory of the events of 1979 is it was the first election I could vote in and the wrong side won! My memory of the miners strike in 1984 is much clearer because a family friend was a policeman who was sent to Nottinghamshire and got seriously injured.
I was in the army in 1979! My God...my other life. Coincidently I had a number of friends in the Met (still do) and they had many a tale of colleagues practically paying off their mortgages early with the overtime whilst drafted up to the miner's strike! None got injured but all saw "action"!
The murder of Airey Neave brought home to people the fact that the IRA had the ability to target public figures almost at will during that time.
Indeed! it does make you thankful that we weren't under any consistent and concerted effort (although it was bad enough).
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