Intro (0:56) A short political history of medieval Hungary (2:37) The Hungarian oligarchy (3:34) The Decline of Oligarchy (06:00) What is whig history (07:33) The rise and fall of Venice (11:38) Warnings of Oligarchy (16:11) The birth of American Oligarchy (18:05) The death of American Oligarchy (23:34) A warning from History? (25:33) Outro (27:16)
A recently reemerging idea in the English speaking political landscape is that history is the story of an almost natural progression of humanity into liberty culminating within English and American democracy. This is nonsense. And it also has a name: "whig history"
Whig history is "bunk". The economic liberties that are so often praised by advocates of whig history, can very often result in the creation of oligarchies that then proceed to undermine and destroy the very economic liberties that created the oligarchy in the first place.
A Northamptonshire hedger is ably assisted by a smiling land girl eager to learn the rural craft of hedge making and maintenance in this gentle instructional film, made by the Realist Film Unit for the Ministry of Agriculture.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Government introduce new measures to support domestic agriculture and farmers' income. Subsidies or price insurance schemes were created for sugar beet, wheat, cattle, dairy and sheep. The Agricultural Produce (Grading and Marketing) Act 1928 promoted the standardisation of grades and packaging and introduced the "National Mark", a trade mark denoting home-produced food of a defined quality for eggs, beef, apples and pears. The Agricultural Marketing Acts of 1931 and 1933 sought to organise farmers into co-operative marketing associations and created Marketing Boards for bacon, pigs, hops, milk and potatoes. The Import Duties Act 1932 introduced a tariff on most imports including fruit and vegetables and quotas on imports of bacon, ham and other meat products. In 1936 the tithe rent charge was abolished, compensation paid to the Church and the money recovered from farmers over a 60-year period. In 1937 a scheme was introduce to subsidise the spreading of lime on agricultural land to boost the fertility of the soil. The Minister of Agriculture was given powers to regulate the cultivation and management of land, end tenancies, even take possession of land, under the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939. On 1 September 1939 many of these powers were delegated to County War Agricultural Executive Committees ("War Ags").
War was declared on 3 September 1939. The UK entered the war well prepared for the maintenance of supplies of food but with less than 40% of the country's needs produced at home. The Ministry of Food was formed on 8 September and William Morrison appointed Minister. The Ministry of Food became the sole buyer and importer of food and regulated prices, guaranteeing farmers prices and markets for their produce. The Marketing Boards, except for milk and hops, were suspended.
Although the upper levels of government would remain in London to act as a “nucleus” the plan was to evacuate the majority of civil servants, mainly to seaside resorts that would have empty hotel accommodation. In this way for example the Ministry of Food(created separately from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries) established a major presence at Colwyn Bay(near Llandudno, North Wales). From their base on the Welsh Coast, the relocated civil servants (under Lord Woolton, Minister of Food from April '40 until '43) not only set about the enormous task of organising the distribution and rationing of food, they also initiated a massive propaganda effort directed at the people of Great Britain to educate them to feed themselves. It was from Colwyn Bay that initiatives such as “Dig for Victory” were set out.
Recruiting began for the Women's Land Army and in 1940, food rationing was introduced. Lord Woolton succeeded William Morrison as Minister for Food. In 1941, the US Lend-Lease act was passed under which food, agricultural machinery and equipment was sent from the US to the UK.
Dorman-Smith was referred to in the book "Guilty Men" by Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard (writing under the pseudonym 'Cato'), published in 1940 as an attack on public figures for their failure to re-arm and their appeasement of Nazi Germany.
Minister of Agriculture - 14 May 1940 to 26 July 1945
He served in several ministerial posts, becoming a Privy Counsellor in 1938. From 1937 to 1940, Hudson served in the Department of Overseas Trade. He had a particular interest in farming and was a member of the council of the Royal Agricultural Society. In 1940, Hudson was appointed the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, a post he would hold until the 1945 election. In the opinion of Edward Turnour, 6th Earl Winterton, Hudson "was by far the best of Ministers of Agriculture in either war...he was determined to see that farmers and landowners alike utilised every acre of soil to help keep the nation from starvation".
The Minister of Food Control (1916–1921) and the Minister of Food (1939–1958) were British government ministerial posts separated from that of the Minister of Agriculture. In the Great War the Ministry sponsored a network of canteens known as National Kitchens. In the Second World War a major task of the Ministry was to oversee rationing in the United Kingdom necessitated by WW2. The Minister was assisted by a Parliamentary Secretary.
The Minister of Aircraft Production was from 1940 to 1945 the British government position in charge of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, one of the specialised supply ministries set up by the British Government, during WW2. It was responsible for aircraft production for the British forces, primarily the Royal Air Force, but also the Fleet Air Arm.
The department was formed in May 1940 by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in response to the need to produce large numbers of aircraft to fight the Battle of Britain. The first minister was Lord Beaverbrook; under his control the Ministry presided over an enormous increase in British aircraft production. Initially under the personal direction of the Minister, even for a time operating from his private home, the Ministry eventually established permanent offices, with a Director-General of Aircraft Production in charge. The Director-General for much of the war was Eric Fraser (1896-1960), who remained the most senior non-elected figure in the department. Fraser, whose pre-war career had been with Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI).
In 1919 Fraser had joined the chemical company Brunner Mond & Co as a manager, remaining when it merged with three other British chemical manufacturers to become Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in 1926. With 33,000 employees, ICI was one of the largest manufacturers in Britain, able to compete with the rest of the world's chemical producers. Fraser was first appointed director-general of equipment production, before moving to the aircraft production post which he held throughout the rest of the war.
On the outbreak of WW2 a significant number of businessmen were seconded to the civil service, particularly in field of army supply. Fraser was part of this group, joining the War Office in 1939 as Assistant Director General of Progress and Statistics, then Director of Investigation and Statistics in 1940. Moving to the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP) in 1942, he became Director Generalof Equipment Production and, in April 1943, Director General of Aircraft Production, a post he held until the end of the war.
In MAP Fraser worked closely with the Minister of Aircraft Production who, from November 1942, was Sir Stafford Cripps, who worked well with Ministry staff. By 1942 aircraft production had rapidly expanded from a number of small innovative companies to be the largest industry in the country. MAP's role was to monitor and co-ordinate the activity of the industry to maximise output, particularly of bombers, and intervene to remove inefficiency and bad practice where necessary. MAP officials with previous experience in large industries, and who knew more about factories and production lines than ministers and permanent civil servants, played a key role in this work. While Fraser was Director General, Cripps developed Joint Production Consultation Committees, set up in each aircraft factory to allow an exchange of views between managers and workers. These mirrored ICI labour relations policies, which had already recognised works councils for a number of years.
In 1945, Ben, later Sir Ben, Lockspeiser was appointed director-general.
The first minister, Lord Beaverbrook, pushed for aircraft production to have priority over virtually all other types of munitions production for raw materials. This was needed in the summer and autumn of 1940, but it distorted the supply system of the war economy. It eventually came to be replaced by a quota system, with each supply ministry being allocated a certain amount of raw materials imports to be distributed amongst various projects within the ministries' purviews. Beaverbrook still continued to push hard for increases in aircraft production until he left the ministry to become Minister of Supply.
Controversially, under Beaverbrook's tenure the aircraft programs set bore little relation to actually expected aircraft production. Beaverbrook deliberately inserted an extra margin of 15% over and above the very best that British industry could be expected to produce. The extra margin was added to provide an out-of-reach target to British industry so that it would push as hard as possible to increase production. Only with the 'realistic' programme of 1943 was planned aircraft production brought back into line with volumes that could realistically be expected from British factories.
The Ministry was characterised by, for its time, highly unorthodox methods of management, including its initial location at Beaverbrook's home, Stornoway House. The personnel was personally recruited from outside the Air Ministry, interaction was informal, characterised by personal intervention, crisis management and application of willpower to improve output. "Few records were kept, the functions of most individuals were left undefined and business was conducted mainly over the telephone."
One important change made within days of the creation of the ministry was it taking over the RAF's storage units and Maintenance Units which were found to have accepted 1,000 aircraft from the industry, but issued only 650 to squadrons. These management and organisational changes bore results almost immediately: in the first four months of 1940, 2,729 aircraft were produced of which 638 were fighters, while in the following four months crucial to the Battle of Britain combat during May to August 1940, production rose to 4,578 aircraft, of which 1,875 were fighters. This production rate was two and a half times Germany's fighter production at the time. The ministry was additionally able to repair and return to service nearly 1,900 aircraft.
The result of this effort and management style was that while the number of German fighters available for operations over England fell from 725 to 275, the RAF's complement rose from 644 at the beginning of July 1940 to 732 at the beginning of October 1940.
