Aditya Chakrabortty is right in locating the origin of Britain’s economic problems in the early 1920s (Discipline the poor, protect the rich – it’s the same old Tories, same old class war, 10 November). Before the first world war, the trade unions had benefited from cooperation between the newly created Labour party and the Liberal party, but Lloyd George’s decision to stay as prime minister at the end of the war using the “coupon election” left him in the power of a Tory majority in the Commons.
When the miners, faced with drastic wage cuts, appealed to him for help, he set up a royal commission. The Sankey report supported the miners and the nationalisation of the mines for the benefit of the national economy. However, the Tory majority refused to implement the report and slashed wages.
The Liberal party never recovered from the coupon election and the Labour party’s then leader, Ramsay MacDonald, lost faith that strikes would help the party gain power. So even though the unions had brought about the existence of the Labour party, he dissociated the party from supporting strikes and opposed the calling of the General Strike in support of miners’ wages. Its failure led to a general lowering of working-class wages.
Margaret Morris
Author, The General Strike
• I could not agree more with Aditya Chakrabortty regarding the Tory party and its iterations since 2010. We are expected to believe that the austerity party of 2010 was “socially liberal” and fiscally conservative. Do people think universal credit, the bedroom tax, the two-child policy and the benefit cap were socially liberal?
Austerity was sold as paying off the national debt so that future crises could be avoided. This has clearly not happened. Furthermore, in order to keep the right wing on board, the Tories spent the years leading up to the Brexit vote denigrating the EU and slagging off migrants, then acted surprised when people voted leave.
Even in economic good times the measures introduced since 2010 would hamper any country’s prosperity, but in bad times there is literally no capacity in the system to cope. Hence we now find ourselves in a mess entirely of our own making.
Lee Cornish
Newcastle upon Tyne
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