I wanted to continue
an idea I've been brainstorming from the last Wikibox forum that I never got around to updating.
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Winters Of Discontent: 1985
With the Tory right left licking their wounds after the unpopular Thatcher government, the party was forced to embrace a more moderate alternative, or at least a less contentious leader. The figure to take up the mantle of the party leadership- Michael Heseltine, who narrowly beat out the elder statesman figure of William Whitelaw- proved an outspoken yet fairly popular figure, internationalist and forward-thinking in his rhetoric and an ardent champion of cooperation with Europe, and his aggressive rhetoric combined with modernized policies played well with swing voters, netting the Tories significant gains in local elections year upon year.
By contrast, Labour found themselves struggling to achieve a united front. Callaghan was getting long in the tooth, and the two factions of the party were unenthused by him, left-wingers like Michael Foot sceptical of his commitment to the welfare state and right-wingers like David Owen and Shirley Williams fearing he was no longer a stable electoral asset. His leadership was finally dethroned when he fumbled badly on the Argentinean invasion of the Falklands in 1982, an event which netted Labour an immense amount of bad press both for its unpreparedness and its limited commitment to fighting back. Callaghan resigned within days of the invasion, and the subsequent Labour leadership election saw Peter Shore become party leader.
Shore took on a much more aggressive tack with the Falklands than Callaghan, sending in British forces and trying to defend his decision to the Labour rank and file on the basis of giving better employment prospects to those entering the forces, and despite a brief blip in his ratings and victory in the conflict, Labour infighting was focused on far more than the war successes by the majority of tabloids. To make matters worse, Labour’s narrow majority was soon being eroded by defections from the party whip and a handful of by-election losses, most notably when the Tories gained Darlington in early 1983. In addition, the hawkish Shore was causing serious notoriety and infighting within the Labour Party by refusing to renege on agreements Callaghan and Jimmy Carter had made to allow US missiles to be stored in Britain when Ronald Reagan pushed for them, causing the CND-allied Labour MPs to threaten to form a splinter group.
Ironically, the economy was starting to improve somewhat throughout the early 1980s due to profits from North Sea Oil, which had also basically wiped the SNP out in the polls. Labour had started to invest some of this into public service programmes, but Heseltine posited that it could be used under a Tory government to push through large tax breaks, and his leadership was fundamentally more trusted than that of Shore, even by some Labour supporters. This became the centrepiece of the Tories’ 1985 election campaign, and it worked spectacularly.
The result was the most resounding Tory victory (or indeed victory for any party) since 1931. Heseltine won a colossal majority of 220, while Labour tumbled to its worst showing in terms of seats since 1935 and its smallest share of the popular vote since 1918. Shore resigned during his victory speech after being re-elected at Bethnal Green & Stepney, lamenting that ‘today we see the end of 21 years of either Labour in government or clearly within reach of government’. His defeatist attitude left him a target of aggressive hatred within his party to the end.
He had a point, however: Labour had been wiped out across the country. For the first time since the passage of the Great Reform Act, the Tories had won the most seats in Wales, and Labour was left without a single seat in East Anglia or the South East, just two seats in the South West (Bristol South and Swindon), only eight in the East Midlands, and only won more seats than the Tories in its traditional strongholds of the North East, Yorkshire and Scotland.
Heseltine, meanwhile, had an enormous mandate to push through whatever social reforms he pleased, and it was clear what he and the bulk of the Tory party wanted.