Tag Archives: helen margetts

Mark Pack

Predicting the future: we didn’t turn Japanese

By Mark Pack | Tue 15th February 2011 - 10:25 am

Shortly after the Conservative Party won its fourth general election in a row in 1992, a symposium met to consider the question of whether Britain – formerly a country with regularly rotating government between the two main parties – was turning into a political version of Japan, where the same party had been in power for nearly forty years.

Even between the event occurring and the publication of a book based on it, Turning Japanese? Britain with a Permanent Party of Government (eds. Helen Margretts and Gareth Smyth), political events in both countries had taken a dramatic turn. In Japan the LDP lost power, starting a period of much greater political fluidity with even subsequent LDP Prime Ministers struggling to restore their party’s previous dominance. Meanwhile in Britain the collapse of the Conservative Party’s economic policies following Britain’s enforced exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) quickly made the government appear very vulnerable, even if debates in Labour continued on whether, as John Smith preferred, one more heave was all that was needed or whether, as Tony Blair insisted on after John Smith’s death, a more radical reshaping of the party was required to win the next election.

Continue reading »
Posted in Books and Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , , , , and | 5 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Chloe
    Mark; If a Nigerian care worker in her early twenties can travel 4000 miles to work for just above the minimum wage, & reside in an HMO locally near the hos...
  • Jana
    @Mark Valladares “ The hospitality industry in the South East struggles to find staff, yet housing is so expensive that nobody could credibly be expected to ...
  • Pawel Urbanski
    @Nonconformistradical - I think that's a big part of it. Everything in schools points at university, and those not heading that way get remarkably little attent...
  • Nonconformistradical
    @Pawel Urbanski "That is the disconnect nobody talks about: the jobs are there, the young people are there, and the pipeline between them barely functions. Bef...
  • Pawel Urbanski
    A real-world data point. I recently recruited for an apprenticeship in my business - £25k, four days' work plus one day's training, salary part-subsidised by t...