This morning, I took the Central Line out all the way to South Woodford to see a colleague for a discussion. When I left the tube station, I realised that I had not been there for 37 years.\u00a0I fought the two General Elections of 1974 as the Labour candidate for the then constituency of Wanstead and Woodford and I used to do leafleting at this station.<\/p>\n
The February 1974 election was held against the background of a miners’ strike<\/a> which had led the country to a three-day working week, but these days we have hardly any miners because we have virtually no coal mines. The October 1974 election resulted in the return of the minority Labour Government with a majority so small that, within a few years, it was forced to conclude the Lib-Lab pact <\/a>– the nearest thing to a post-war coalition until the real thing in 2010.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This morning, I took the Central Line out all the way to South Woodford to see a colleague for a discussion. When I left the tube station, I realised that I had not been there for 37 years.\u00a0I fought the two General Elections of 1974 as the Labour candidate for the then constituency of Wanstead […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-my-life-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7345"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7349,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7345\/revisions\/7349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}