DBWI: Thatcher wins in 1979

Yeah, yeah, I know, been done.

But: The no-confidence vote was 311-310 in Callaghan's favour. We're a coin toss away from a tie or the dissolution of the government. Even without that, October's a hung parliament and it would only take a few constituencies for a Conservative majority.

For a start, does the Falklands War happen without the 1981 White Paper and HMS Endurance being pulled back?
 
I assume that the Conservatives would be big on defense and would try to strengthen the Royal Navy. So no Falkland war.
Another question: In most Thatcher-TL the UK fells apart even earlier then in OTL. Is that really so set in stone?
 
Yeah, yeah, I know, been done.

But: The no-confidence vote was 311-310 in Callaghan's favour. We're a coin toss away from a tie or the dissolution of the government. Even without that, October's a hung parliament and it would only take a few constituencies for a Conservative majority.

For a start, does the Falklands War happen without the 1981 White Paper and HMS Endurance being pulled back?

Shouldn't this be in ASB? There's no way 1970's Britain would have elected a female Prime Minister. Socially speaking despite the advance in Women's rights throughout the 60's and 70's there was still a large amount of chauvinism both in and out of Parliament for her to be elected. If the Tories had tried the 1983 with her still leading the party we'd have been stuck with Labour probably until at least 1987 anyway.

As it is, I think if you tried to Write a time line about Curry being the first female PM with a POD anytime before 1993 you'd be laughed off of the board - and she was lucky in 1997 as it was. That said, nearly 20 years later, we're still only looking at a possible 2nd female prime minister at the next election of the Greens, PC, SNP and ERP can get a coalition together.
 
Wasn't the Deputy Leader at the time for Labour Michael Foot? :eek:

Assuming that, Thatcher may have a chance, or possibly a third party wins between to two choices...
 
Well, chances are those wankers wouldn't nearly have scrapped HMS Ark Royal, which they did after war which caused enough anger to get a real no-vote of confidence.

Plus Thatcher was a Conservative in the perfect environment for her. So think the Conservative cuts of 87 onwards on a smaller scale being accepted because of the overwhelming bureaucracy and stagnation of the left-wing.

Truth is, even Howard the Duck (movie version), if he had been a conservative could've won during the 80's, the question was when.
 
Beyond Albion

Never yet in a Thatcher-Wins TL have I seen the effect on two things: The American Carter's re-election in 1980 and the assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981. (It's like other than those useless islands in the South Atlantic, the rest of the world doesn't exist!)

It is arguable a Thatcher victory would embolden the Conservatives in the USA to go for Ronald Reagan (however unlikely as he was a divorced former New Deal Democrat). With Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US, international Conservatism might have a fighting chance.

With John Paul II still alive in the late '80's, he could have been a mediator who could have helped a more peaceful end to the USSR than the one we suffered (several nukes going off, even confined to the former USSR did a number on weather for a good score of years, not to mention the fallout problems.)

Not complaining about the present world condition mind, a quarter century of peace and prosperity is not to be sneezed at, but it might have been better, don't you know. (For one thing, the Mars Colony could have been planted in the 1990's.)
 
re: the Pope.

I don't think those wackjob Orangemen who took out John Paul II on his UK visit would have acted any differently in the event of a Conservative victory. I know that stupid "statement" they mailed out to the press rambled on about the Labour Party and it's supposed betrayal of Ulster, but at the end of the day I think party politics was just a side issue for them.

Heck, those were the kind of guys who probably would've killed the Pope even if they were getting every single thing they wanted politically. They were just religious fanatics, full stop.
 
Yeah, the Ulster militants would have been less agitated if a hardline Conservative was in but if you're a guy who's going to shoot the Pope, you're a guy who's going to shoot the Pope. That couldn't be solved. Thatcher being around could have made the Northern Irish Assembly less of a mess though, the Conservatives would have more clout with the "loyalists" (though then we'd have the republicans agitating in their place). No "Red and Green" murals in that timeline.

It is arguable a Thatcher victory would embolden the Conservatives in the USA to go for Ronald Reagan (however unlikely as he was a divorced former New Deal Democrat).

It's possible - getting hostages out of Iran only gave Carter a slight boost, Reagan (or maybe another candidate if Thatcher's in) could have turned that around.

Truth is, even Howard the Duck (movie version), if he had been a conservative could've won during the 80's, the question was when.

As Brittan shows, ho ho - but without a second 'Falklands bounce', everything had caught up with Labour and there was nobody Callaghan could hand the reigns to. Pity really, you wouldn't have needed the SDP split and the UK wouldn't have faced late-80s megacuts if the Hard Left hadn't gutted any of Callaghan's attempts to get his house back in order.
 
Another question: In most Thatcher-TL the UK fells apart even earlier then in OTL. Is that really so set in stone?

Yes, but the timing is the writer's playing hindsight on us. Scottish nationalism had been inflamed since the referendum of 1979, North Sea oil profits made it worse, and Callaghan was under pressure to do another Scotland Act - once that was in, independence was inevitable because the Scottish could argue they definitely could handle their own affairs. If anything, Thatcher would have delayed it because the Tories wanted the Scotland Act repealed and wouldn't care about devolution. I'd guess it'd be the 2000s instead of 1990*. These timelines have it in the mid-to-late 80s and all require Thatcher to bring in Holyrood.

* and the cumulative effects from that would be enormous. For one, Brittan's no longer The Man Who Lost The Union and a one-term man; you don't have old-school Labour and new-flavour Tories discredited in the eyes of the public within years of each other. A more recently independent Scotland would have wildly different politics too, so the bank horrors of 2009 are out
 
Wonder if Thatcher would have implemented any economic reforms. even today free-marketeers lump Britain with France and Europe as a lazy, unproductive, stagnant, almost socialist economy. Plus I doubt that we'd have had the Great Strike of 2010, that destroyed Prime Minister Hague and ensured the Tories got less than 200 seats. They're very lucky to have got a hung parliament last year. Also, I wonder if the UK would still have the single currency, or would there be butterflies to that.
 
Wonder if Thatcher would have implemented any economic reforms.

Based on 1987, yeah - not as far as Brittan could go, but quite far. If the Tories get two terms, those reforms aren't going to be mostly repealed either and the free-marketeers will be very happy indeed.

The euro's inevitable though. When the rest of the EU was going for it, it would have been quite hard to stand out.
 
I agree that Thatcher would never have won, Conservative-wank TLs aside. Who seriously thinks that Conservative voters would turn out en masse to elect the United Kingdom's first female Prime Minister? I'm cynical enough to think that's why they elected her in the first place; they knew they weren't going to win in 1979 so they chose that as a year to give her a chance at the leadership and have her fail so that the party could put someone more credible, i.e. male, in power. The Conservative Party has long been much more ruthless than Labour in deposing failed leaders; no wonder it wasn't long after Thatcher lost when the knives came out and the Heathites sailed back in.

The idea of Thatcher winning is sufficiently far-fetched that there are plenty of even more far-fetched notions floating around in this discussion. Avoiding the single currency? God, I wish so, but that certainly wouldn't have happened in an ATL with a more successful Conservative Party. The Conservatives are far more wrapped up with pan-European-nationalist idealism than Labour are, or indeed any of the other parties big enough to be worth mentioning; it's always been that way and it always will be. Are all of you too young to remember Harold Wilson and the EC referendum?

A Thatcher Conservative government would be, well, a Conservative government, not the Referendum-Party-before-the-Referendum-Party fantasy that some people seem to have. We've had Conservative governments before; we know exactly what they're like. They aren't the sort of people who would stand against the EU, any more than they would stand up for trade unionism against the bosses.

It would be great if it could somehow have happened, though. That's the root of the troubles Pericles was talking about. It's honestly hard to know who to blame. Poor Hague [1] was just trying to comply with the terms enforced by the troika; the huge budget cuts were disruptive, no doubt, but from his perspective he had no choice in order to keep the country afloat and prevent another catastrophic default and decline in living standards due to lack of cooperation with the lenders and the punitive dissatisfaction of the IMF, ECB et al. It's difficult to fault the strikers either; they were doing naught but trying to protect the wages they rightly earned by their work. The true villain of the story is of course the EU itself, vehicle for the imposition of neoliberalism that it is—if we were able to have our own central bank and set our own interest rates rather than being forced to follow an institution which doesn't really help anyone except the German economy, the Great Collapse wouldn't have hit us anywhere near so hard and we'd be in the same boat as Switzerland and Norway, not the same boat as Italy, Portugal and Greece—but that's far too abstract for most people.

That's why Hague fell, really. He was stuck in an impossible balancing act between remorseless usurers of international capital trying to take their pound of flesh and public anger at those demands. Perhaps apathy was worse than any of it; so many people have lost hope that anything will ever get better. Redwood may be one hell of a public speaker and the Referendum Party may have been strong enough to turn an electoral defeat into an electoral massacre for the Conservatives, but everyone knows we're too entangled with the eurozone to pull out of it now (how would we do it? Say that euros being traded in the United Kingdom are somehow different from all the other euros floating around the continent, and we'll exchange these but not others?). The low turnout in the election was because people have lost hope that their votes can ever change anything, since no matter who they vote for they'll just get more austerity enforced upon them by wealthy greedy bankers from Europe and America. [2]


OOC:

[1] That was quite an interesting portrayal; I've never seen Hague as Ted Heath 2.0 before.

[2] For a party to go from 325 seats or more (able to form a government) to under 200—especially in the circumstances of a big strike harming public order, which is normally the sort of thing which would make people fearful and make Conservative voters turn out in droves, i.e. pretty much circumstances tailor-made for the benefit of a Conservative government—is, well, let's say, surprising. This is an attempt at rationalisation: the Conservatives were being bled white on their right flank by a rival party, so the right-wing vote was really heavily split. (Alternatively it may have been the supposition that, if not for the black magic of Thatcher ruining the inevitable march of progress, people who are right-wing in the real world wouldn't be right-wing, but I'll make a more generous assumption as to authorial intent.)
 
The left were certainly unhappy that the SDP came back in after the Great Strike and didn't manage to overturn all austerity - which they can't (though they did get more of the debt written down) and neither can Labour, not that it's stopping McDonnell's mouth writing cheques his mouth can't cash.
 
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