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Vybik Jon wrote: Except that it completely ignores the situations where that didn't work by itself and clearly wouldn't have worked by itself. A great example from our own island's history has been given elsewhere in the thread - the suffragette movement - but has been conveniently sidestepped in subsequent responses.
The effectiveness (or not) of direct action is only seen in retrospect, but the day after.
So what was the time lag between the peak of WSPU violence and the passing of the act granting universal suffrage for the over 21s? Even taking out the war years I would wager it was at least a decade.
Is that proof of a significant direct link between the two or was it one small factor among a multitude of factors? What other less lofty motives might have pushed the Tories to introduce the 1928 bill when they did? There is actually a very strong argument for saying that universal suffrage was an inevitability from the 1886 election onwards. The rest was waiting for the social gears to change.
It's like the Poll Tax Riots Brought Down Maggie fallacy.
Sure it played a small telegenic part in the mosaic but she had been trailing Labour in the polls for the best part of a year before Trafalgar Square and the seeds had been sewn in the Westland business years earlier. Westland directly led to Heseltine resigning from the cabinet, which led him to opposing the Poll Tax as originally drafted. This despite he having been something of a scourge to the inner cities for years. So you can guess his motivation was probably not protection of the poor or a concern for social justice. This in turn set the scene for Howe's defection over the ERM. And thus the last of the old cabinet guard was gone.
When it came clear to all and sundry that the Tory press felt that Heseltine could actually win an election that Maggie could only lose the Tories had to find an alternative or suffer the insufferable - a choice between a divisive leader and a Labour victory. So they got John Major the lukewarm water guy, a candidate so inoffensive he actually got himself elected PM against all the odds.
What all this had to do with breaking shit on the streets of London is, to me at least, a little unclear but for every great upheaval in this country in modern times you don't have to look far for a catalyst that is all about personal hubris, political pack-menality pragmatism and the individual and collective pursuit of power rather than the issues themselves. Which brings as straight back to the post WW1 political scene and what to the Tories was the "terrible arithmetic" of electoral demographics. The great irony is that they won the popular vote in the first ever real election with a slightly greater percentage than five years previous (so they got that bit right) and yet lost the bloody election.
But as you say lets see what happens ....
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