1983 General Election
The 1983 General Election in the UK saw Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party win a landslide victory, securing a second term in office. The election was marked by a significant shift to the right in British politics, with the Labour Party's manifesto being dubbed the "longest suicide note in history" due to its left-wing policies. This election solidified Thatcher's position as a dominant political figure.
7 Key excerpts on "1983 General Election"
eBook - ePub- Paul Whiteley(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...9 Postscript: The 1983 General Election It would be an understatement to say that the 1983 General Election was a bad defeat for Labour. The statistics of this election have by now been well reviewed in the press. In terms of the share of the popular vote the result was Labour’s worst since 1918; in terms of parliamentary seats the result was the worst since 1935; and if one cares to calculate the average Labour vote per candidate the results were worse than those of the 1930s. In this sense one has to look at the General Elections before the First World War when the party was in its infancy to see a worse performance. The summary statistics of the 1983 election appear in Table 9.1, which also includes the results of the 1979 election. The most striking feature of these results, apart from the sharp decline in the Labour share of the vote, was the fact that the Conservatives increased their parliamentary representation by thirty-six seats with a smaller vote than in 1979. This result was of course produced by an electoral system which magnifies a lead in the popular vote, but also by the boundary reorganization which gave the Conservatives a distinct advantage. One of the most disturbing things about this reorganization was that although the boundary commissioners were politically independent they worked within a framework of boundaries arising from the local government reorganization of the early 1970s. It has been shown that this reorganization produced boundaries which clearly favoured the Conservatives, as it was designed to do so by the then minister, Peter Walker (Newton, 1983). Labour has suffered a loss of seats in the two General Elections since 1974 as a direct result of this. In the future Labour and others will have to look at this whole question again to ensure that boundaries fairly reflect political support in the country. The task facing the Labour Party at the next General Election in the late 1980s is formidable...
eBook - ePub- Mark Garnett(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...However, Thatcher was eminently newsworthy, not least because of her forthright views on domestic and international questions. Whether or not the Falklands conflict determined the outcome of the 1983 General Election – most likely, it simply increased a majority which the Conservatives would have secured anyway – it ensured that Thatcher would certainly be the central figure second time round. At the start of the 1983 campaign the Economist pronounced that ‘The issue is Thatcher.’ What this meant, to ‘rational’ readers of a specialist journal, was that the election was likely to be decided by voters for whom all of the political issues of 1983 (the economy, nuclear weapons, etc.) were somehow subsumed or transcended by a single personality. Right-wing tabloid journalists, well aware that their readers would not wish to follow the nuances of the economic debate which had ravaged the Conservative Party since 1979, replaced the old journalistic deference towards Prime Ministers with slavering subservience. One Daily Express writer opined that ‘The PM is the sun around which all other politicians orbit’ (Butler and Kavanagh, 1984, 206–7). With this level of adulation fresh in her memory, it is not surprising that Thatcher was taken aback by the relatively low profile she was asked to adopt in the next general election campaign (1987). Although she understood that some of her colleagues – notably the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson – had contributed to the supposed ‘economic miracle’ which had taken place since 1983, she surely deserved a central role as the person whose iron resolution had rescued the country from the turmoil of the late 1970s. When on ‘Wobbly Thursday’ (4 June 1987, just a week before the election) opinion polls suggested that the overall Conservative majority might fall – or disappear entirely – Thatcher began to suspect malevolent intentions even in previously trusted colleagues like the party’s Chairman, Norman Tebbit...
eBook - ePubThe Heath Government 1970-74
A Reappraisal
- Stuart Ball, A. Seldon(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The election was called in part to contain trade union power, but the outcome ensured that the miners and other unions were the short-term winners and able to dictate policy to the next Labour government. The outcome marked a turning point in Heath’s career and in the character of the Conservative Party. If Heath’s leadership had been strengthened by the Conservatives’ winning the 1970 general election, then he and his style of Conservatism were major casualties of the 1974 election defeat. The path was open for Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph to argue for a new kind of Conservatism. The result, in conjunction with that of the October election later that year, induced something of an electoral crisis in the Conservative Party; the Party’s lowest share of the vote in elections since 1945 was followed by the lowest gained in the course of the twentieth century. The decline in the Conservative share of the vote between 1970 and February 1974 (8.6 per cent) is still the largest suffered by any government party since 1945. The assumption of most discussions of the timing of elections is that a government calls one only after it has prepared the ground, through tax give-aways and pump-priming to induce a ‘feel good’ mood among voters, and is reassured by a run of favourable opinion polls. Heath’s government had no such comfortable background. Other Prime Ministers had called ‘early’ elections – for example, Clement Attlee in 1951 because he had a majority of only six, and Harold Wilson in 1966 one of only four. James Callaghan was forced to call an election after his government lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons in 1979. But his government was already in a minority and the Parliament was near the end of its life. None of these excuses or explanations are available for Heath in 1974...
eBook - ePub- David Robbins, Lesley Caldwell, Graham Day, Karen Jones, Hilary Rose, David Robbins, Lesley Caldwell, Graham Day, Karen Jones, Hilary Rose(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...each week-day morning during the Election) has not been examined although there is some evidence to suggest that this programme was influential in setting up the issues for the day, even if not to the same degree as the official party press conferences. (7) All of this does require close analysis, particularly because we do believe that there is a given form or structure to general election coverage in each of the mass media, and these forms are relatively ‘permanent’. That is to say, forms of election coverage of the kind observed in the 1979 Election are likely to structure the coverage given the 1984 Election, or any earlier election. Students of the media, and particularly socialists involved in political practice, must do much more work in understanding these forms, in order to identify points of intervention at which alternative frameworks can be given primacy. The work displayed in this paper is on television alone, which may be justified as the most important medium which people in general use in forming opinions at the moment of elections. There is certainly widespread evidence that people feel that television is more real, impartial and personal in its reportage than are newspapers and even the (unseen) professional journalists on the radio. (8) A final cautionary point is essential before we turn to the substance of this paper. The corner stone of the Tory victory was the very significant electoral foothold in traditionally Labour-voting constituencies that the Conservatives gained, as Margaret Thatcher had predicted they would. (9) Kellner’s examination of the popular vote in May 1979 revealed that 37 per cent of skilled and semi-skilled workers voted Tory as against only 28 per cent in 1974, and that 41 per cent of the 18-24-year-old age group cast their vote to the Tories in 1979 as against only 24 per cent five years before. (10) It is in no way our intention to indict television journalists, in any simple-minded fashion, for this victory...
eBook - ePub- Colin Rallings, Michael Thrasher(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1.32 : General Election 1959 (8 October) Table 1.33 : General Election 1964 (15 October) Table 1.34 : General Election 1966 (31 March) Table 1.35 : General Election 1970 (18 June) Table 1.36 : General Election 1974 (28 February) Table 1.37 : General Election 1974 (10 October) Table 1.38 : General Election 1979 (3 May) Table 1.39 : General Election 1983 (9 June) Table 1.40 : General Election 1987 (11 June) Table 1.41 : General Election 1992 (9 April) Table 1.42 : General Election 1997 (1 May) Table 1.43 : General Election 2001 (7 June) Table 1.44 : General Election 2005 (5 May) 2 General Election Summary Data, 1832-2005 Table 2.01 : Summary Results of General Elections 1832-2005 (UK) Table 2.02 : Summary Results of General Elections 1832-2005 (GB) Table 2.03 : Votes Cast at General Elections 1832-2005 (UK) Table 2.04 : Votes Cast at General Elections 1832-2005 (GB) Table 2.05 : Party Votes as Percentages of Electorate 1950-2005 (UK & GB) Table 2.06 : Conservative and Labour Votes as Percentages of Two-Party Votes 1945-2005...
- Dennis Kavanagh, Iain Dale(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...LABOUR PARTY GENERAL ELECTION MANIFESTO OCTOBER 1974 Britain will win with Labour Date of Election Thursday 10 October Party Leader Harold Wilson Candidates 623 MPs 319 Votes 11,457,079 % of Vote 39.2% Foreword by the Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, OBE, FRS, MP In February we put before the British people our Manifesto, ‘Labour’s Way out of the Crisis’. It was a programme for getting Britain back to work, for overcoming what was universally acknowledged to be the gravest economic crisis Britain had faced since the war. A programme to be carried out by a Government of all the people working together. Labour formed the Government, got Britain back to work and showed our determination to fulfil the programme which we had put before the people. No postwar British Government has achieved more in six months. But at every turn we have found ourselves faced in Parliament by a majority which could, and did, coalesce to frustrate the policies we had put before the nation. What is still more serious has been the widespread expectation of an inevitable and early General Election, which created uncertainty in industry and the other institutions of our British society. Soon the people must decide on the Government to whom they want to entrust the future of themselves and their families for the next five years. • They will judge each Party on its record in office, when it had the responsibility: on its record in honouring the pledges it had made to the country. On its willingness to undertake measures which would enlist the support and enthusiasm of our people in fighting the economic crisis. • They will judge on the policies which each Party puts forward, asking themselves which Party can best be trusted to make a reality of those policies. • They will judge not only on policies and records, but on the calibre and experience of the men and women who will be responsible for carrying out those policies...
eBook - ePubThe Slump
Britain in the Great Depression
- John Stevenson, Chris Cook(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Curiously, during the lifetime of the second Labour Government, Labour had lost only three seats – at Fulham West, Shipley and Ashton-under-Lyne – but far more significant in terms of any future General Election had been the Liberal collapse. In every contested by-election (except for Scarborough, where no Labour candidate stood) the Liberal share of the poll had fallen, in many cases disastrously. This, however, was of little comfort for the Labour Party. For the lessons of the by-elections were clear. Long before MacDonald ‘betrayed’ the Labour Party, the electorate had already given clear indications of its disenchantment with the shortcomings of the government. There was a second, and perhaps even more fundamental, reason why the Labour Party faced a General Election with much to fear from the voters. The reason lay in the circumstances of the 1929 election. In that year, though emerging for the first time as the largest single party, Labour did not fare nearly as well as some historians would have us believe. In the euphoria of Labour’s success in May 1929, a variety of features of the party’s victory had been obscured. Though the party had, for the first time in its history, become the largest single party, a large proportion of its victories had been won with the slenderest of margins. In addition, the chance workings of the electoral system had actually benefited Labour. With fewer votes than the Conservatives, Labour had actually won more seats. As a result, with many seats won by narrow margins, even a small decline in Labour’s popularity at any subsequent election was likely to produce widespread losses. Labour had a further source of concern. Many of these Labour victories had been achieved in three-cornered fights on a minority vote. No less than 41 per cent of Labour-held seats in 1929 had been won on a minority vote, compared with 21·9 per cent in 1924...
