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   The Sleight Doctor 🃏 (apostateenglishman@mastodon.world)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Dec-2024 06:22:55 JST The Sleight Doctor 🃏

   After WWII, fear stalked the corridors of power in Great Britain. Irrespective of partisan allegiance, the ruling classes knew that because so many had sacrificed so much for so few, it wouldn't take much to trigger a popular uprising. Hence the emergence of what historians call the "post-war consensus", a cross-party acceptance that nationalisation, strong trade unions, robust regulation, progressive taxation, and an expanded welfare state would be needed to placate the restive electorate.

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     The Sleight Doctor 🃏 (apostateenglishman@mastodon.world)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Dec-2024 06:22:52 JST The Sleight Doctor 🃏

     in reply to

     So don't let anyone tell you CEOs in America having to beef up their personal security, while feeling increasingly nervous and unsafe in their luxury hotels, gentrified blocks and gated communities can ever be a bad thing. That should just be the price of extreme wealth and power, and as the British post-war experience shows, and recent events in South Korea further highlight, all that's needed for concrete change is enough people refusing to accept less.

     Then no more shots need be fired.

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     The Sleight Doctor 🃏 (apostateenglishman@mastodon.world)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Dec-2024 06:22:53 JST The Sleight Doctor 🃏

     in reply to

     Thanks to British socialism, made possible by elite terror at the prospect of revolt, every citizen now enjoys financial protection in the event of unemployment or sickness, a state pension when they retire, standardised minimal living and working conditions, universal free healthcare and education, financial help with funerals...the list goes on and on. Attlee's bold achievements in improving people's lives caused a surge in upward mobility that led to the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

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     Robert Link and Joachim repeated this.
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     The Sleight Doctor 🃏 (apostateenglishman@mastodon.world)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Dec-2024 06:22:54 JST The Sleight Doctor 🃏

     in reply to

     In 1945 the democratic socialist Clement Attlee swept to power. A landslide against war leader Winston Churchill, who contrary to today's far-right mythology was widely hated by the working classes and armed forces, and expected to be a disaster for peacetime domestic policy. Attlee's government embarked on a radical programme of social reforms to safeguard all citizens, "from the cradle to the grave". There began two decades of year-on-year economic growth, the longest in the UK's history.

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