From "The Crown: Season 3, Episode 5" Also. Don't copyright me Netflix. All rights to this go to The Crown on Netflix. Yadddi yaddi yadii. You get the point.
I did, my favourite part about the crown are the different Prime Minsters through the ages. Really enjoy John Lithgow as Churchill, Jason Watkins as Wilson and Gillian Anderson was brilliant as Thatcher!!!!
What few understood at the time, and few understand today, is that the value of the Pound already was slipping quite a lot but was being kept artificially higher by the way that exchange rates were structured. The sudden devaluation didn't make the British people poorer, it just exposed what had been eroding for years.
They faced similar problems in the early 1930s when the English government went off the gold standard. Suddenly, the British Pound, that symbol of strength and consistency, lost a shitload of spending power and security. Both decisions were made due to reality- McDonald and Wilson having to acknowledge the fiscal situation of the time, and choosing long-term financial benefit. The Brits _were_ made poorer by the devaluation, as they still imported a lot of food as well as household goods.
@@nevillewran4083 and yet everyone hates harold eventhough he did the right thing. Everyone hates mcdonald eventhough he kept britain out of the great depression. People
@@adamharrold407 Yes, deliver everything I demand and give me lots of handouts, be I an age pensioner, out of work, a small business owner or the CEO of huge corporation. Don't make _me_ pay tax, make the other bastards. Don't run up a deficit as you do so, and hurry up & give me my perks.
Queen loves him as her favourite pm. The queen went through thick and thin during ww2 serving in auxiliary unit. She endured rationing same as the rest, surely a labour pm such as Wilson was her favourite
@@timloo6191 It's trendy to disparage Wilson now, but his government did a lot of good things. I started listing them, but it's all on the internet if anyone wants to look it up.
@@soupman3285 It was a continuation of previous economic factors. Keynesian economics were only now beginning to rear their dangers - artificial stagflation after a steady period under Mac the Knife, which took from Churchill, Attlee, Churchill-Eden administrations to reach. Also, the exchange with the old pound divided into shillings, pennies, was complicated, thus why Wilson-Heath implemented decimalisation - 100p to the pound simple, with growing pains.
In a way, this series tells the history of UK during a good part of the 20th century. I think this video is particularly brilliant in portraying how shocking and dispiriting this currency devaluation was for the primer minister himself and for a nation that still believed to be an empire
@@devanman7920 It's why that for many of the James Bond films made in the last 30 years, the only way they made a profit was huge numbers of nationalistic Brits flocked to see them. Many were poorly made & couldn't compete with American action films, so did badly world-wide. But the English still needed to feel their country meant something, had influence in the world, so went to the cinema in large numbers, some of them repeat visitors, to see a hero from the UK saving the world. The more flag-waving Brits, yes, the older people, missed the empire and the "Britannia Rules the Waves" notion. The loss of English might and prestige deeply saddened them. A film in a darkened cinema allowed them to suspend disbelief for a short time and still feel the UK was a leading nation.
@@nevillewran4083 The James Bond films *were* American action films (that is to say, produced by American studios, albeit they were shot in Britain with a Canadian director and British stars), they were very high quality for their time, and they were a huge hit internationally, where they were enormously influential, as you can see when you consider that the "cool-spy" and "action-hero-spy" genres arose entirely in reaction to the success of the Bond films. Thanks to Bond, we get similar French films, we get the Flint series of films in the States, we get Mission Impossible, we get innumerable spy spoofs, and we get Austin Powers. Even XXX and the "Bourne" series of films were envisioned as more modern alternatives to the pre-existing Bond series. So it's a bit of a stretch to say that Bond films were only successful because "nationalistic" Brits flocked to see them.
@@CBfrmcardiff What I did express poorly was "the last 30 years". That wasn't true, they were revived by Daniel Craig. What I should have said was "roughly the 90s", that was a low patch. Brosnan & Dalton. Before we argue too much about box office, perhaps we should agree on an official source for data? Ticket sales are relative and (generalising) the 90s were lower in comparison to Connery, Moore & Craig. I think you'll find some were disappointments, returns-wise. mea culpa- I felt so let down by the Dalton/Brosnan era, I haven't seen them all. Seen most and all the others several times (last once). In being American, you're right, they took an American flavour, changing chases from being clever to being OTT and with too many explosions. I had the impression they were trying to compete with Arnie action movies for big bangs & huge stunts. Terrible framing annoyed the fudge out of me, too- a 90's Bond pointing a machine pistol out a car window in one direction and baddies doing silly "I'm dead!' backflips in the other. 90's Bond film (same one?), boat chase. When a boat leaves the water & skids along the ground, you see the film prop, a fence, drop its railing a _long_ time before the boat "smashes thru". Glaringly obvious and unforgiveable in an expensive film. Dare I say it? Even worse that the laughable stunts in Van Damne & Norris action flicks. Bond films lost their Bond DNA. All those stunts & explosives cost huge amounts and some of the films brought shitty proportional returns. I was quoting a British magazine article, BTW. How flag-waving Brits filled cinemas to see Bond but (surprise!) didn't have much affection for Wesley Snipes or Stallone actioners.
Fixed exchange rates were always problematic and the shift to floating rates has been a good thing. But I remember this speech and a long period in which the British people were dispirited (I'm of an Anglo/American family).
When he first met the Queen after winning the General Election and was appointed PM the Queen asked if he would devalue the Pound. He said he couldn't afford for Labour to be seen as 'the party of devaluation' having done it before. And lo and behold .....
Its one thing for your party not being able to afford doing something and another thing for your country needing that something to be done. A politician has to put the country first over the interests of his/her party. Though all to often they delay it, hoping to be able to pass the bucket on to at least the next guy.
There’s advantages to devaluing your currency: Greece for example have been in debt since adopting the Euro, which has kept costs as high as Germany (despite being a poorer country). If Greece were able to devalue their currency, things would be cheaper and the first thing people would do is book holidays there. I don’t go anymore because it’s so expensive now.
I remember once, the rate of the British Pound to the US dollar when I was a young man. The pound to me was very high and then it dawned on me the only way was the government was keeping it high. It was great for the British traveling to America. Not so great when you visited Britain.
I can just imagine the passions that are roiling inside Cecil King when he hears Harold Wilson announcing the pounds devaluation, very fine actor indeed.
1. Money isn't real. 2. Devaluing a currency makes everyone believe that goods from a different currency/customs area are more expensive. I can get €10 for about £8.77 according to Google right now. Devalue the Pound Sterling by 14% and that same €10 item now costs me £10...£9.998 actually. In any case, the price of the item hasn't changed but the buying power of my money in relation to the currency the item is sold in has. Domestically this means that foreign produced and priced goods effectively become more expensive, but internationally our goods are essentially cheaper...£ for lb. The rationale being that our *cheaper* goods become more attractive on the foreign markets hopefully boosting the economy. :)
@@ost2life Boosting exports is one thing, but wouldn't that screw up with the lives of the people? People's purchasing power would have gone down, savings' values eroded, etc.
1) At the time the government and the bank of england had a "goal" of what the value of the pound should be versus the dollar. That goal translated to political and economic actions to defend that value of the pound if markets started to push the value lower. If people who held British pounds overseas started to sell them off (driving the value of the pound down) the government and the Bank of England would intervene in the markets by buying pounds to prop the price up. They did this by borrowing money from institutions like the International Monetary Fund. The currency was devaluated by the government stating that it would defend a different (lower) exchange rate target against the dollar. When the policy was announced, the pound would fall to that level in international markets. 2) If the value of the pound falls, the cost of things imported into the country instantly rises. Prices for things imported and things built from imported components go up. Living standards fall. The wages of ordinary people buy less. With Wilson's devaluation, the price of many goods in the economy instantly went up about 14%. People's pay bought about 14% less in terms of things. The problem with devaluation is that it doesn't tend to fix anything. It simply allows a government to defer dealing with the underlying economic problems and make those problems even worse in the future. The devaluation of the pound basically led to almost ten years of continuous economic crisis and informal devaluations of the pound. The pound was at a value of $2.40 after the devaluation and by 1976 it had fallen to $1.58. The country eventually was flat broke and had to be bailed out by the IMF like some kind of third world country. As part of being bailed out, the government had to agree to external requirements for reforming the economy. Through the IMF, the Labour party was able to make reforms of the economy that would otherwise have been politically impossible. The devaluation happened because the government of Harold Wilson was unwilling to address any of the economic problems of the country. And the devaluation allowed them to continue to ignore the economic problems until the country was left in a total financial crisis. At which point Harold Wilson basically walked away and left it to others to solve the problems.
FDR devalued the US Dollar in the 1930s by changing the price of gold redemption from $20.25/troy.oz. to $35./troy.oz. That hurt the US international economy for a decade. Nixon finally closed the Gold Window by floating the US Dollar instead of redeeming Dollars at $35.00/tr.oz. Now inflation and interest rates drive the value of international currencies.
Just an ignorant American’s pov but Wilson seems like a decent bloke just based off this show, I often wonder how each PM is perceived by the people of the UK.
tv shows always portray the more left of center politicians in a more positive light and the right of center politicians in a more negative light than what was reality
Most of the Labour PMs and their governments from the 60s to the 80s had to make tough decisions about Africa. Most of the decolonisation strategies came from Labour governments, as did most of the boycotts and other financial pressure against white minority rule countries in Africa. Their stance on Rhodesia's UDI, etc. It earned them pariah status from those 'more British-than-British' residents of Kenya, (then) Rhodesia, South Africa, and their many relatives in the UK. "Horrible Harold", they called Wilson, and they hung effigies of him from lampposts. It cost a few Labour administrations huge electoral support, especially by the very jingoistic types who made up a large segment of the population. England unusually saw a series of short-term governments, and the instability was partly caused by cabinets doing the honorable thing by Africa. But they were judged harshly by the voters.
there were advantages to the strict currency controls; capital was less mobile, and less fickle. The wealthy could be forced to pay taxes instead of threatening to move their money by a click of a computer to offshore accounts. The state was powerful, and the rich bowed before it. Now the state is without any means of controlling the rich, and they know it.
Independence for the central bank (in this case the Bank of England) removes many of the levers of the economy from democratic control and hands them to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. They are like high priests of capitalism, in thrall to one or other set of theories of how the economy works or ought to work. They answer to no one. In my view they should sit in the House of Lords in place of the abbots who were removed by Henry VIII. Borrowing from the IMF comes with strings attached: compulsory neoliberalism, encompassing tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, privatisation of public services, doing away with tariffs, free movement of capital (but not labour) ...
@@SandyYoung1 I have an Indian friend I met in college. He was born in the US many years after the British left India. And he HATES them with a passion. Maybe try asking someone who is Indian or Pakistani or Chinese or Egyptian or Irish and ask them about just how caring and kind the British Empire was.
@@nelsonchereta816 And the mythic joyful, peaceful India? Religious, factional violence, settee, etc... and after? Guess we skip the Pakistan/Indian and Bangladeshi casualties? All after Britain left. Palestine was the mess of muticulti League mandates and UN resolutions. Like Africa, keep blaming an Empire long gone, not the actual players.
@@michaelplunkett8059 Wow its almost as if raping and pillaging countries for years then when you leave dividing them poorly with straight lines that ignore cultural and religious groups in hasty exits from them doesn't set nations up for prosperous futures.
@@michaelmuldowney8 this rumour grew out of the fact that he did work as a private individual for a company that had a trading relationship with the USSR. He made more visits to Russia than any other british PM, but most of them were in a private capacity.
To pray for 1 thousand millions pounds loan from USA and than to devaluate BPound for 14% down, it was so unhappy decision no beggar w´d do it. The Brittish Government with PM Mr. Harold WILSON did it. So weak………🌵🌵🌵
The meteoric rise in house prices stem from Labour's greedy taxes - leaving houses as the ONLY escape route. Of course, it really began to bite when the Conservatives returned to power, so they got the blame. The unions insisted they ran the country, and in 1974, they proved it, with Labour returned to power. Labour's financial incompetence left Britain begging the IMF for help, and the noble unions had mountains of rubbish in the streets, and the unburied dead left in limbo. It took Mrs Thatcher to bring Britain into the late 20th century. Now we have perpetual socialist government - the Conservatives are NOT conservative - printing money as fast as they can go, robbing The People of the value of their savings, as the Global Agenda is rolled out. The Great Awakening - is people who see through the lies, the smokescreens, the perpetual stage-managed fearmongering with unwinnable perpetual wars on everything one can imagine.
Makes perfect sense. If you have a bunch of cash in a rapidly devaluing currency, you would rather invest it in a hard asset like real estate or gold to preserve your wealth. The only downside of that is that the market prices of such hard assets will be driven up, making it harder for people to afford housing or invest in gold.
It shows how badly managed Britain was before Thatcher came along and got rid of the group think. Johnson seems to want to take us back there at the moment.
People who think Thatcher improved that management seem to forget the interest rates and inflation rates that hobbled the economy until the days of Major. The early 1990s was seeing interests rates up to 15%. The new normal was brought about by the BoE getting it's independence and a change in the culture of monetary policy in the late 1990s.
@@Dir3ctH3X Thatcher improved a lot of stuff. Up until around WW2 the Britain was doing trade with her colonies where British manufacturing and business in general was enjoying a great deal of protectionism in order to remain sustainable. Post WW2 Britain was broke. The only ones giving financing were the Americans. The US basically demanded that the UK dismantle their colonies and enact free market capitalism instead of the current system. A lot of people went broke and started voting for stagnant socialist policies that gave away "free stuff" which caused corruption and economic stagnation. Meanwhile London which had been the financial and banking center of the empire started to decline since there no longer was an empire. When Britain joined the EU the capital London was still the biggest banking center on the continent so it effectively became the banking center of the EU. It was like they got a second empire. Thatcher made the mile a special economic zone, privatized losing government industries and cut spending. She also raised interest rates to cut inflation. It was a painful process that needed to be done and it did set up the modern British economic model. Brexit undid that of course since London is no longer the banking center of the EU. Now England once again needs a deal and only the Americans can offer one. The US will once again offer an unfair deal which will fuck the UK in the ass.
Devaluation can't occur because the dollar is freely floating. That will be depreciation and the dollar is strengthening against several currencies at the moment.
@@riddhimaansenapati5006 C'mon-you can't expect a member of the TrumpCult to actually deal in _facts._ If they could, they wouldn't be in the cult in the first place.
@@riddhimaansenapati5006 Only as a refuge in times of turmoil. After peace, the dollar weakness will be glaring. Like the other, "too strong" currencies.
Nothing? He was only trying to keep the whole country on the road after two world wars, the loss of empire and half our industry up to that point. By the 80s, Thatcher thought we could all become City boys or retail slaves- and that places like Liverpool should be allowed to crumble entirely- but obviously she solved all our problems, right?
@@herondelatorre4023 Socialism is the idea of everyone owning the means of production (i.e we all get a stake in factories and share in the profits basically) you can get there by democratic (Beatrice Webb) or revolutionary means (Rosa Luxembourg) Marxism is the philosophy penned by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels describing how capitalism inevitably only leads to the exploitation of the working class so a violent revolution is needed to overthrow it, whereby a dictatorship of the proletariat will briefly ensue before a communitarian society takes hold. Socialism is the main broadstream ideology Marxism is the first subsect Hope I helped clear that up for you 😁
@@biteme9486 State control of resources and economic production. Does it matter, through ownership, diktat, coercion or regulation? Outcome is the same.
Hope you guys liked this video!
I did, my favourite part about the crown are the different Prime Minsters through the ages. Really enjoy John Lithgow as Churchill, Jason Watkins as Wilson and Gillian Anderson was brilliant as Thatcher!!!!
Forget the Queen and Harold Wilson I like the RAF VC-10!
What few understood at the time, and few understand today, is that the value of the Pound already was slipping quite a lot but was being kept artificially higher by the way that exchange rates were structured. The sudden devaluation didn't make the British people poorer, it just exposed what had been eroding for years.
They faced similar problems in the early 1930s when the English government went off the gold standard. Suddenly, the British Pound, that symbol of strength and consistency, lost a shitload of spending power and security.
Both decisions were made due to reality- McDonald and Wilson having to acknowledge the fiscal situation of the time, and choosing long-term financial benefit.
The Brits _were_ made poorer by the devaluation, as they still imported a lot of food as well as household goods.
@@nevillewran4083 it's was overvalued after ww1 as well.
@@nevillewran4083 and yet everyone hates harold eventhough he did the right thing. Everyone hates mcdonald eventhough he kept britain out of the great depression. People
@@JK-gu3tl True.
@@adamharrold407 Yes, deliver everything I demand and give me lots of handouts, be I an age pensioner, out of work, a small business owner or the CEO of huge corporation. Don't make _me_ pay tax, make the other bastards.
Don't run up a deficit as you do so, and hurry up & give me my perks.
I love Jason Watkins’ quiet performance throughout the series. Especially scenes of evolving and real mutual respect between him and the Queen.
Jason Watkins is an awesome actor. He’s great in everything I see him in. I’ve seen him in lots of stuff lately
Queen loves him as her favourite pm. The queen went through thick and thin during ww2 serving in auxiliary unit. She endured rationing same as the rest, surely a labour pm such as Wilson was her favourite
@@timloo6191 It's trendy to disparage Wilson now, but his government did a lot of good things. I started listing them, but it's all on the internet if anyone wants to look it up.
@@timloo6191What other Prime Minister missed these experiences? Not Churchill. Eden, Heather,
@@michaelplunkett8059 but the queeen looooooves the commie pm. The queen stop the coup. Remember
Wilson: *attributes blame
Also Wilson: “now is not the time to attribute blame”
he blamed everyone - the previous Torry govt., foreign speculators etc. not uncompetitive economic policies
@@ciroalb3 I mean he ain’t wrong. The previous one put the economy in a ditch.
@@soupman3285 It was a continuation of previous economic factors. Keynesian economics were only now beginning to rear their dangers - artificial stagflation after a steady period under Mac the Knife, which took from Churchill, Attlee, Churchill-Eden administrations to reach. Also, the exchange with the old pound divided into shillings, pennies, was complicated, thus why Wilson-Heath implemented decimalisation - 100p to the pound simple, with growing pains.
@@soupman3285 You mean Churchill did.
In a way, this series tells the history of UK during a good part of the 20th century. I think this video is particularly brilliant in portraying how shocking and dispiriting this currency devaluation was for the primer minister himself and for a nation that still believed to be an empire
The commonwealth is probably still the biggest empire on earth if considering the money tied up in their worldwide labyrinthine banking system
I was just thinking that. We have to remember the mindset of the older people at the time. The great empire was close to them.
@@devanman7920 It's why that for many of the James Bond films made in the last 30 years, the only way they made a profit was huge numbers of nationalistic Brits flocked to see them. Many were poorly made & couldn't compete with American action films, so did badly world-wide.
But the English still needed to feel their country meant something, had influence in the world, so went to the cinema in large numbers, some of them repeat visitors, to see a hero from the UK saving the world.
The more flag-waving Brits, yes, the older people, missed the empire and the "Britannia Rules the Waves" notion. The loss of English might and prestige deeply saddened them. A film in a darkened cinema allowed them to suspend disbelief for a short time and still feel the UK was a leading nation.
@@nevillewran4083 The James Bond films *were* American action films (that is to say, produced by American studios, albeit they were shot in Britain with a Canadian director and British stars), they were very high quality for their time, and they were a huge hit internationally, where they were enormously influential, as you can see when you consider that the "cool-spy" and "action-hero-spy" genres arose entirely in reaction to the success of the Bond films. Thanks to Bond, we get similar French films, we get the Flint series of films in the States, we get Mission Impossible, we get innumerable spy spoofs, and we get Austin Powers. Even XXX and the "Bourne" series of films were envisioned as more modern alternatives to the pre-existing Bond series.
So it's a bit of a stretch to say that Bond films were only successful because "nationalistic" Brits flocked to see them.
@@CBfrmcardiff What I did express poorly was "the last 30 years". That wasn't true, they were revived by Daniel Craig. What I should have said was "roughly the 90s", that was a low patch. Brosnan & Dalton.
Before we argue too much about box office, perhaps we should agree on an official source for data? Ticket sales are relative and (generalising) the 90s were lower in comparison to Connery, Moore & Craig.
I think you'll find some were disappointments, returns-wise.
mea culpa- I felt so let down by the Dalton/Brosnan era, I haven't seen them all. Seen most and all the others several times (last once).
In being American, you're right, they took an American flavour, changing chases from being clever to being OTT and with too many explosions. I had the impression they were trying to compete with Arnie action movies for big bangs & huge stunts.
Terrible framing annoyed the fudge out of me, too- a 90's Bond pointing a machine pistol out a car window in one direction and baddies doing silly "I'm dead!' backflips in the other.
90's Bond film (same one?), boat chase. When a boat leaves the water & skids along the ground, you see the film prop, a fence, drop its railing a _long_ time before the boat "smashes thru".
Glaringly obvious and unforgiveable in an expensive film. Dare I say it? Even worse that the laughable stunts in Van Damne & Norris action flicks.
Bond films lost their Bond DNA. All those stunts & explosives cost huge amounts and some of the films brought shitty proportional returns.
I was quoting a British magazine article, BTW. How flag-waving Brits filled cinemas to see Bond but (surprise!) didn't have much affection for Wesley Snipes or Stallone actioners.
Nice contrast between the people in the plane not being troubled one bit and the rest of the folks
Sorry, by “folks” did you mean the rich bankers drinking Scotch? Those “folks?”
Fixed exchange rates were always problematic and the shift to floating rates has been a good thing. But I remember this speech and a long period in which the British people were dispirited (I'm of an Anglo/American family).
He played H.W. Perfectly!!!!!
That he did, and this coming from an American who hadn't heard of him, though I've read plenty about Wilson.
He even looked enough like Wilson to startle me. :-) Well done.
When he first met the Queen after winning the General Election and was appointed PM the Queen asked if he would devalue the Pound. He said he couldn't afford for Labour to be seen as 'the party of devaluation' having done it before. And lo and behold .....
Like war, politics is hell.
Typical politician....says he won't do something, then goes ahead and does it.
@@CaesarInVa He tried to avoid it though
Its one thing for your party not being able to afford doing something and another thing for your country needing that something to be done. A politician has to put the country first over the interests of his/her party. Though all to often they delay it, hoping to be able to pass the bucket on to at least the next guy.
This is what cost Labour the election.
What Wilson means by "we're out on our own now" is that there is no Empire to exploit!
im so amaze the look and voice just look like real hw
There’s advantages to devaluing your currency:
Greece for example have been in debt since adopting the Euro, which has kept costs as high as Germany (despite being a poorer country).
If Greece were able to devalue their currency, things would be cheaper and the first thing people would do is book holidays there.
I don’t go anymore because it’s so expensive now.
*Places blame*
*while previously laying blame*
I remember once, the rate of the British Pound to the US dollar when I was a young man. The pound to me was very high and then it dawned on me the only way was the government was keeping it high. It was great for the British traveling to America. Not so great when you visited Britain.
I can just imagine the passions that are roiling inside Cecil King when he hears Harold Wilson announcing the pounds devaluation, very fine actor indeed.
Can someone explain simply 1. how a government can just devalue their currency, and 2. what are the consequences of devaluation?
1. Money isn't real. 2. Devaluing a currency makes everyone believe that goods from a different currency/customs area are more expensive. I can get €10 for about £8.77 according to Google right now. Devalue the Pound Sterling by 14% and that same €10 item now costs me £10...£9.998 actually. In any case, the price of the item hasn't changed but the buying power of my money in relation to the currency the item is sold in has. Domestically this means that foreign produced and priced goods effectively become more expensive, but internationally our goods are essentially cheaper...£ for lb. The rationale being that our *cheaper* goods become more attractive on the foreign markets hopefully boosting the economy. :)
@@ost2life Boosting exports is one thing, but wouldn't that screw up with the lives of the people?
People's purchasing power would have gone down, savings' values eroded, etc.
@@Alvin_Vivian yes, that's why it's so controversial. It's about the last lever you want to pull before your economy goes bananas.
1) At the time the government and the bank of england had a "goal" of what the value of the pound should be versus the dollar. That goal translated to political and economic actions to defend that value of the pound if markets started to push the value lower. If people who held British pounds overseas started to sell them off (driving the value of the pound down) the government and the Bank of England would intervene in the markets by buying pounds to prop the price up. They did this by borrowing money from institutions like the International Monetary Fund.
The currency was devaluated by the government stating that it would defend a different (lower) exchange rate target against the dollar. When the policy was announced, the pound would fall to that level in international markets.
2) If the value of the pound falls, the cost of things imported into the country instantly rises. Prices for things imported and things built from imported components go up. Living standards fall. The wages of ordinary people buy less. With Wilson's devaluation, the price of many goods in the economy instantly went up about 14%. People's pay bought about 14% less in terms of things.
The problem with devaluation is that it doesn't tend to fix anything. It simply allows a government to defer dealing with the underlying economic problems and make those problems even worse in the future.
The devaluation of the pound basically led to almost ten years of continuous economic crisis and informal devaluations of the pound. The pound was at a value of $2.40 after the devaluation and by 1976 it had fallen to $1.58.
The country eventually was flat broke and had to be bailed out by the IMF like some kind of third world country. As part of being bailed out, the government had to agree to external requirements for reforming the economy. Through the IMF, the Labour party was able to make reforms of the economy that would otherwise have been politically impossible.
The devaluation happened because the government of Harold Wilson was unwilling to address any of the economic problems of the country. And the devaluation allowed them to continue to ignore the economic problems until the country was left in a total financial crisis. At which point Harold Wilson basically walked away and left it to others to solve the problems.
FDR devalued the US Dollar in the 1930s by changing the price of gold redemption from $20.25/troy.oz. to $35./troy.oz. That hurt the US international economy for a decade. Nixon finally closed the Gold Window by floating the US Dollar instead of redeeming Dollars at $35.00/tr.oz. Now inflation and interest rates drive the value of international currencies.
I miss how good this show was
Thatcher had to do the same because there was a lot of "kicking the can down the road" issues.
holy....
i read the title as "The Clown"...
@0:04 It appears the zero on the door of 10 Downing is straight and not at a slight angle, as it is today.
Just an ignorant American’s pov but Wilson seems like a decent bloke just based off this show, I often wonder how each PM is perceived by the people of the UK.
tv shows always portray the more left of center politicians in a more positive light and the right of center politicians in a more negative light than what was reality
@@AW-zk5qb I'm not British but this is so true for my country as well. People tend to think left is a great idea only until the left is in power.
@@AW-zk5qb As does history to be fair.
@@AW-zk5qb Like Fox? Or the christian drama channels?
Most of the Labour PMs and their governments from the 60s to the 80s had to make tough decisions about Africa. Most of the decolonisation strategies came from Labour governments, as did most of the boycotts and other financial pressure against white minority rule countries in Africa.
Their stance on Rhodesia's UDI, etc.
It earned them pariah status from those 'more British-than-British' residents of Kenya, (then) Rhodesia, South Africa, and their many relatives in the UK. "Horrible Harold", they called Wilson, and they hung effigies of him from lampposts.
It cost a few Labour administrations huge electoral support, especially by the very jingoistic types who made up a large segment of the population.
England unusually saw a series of short-term governments, and the instability was partly caused by cabinets doing the honorable thing by Africa.
But they were judged harshly by the voters.
almost hearing this exact same speech now hahah
Why governments should be kept out of currency values, it should be been devauled for years but wasnt for poltics
there were advantages to the strict currency controls; capital was less mobile, and less fickle. The wealthy could be forced to pay taxes instead of threatening to move their money by a click of a computer to offshore accounts. The state was powerful, and the rich bowed before it. Now the state is without any means of controlling the rich, and they know it.
Independence for the central bank (in this case the Bank of England) removes many of the levers of the economy from democratic control and hands them to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. They are like high priests of capitalism, in thrall to one or other set of theories of how the economy works or ought to work. They answer to no one. In my view they should sit in the House of Lords in place of the abbots who were removed by Henry VIII.
Borrowing from the IMF comes with strings attached: compulsory neoliberalism, encompassing tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, privatisation of public services, doing away with tariffs, free movement of capital (but not labour) ...
Oh vrexir. "For his expertize" the Saudi Arabian Princess tryed to tell you.
But ypu failed yo listen, didnt you?
As America found out, “Buy British” only works when there are British products to buy.
Tywin Lannister is British 😮???
bro recorded this on his microwave
1:22 👏
Why does this speech remind me so much of Boris Johnson and Brexit. "You will be poorer and you will enjoy it"
don't confuse bojo with WEF
@@TheShootist Wasn't making any reference to them but Boris is one of their puppets anyway.
As if there was ever a time the British Empire didn't put Britain first.
Pretty naive statement Nelson,considering that you’re writing that particular comment in English.🇬🇧
@@SandyYoung1 I have an Indian friend I met in college. He was born in the US many years after the British left India. And he HATES them with a passion. Maybe try asking someone who is Indian or Pakistani or Chinese or Egyptian or Irish and ask them about just how caring and kind the British Empire was.
@@nelsonchereta816 And the mythic joyful, peaceful India? Religious, factional violence, settee, etc... and after? Guess we skip the Pakistan/Indian and Bangladeshi casualties? All after Britain left.
Palestine was the mess of muticulti League mandates and UN resolutions.
Like Africa, keep blaming an Empire long gone, not the actual players.
@@michaelplunkett8059 omg... The opium war has enter the chat...
@@michaelplunkett8059 Wow its almost as if raping and pillaging countries for years then when you leave dividing them poorly with straight lines that ignore cultural and religious groups in hasty exits from them doesn't set nations up for prosperous futures.
Many contend he was the KGB’s best ever spy.
I suspect those people who believe that nonsense are idiots
That's bull.
@@67Parsifal I dont believe it - but some do.
@@michaelmuldowney8 this rumour grew out of the fact that he did work as a private individual for a company that had a trading relationship with the USSR. He made more visits to Russia than any other british PM, but most of them were in a private capacity.
It doesn't really look like him.
ur crazy he looks very like him
Yup. Looks a lot like Jason Watkins.
Question…Where any of his sexual tendencies shown in this series?
Wilson was weak
เอเซีย
To pray for 1 thousand millions pounds loan from USA and than to devaluate BPound for 14% down, it was so unhappy decision no beggar w´d do it. The Brittish Government with PM Mr. Harold WILSON did it. So weak………🌵🌵🌵
So, that’s where all this “Britain First” nonsense got started.
The meteoric rise in house prices stem from Labour's greedy taxes - leaving houses as the ONLY escape route.
Of course, it really began to bite when the Conservatives returned to power, so they got the blame.
The unions insisted they ran the country, and in 1974, they proved it, with Labour returned to power.
Labour's financial incompetence left Britain begging the IMF for help, and the noble unions had mountains of rubbish in the streets, and the unburied dead left in limbo.
It took Mrs Thatcher to bring Britain into the late 20th century.
Now we have perpetual socialist government - the Conservatives are NOT conservative - printing money as fast as they can go, robbing The People of the value of their savings, as the Global Agenda is rolled out.
The Great Awakening - is people who see through the lies, the smokescreens, the perpetual stage-managed fearmongering with unwinnable perpetual wars on everything one can imagine.
good to see Thatcherite propaganda still ticking away effectively in the minds of peons long after the wench has turned to dust and grubs
True
Makes perfect sense. If you have a bunch of cash in a rapidly devaluing currency, you would rather invest it in a hard asset like real estate or gold to preserve your wealth. The only downside of that is that the market prices of such hard assets will be driven up, making it harder for people to afford housing or invest in gold.
@@irkhanbasc
We live in a society driven by fear,
by people
who use fear as a weapon.
Not nice people.
Can't disagree here.
It shows how badly managed Britain was before Thatcher came along and got rid of the group think. Johnson seems to want to take us back there at the moment.
People who think Thatcher improved that management seem to forget the interest rates and inflation rates that hobbled the economy until the days of Major. The early 1990s was seeing interests rates up to 15%.
The new normal was brought about by the BoE getting it's independence and a change in the culture of monetary policy in the late 1990s.
Johnson is a thatcherite through.
@@Dir3ctH3X Such are the demands of runaway inflation and current account currency trading.
@@michaelplunkett8059 What are you talking about? That's such a general statement can you add some definition please.
@@Dir3ctH3X Thatcher improved a lot of stuff.
Up until around WW2 the Britain was doing trade with her colonies where British manufacturing and business in general was enjoying a great deal of protectionism in order to remain sustainable. Post WW2 Britain was broke. The only ones giving financing were the Americans. The US basically demanded that the UK dismantle their colonies and enact free market capitalism instead of the current system.
A lot of people went broke and started voting for stagnant socialist policies that gave away "free stuff" which caused corruption and economic stagnation. Meanwhile London which had been the financial and banking center of the empire started to decline since there no longer was an empire.
When Britain joined the EU the capital London was still the biggest banking center on the continent so it effectively became the banking center of the EU. It was like they got a second empire. Thatcher made the mile a special economic zone, privatized losing government industries and cut spending. She also raised interest rates to cut inflation.
It was a painful process that needed to be done and it did set up the modern British economic model. Brexit undid that of course since London is no longer the banking center of the EU. Now England once again needs a deal and only the Americans can offer one. The US will once again offer an unfair deal which will fuck the UK in the ass.
The market should set the value of currency not govt.
really does that explain the immense post wwii growth wealth and stability in the united states and its partners?
It did, in the end.
@@marvintpandroid2213
No. It did not.
The markets were intervened by both sides of World War II.
@@whathell6t good morning, by the end I mean when the erm collapsed, I didn't set a time frame.
Oh, BTW, it's a 3 month old post, let it die.
@@marvintpandroid2213
Morning?
I just got off swing shift.
Biden in 2022, hey man, we devalued our dollar, but I'm sure you already know.
Not at all the same thing
The dollar is at all time highs in terms of currency rates anyways
Devaluation can't occur because the dollar is freely floating. That will be depreciation and the dollar is strengthening against several currencies at the moment.
@@riddhimaansenapati5006 C'mon-you can't expect a member of the TrumpCult to actually deal in _facts._ If they could, they wouldn't be in the cult in the first place.
@@riddhimaansenapati5006 Only as a refuge in times of turmoil. After peace, the dollar weakness will be glaring. Like the other, "too strong" currencies.
Britain first
What does that mean
The World Trade Organization and the UN.
I did nazi that coming.
I did nazi that coming.
@@humanchannel7825 it's a right wing hate group
Every scene Ive seen with Wilson in this series just looks over acted to fuck lol, whys he shaking and quivering all the time over nothing
Nothing? He was only trying to keep the whole country on the road after two world wars, the loss of empire and half our industry up to that point. By the 80s, Thatcher thought we could all become City boys or retail slaves- and that places like Liverpool should be allowed to crumble entirely- but obviously she solved all our problems, right?
@@anonUK who asked? doesnt change the fact that he over acted every scene
Find a video of the actual Wilson. He was actually like that.
@@MightySheep You asked??
Socialism.
qwertyuiopqwerty112 : Marxism. Don't see the difference in either of the two. They're one in the same.
@@herondelatorre4023 Socialism is the idea of everyone owning the means of production (i.e we all get a stake in factories and share in the profits basically) you can get there by democratic (Beatrice Webb) or revolutionary means (Rosa Luxembourg) Marxism is the philosophy penned by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels describing how capitalism inevitably only leads to the exploitation of the working class so a violent revolution is needed to overthrow it, whereby a dictatorship of the proletariat will briefly ensue before a communitarian society takes hold.
Socialism is the main broadstream ideology
Marxism is the first subsect
Hope I helped clear that up for you 😁
@@herondelatorre4023 There are many different schools of socialism, not just what Marx wrote
We're seeing devaluation worse after Brexit under a 10 year Tory government...
@@biteme9486 State control of resources and economic production. Does it matter, through ownership, diktat, coercion or regulation? Outcome is the same.