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Events, Dear Boy
A British Political Timeline
So, an idea I've had for a while, but one I'm only just finally getting around to putting into an actual timeline. The POD for this TL is that Tony Benn, instead of Denis Healey, wins the 1981 UK Labour Party deputy leadership contest.

This TL won't be very text heavy so I suppose it will be more of a mini TL in that respect. But it will seek to cover politics in the UK, US and Europe. I may do some other countries too. I have the TL roughly planned out until present day.


The 1981 Labour Party deputy leadership contest saw Tony Benn, former Energy Secretary under James Callaghan and MP for Bristol South East, challenge the incumbent Denis Healey. The contest was held at the party's conference in September 1981, amongst background of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) having split from the party earlier on in the year and attracting a number of Labour MPs to join their ranks since. Benn was from the hard left of the party and was strongly supported by Militant, a Trotskyite entryist group that aimed to infiltrate Constituency Labour Parties and drag the party leftwards in the aftermath of Labour's 1979 election defeat. The contest was the first to be held under the new electoral college system – now instead of MPs having universal control over who was elected leader, the final result also saw affiliated unions and CLP blocks having a say too. This meant that the moderate Healey faced a much closer contest than he would have done under the old system. Nonetheless, he was still widely expected to win.
John Silkin, a former government minister, would also throw his hat in the ring as a "soft left" candidate. Unsurprisingly, Silkin was eliminated in the first round after securing just under 20% of the vote. Healey failed to win a majority of votes in the first round to avoid a second ballot. The second ballot was far closer than anyone ever expected: indeed, it came to pass that the result was on a knife-edge but, thanks to securing a larger proportion of union votes than expected, as well as 90% support amongst CLPs, Benn would win the leadership over Healey. His victory motivated his supporters to try and push significant party reforms through over the course of the next year and meant that, by the party's 1982 conference, the possibility of MPs being forced to face US-style primaries before every general election and of internal party elections being conducted under one-man-one-vote rules were on the table. The former was narrowly defeated thanks to significant union blocks voting against the proposal, but parts of the latter did come to pass and meant that the party's National Executive Committee would no longer be appointed by the party's leadership but instead by elected by party members under OMOV. NEC elections held in the spring of 1983 saw big victories for members of the left, who would now have a majority on the party's governing committee.

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Outside the party Labour was facing problems too. Whilst it narrowly avoided defeat in the 1981 Warrington by-election where former Home Secretary Roy Jenkins had tried to re-enter Parliament, the SDP had won its first seats to the House of Commons at the Crosby by-election in November and the Glasgow Hillhead by-election in March 1982, where Jenkins was successfully returned to the green benches. The party had formed an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party in the summer of 1981 and the Alliance saw its ratings in the polls soar as dissatisfaction with both the Conservative government and a heavily divided Labour Party set in amongst voters. One poll, conducted in December 1981, placed support for the Alliance on 50%.

The Gower by-election of 1982 was a real turning point for the Alliance. The seat had been safely won for Labour with a voteshare of 53% in the 1979 general election by Ifor Davies, whose passing triggered the calling of the by-election, and was not considered natural fertile ground for the party. Although Labour expected to have a reduced vote share in line with polling, the actual result saw former Labour MP Gwynoro Jones take the seat for the SDP on a colossal swing of almost 23%. A similar result was replicated in the Peckham by-election, although Labour narrowly held on to the seat that time, with Harriet Harman entering the Commons with a majority of just 755 in another traditional Labour safe seat. In February 1983, Labour lost Bermondsey in a historic by-election defeat, with Simon Hughes taking the seat for the Liberals on an unprecedented 52% swing.

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For the government, things were not going well either. The Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher were overseeing an economic recession and high unemployment and were forced to break a manifesto commitment and increase taxes as a result. Thatcher's approval rating in 1982, amidst the rise of the Liberal–SDP Alliance, had fallen to the low 20s and the party's performances in both local elections and in by-elections since the 1979 election had been very poor.

In the summer of 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and, whilst Thatcher's reaction was swift and resolute, leading to British victory in the following Falklands War, her government was criticised for cutting the defences of the islands prior to invasion and she herself was criticised for ordering the torpedo of the General Belgrano warship. Though the Conservatives experienced an expected small post-crisis bounce in the polls, a difficult winter period which was populated by a crisis in the National Health Service and union action wiped any electoral advantage the government had had away. A general election, mooted for spring 1983, would not come to pass and Thatcher was instead determined to hold an election as late as possible in 1984 to allow her party time to try and recover the economy before they faced the country. Initial polling in the aftermath of the Bermondsey by-election which followed suggested the Liberal–SDP Alliance had consisted double-digit leads over the other two parties.
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