On Wilson's 60th birthday — 11th March 1976 — he suffered a rebellion on his proposed cuts to public expenditure.
He immediately challenged the left of Labour to depose him, and in the ensuing debate Tony Benn described his as a right wing government. Chancellor Denis Healey, responding to jibes from left wing backbenchers, famously shouted, "Go and fuck yourselves you fuckers!"
Wilson won the vote but resigned a few days after. Thatcher came to power 18 months later.
Finally.
We need a legitimate and strong second chamber, and every inch of ground we gain modernising it is worth the agonising and glacially slow fight to win it.
Here the last ~90 or so hereditary members will lose their seats — some of who can trace their family's presence in the chamber back ~900 years — after a compromise to offer peerages to *some* of them in order to get the Tories to drop their opposition.
This is good.
The Lords' amendment was an incredibly blunt instrument that nobody sane was backing. It would've defined most of the web as 'social media' and therefore banned it for under 16s, with loads of negative knock-on effects.
The government whipped against this amendment, but there were lots of abstentions and one rebel — John McDonnell, continuing his long career of voting contrary to Labour.
Some of the criticism through this seems super confected.
I usually lean more to the warmongery side but not in this case, and it seems plainly right that our bases not be used unlawfully, that they are used for defensive/reciprocal purposes, and that we shouldn't be party to the wider conflict.
The 'special relationship' ought not even be a part of the discussion.
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