Foot wins in 1983-From Todays Daily Mail

I seriously doubt it. Roberts has a decent reputation as a historian - see his biographies of Halifax and Salisbury - and as far as I can see this was definately written with tongue in cheek.
 
A Labour Victory in 1983...

The Roberts article panders to the prejudices of the Mail readership and is predicated on the assumption that everything Left-wing is bad and everything Right-wing is good and also reminds the readership how "lucky" we all were to have enjoyed the reign of the Blessed Margaret.

As far as the history is concerned, it's often forgotten that the Falklands War not only "saved" the Conservatives but also rescued Labour as well. The 1983 election saw off the challenge of the Alliance parties and enabled not only the preservation of the Conservative-Labour duopoly but ensured that the next non-Conservative Government would be led by Labour.

The Alliance was polling around 30% in the early days of 1982 and had that continued into the spring and summer, the combined parties would have won hundreds of Council seats (including in London where they could well have prevented Ken Livingstone taking control of the GLC).

The Alliance thrived particularly on by-elections and while in OTL the Tory vote held up in Beaconsfield and Mitcham & Morden, the collapse in the Conservative vote seen at Hillhead and Crosby in the autumn of 1981 might have been replicated in the spring and summer of 1982.

Thus, Paul Tyler wins Beaconsfield narrowly and Bruce Douglas-Mann is triumphantly returned in Mitcham & Morden. The impact of these results on party morale is obvious with the Alliance gaining a big boost into the summer and leading the polls in June and July.

Similarly, the 1982 Conference Season finds the SDP and Liberals united and projecting a strong positive image with Labour still beset by internal feuding and the Conservatives struggling to convince anyone that they have the right policies.

On September 16th, Gwynoro Jones captures Gower for the SDP from Labour while on October 28th, Dick Taverne echoes his great Lincoln by-election triumph of 1973 by defeating Harriet Harman in Peckham and the Liberals storm home in Birmingham Northfield with the Conservatives collapsing in third.

1983 dawns with the Alliance polling at 41% and well ahead of the Conservatives and Labour.

The Alliance will score its biggest triumph so far at Darlington on 24th March 1983 with Tony Cook, in spite of being a poor candidate, riding the national tide to victory.

Margaret Thatcher will delay the election to May 3rd 1984 in the hope that economic improvement will bolster the standing of the Conservatives and there is a small recovery but the Alliance camapigns strongly, led by Roy Jenkins, and infused by the aid of an army of new activists as well as defectors from both Conservative and Labour parties.

The results filtering out that night told the story:

Alliance 41%
Conservatives 32%
Labour 24%

This wasn't quite enough to give the Alliance an overall majority with the party winning 269 seats, the Conservatives were pushed down to 197 and Labour down to 155. Both older parties had suffered significant losses to the Alliance and while Margaret Thatcher survived in Finchley (her majority was slashed to just 318 votes) many of her Cabinet did not while the Labour side was also devastated with Tony Benn among the casualties.

Margaret Thatcher had no option but to resign and Roy Jenkins became Prime Minister.
 
I doubt it. With the economic recovery was coming the Tory recovery - they had already recovered about ten points from their depths in December 1981 and were back at about 33/34% just before the Falklands. While the Falklands cemented a firm Tory lead, in my view without it it would simply have taken longer for the Government to reassert a firm lead. The 1983/4 election may not have resulted in a Conservative landslide but from the Tory point of view, by the time the Falklands came around the worst was over and they were steadily recovering.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as a dependency of the crown I was under the impression that the Channel Islands would not be the Foot government's to give away, and them giving themselves over to France is frankly ludicrous. Roberts might as well have had the Isle of Man given to Norway.
 

Sachyriel

Banned
He would have put his foot down and told you where you could stick that foot of yours before he kicked you down, stepped on your face and used his other boot to step on your ankle, forcing your own appendage into your mouth and then talk to the television people (from the waist up of course) about how he enjoys kicking his opponents asses in the polls.

His name has the opportunity for a bunch of foot-related comedy, I'm sure he's heard it all.

Even that one about the yoga instructor. :rolleyes:
 
I knew this was going to be utter nonsense but Jesus.

The UK not responding to the Falklands invasions? The French demanding the Channel Islands back??

This isn't an article, its Robert's wet dream.
 
Is there a good timeline anywhere on here for a 1983 Labour victory where the 'longest suicide note' manifesto is implemented?

I remember a BBC documentary a long time ago which did something along those lines, a 'What if no Falklands', or Maggie lost? or something. I don't recall what it was called but it came up with some interesting if unlikely counterfactuals, such as an 'orbital railway' around London instead of the M25. Needless to say this alternative transport proposal was a great success, and I recall the documentary tended a bit towards the wanktastic in places.
 
Would there even be a Falklands invasion ITTL? Galtieri's government was rather shaky at the time; no defeat on the Malvinas will prolong his reign, but by how much? He might be out by the end of '83, and then things probably start to get interesting in South America...
 
Comments..

The idea that the Conservatives would have won anyway is one that does the rounds regularly but fails to appreciate what was happening at the time, how parties function and the impact of by-elections on polls.

As someone who was politically active at the time I can testify to the softness of the Conservative vote in early 1982. Without the Falklands, I think the Alliance would have been politically far more successful and effective and this would have had a number of consequences:

1) The Labour vote would have fractured further (including more defections) as the other anti-Conservative alternative became increasingly credible. If the reason for voting Labour is to keep out the Tories, then there's no need to vote Tory if there is another party able to keep them out.

2) The Conservative vote would also have come under pressure for the same reasons. Many Tories found the Thatcherite message abrasive - the SDP were a "kinder" option and could be relied on to keep Labour out which was the other reason for voting Tory.

3) The Alliance itself feeds on success - by-election and local election successes in 1982 and 1983 help build vibrant parties at local level.

In a number of local elections in OTL, there was evidence of a bandwagon which developed once it became clear to Tories that Labour could not win and to Labour voters that the Conservatives could not win.

My argument is that a more successful Alliance during 1982-83 would have developed its own momentum and, as we saw in 1997, economic recovery is not always a guarantee of political popularity.

The qualities which served Thatcher well in the Falklands were often regarded in the field of social and economic policy as being abrasive and weren't anywhere near as popular.

As for a Labour victory, I think that's only possible if the Falklands expedition is a disaster with ships sunk, heavy loss of life and a failure to retake the islands. Such a military disaster would have finished Thatcher and allowed Foot to argue with justification that Britain could no longer justify a military establishment and that could include a nuclear capability.

Those in favour of nuclear disarmament and a reduced military would have found more support in the light of a Falklands defeat.

Had the Thatcher Government collapsed following disaster in the South Atlantic, Labour would probably have swept into power.
 
Is there a good timeline anywhere on here for a 1983 Labour victory where the 'longest suicide note' manifesto is implemented?

I remember a BBC documentary a long time ago which did something along those lines, a 'What if no Falklands', or Maggie lost? or something. I don't recall what it was called but it came up with some interesting if unlikely counterfactuals, such as an 'orbital railway' around London instead of the M25. Needless to say this alternative transport proposal was a great success, and I recall the documentary tended a bit towards the wanktastic in places.
It was called "Withot Her" and broadcast in October 1993, I think....
Callaghan calls an October 78 elections and wins a 21 seat majority, Healey suceeds Callaghan in 1981, No Falklands, but there are riots in 1982 about Council Housing, peter Walker became Tory leader and won an election in 1983 with a majority of six!!!
 
Andrew Roberts has a history of writing this kind of junk for the Daily Fascist. I seem to remember that he wrote something similar just after Maggie was given the Black Spot by her own party in 1990. I think it went something on the lines of "Maggie starts an anti-European Conservative splinter group that wipes the floor with Major and then sweeps back into power and then everything is hunky dory again, cheers, cheers, rarara!!!"
:rolleyes:
 
I seriously doubt it. Roberts has a decent reputation as a historian - see his biographies of Halifax and Salisbury - and as far as I can see this was definately written with tongue in cheek.

But he doesn't have a reputation for having a sense of humour.

No matter what a Daily Wail subeditor would have us believe.

This is article is by a clever man playing to the cheap seats.
 
As an American who remembers Foot's avowed pacifism as well as his avowed opposition to Fascism and support for the liberation of the Falklands, I can only say of this article: Hmmm, project much? Sounds like he's describing a Tony Benn Prime Ministership. Personally, I'd have to go through the entire KGB Archives before I'd even BEGIN to give "Red Tony" the benefit of the doubt.:D
 
As an American who remembers Foot's avowed pacifism as well as his avowed opposition to Fascism and support for the liberation of the Falklands, I can only say of this article: Hmmm, project much? Sounds like he's describing a Tony Benn Prime Ministership. Personally, I'd have to go through the entire KGB Archives before I'd even BEGIN to give "Red Tony" the benefit of the doubt.:D
Both Foot and Benn were as patriotic as you could get. In fact, to even consider that they worked for the KGB is laughable.
 
Both Foot and Benn were as patriotic as you could get. In fact, to even consider that they worked for the KGB is laughable.

Quite.

Though journalist Chapman Pincer gives some strong hints in his seventies books that there was a Soviet 'agent of influence' in the Wilson Cabinet.

Of course the old hack in question might be paranoid, malicious, wrong, but I distinctly got the impression he all but pointed the finger at... Dennis Healey.
 

Hendryk

Banned
I see that Andrew Roberts is still the same crappy hack writer with a fondness for author tracts. I still have that FH novel he once wrote about Britain being put under military occupation by a dictatorial EU.

In this regard, perhaps the only interest of that piece of drivel is to watch Roberts trying to choose between his Europhobia and his radical right-wing bias. Anyone writing an unbiased ATL in which Michael Foot becomes PM in 1983 would have started with the obvious: Labour's pledge to pull Britain out of the EEC. But Roberts couldn't bring himself to that, since that would have meant that a Socialist could do something right in his book :rolleyes:

Labour failed to foresee the immediate and devastating international consequences of such weakness.
The Chinese unilaterally brought forward the date of the handover of Hong Kong by five years to 1992; the Spanish imposed a total blockade on Gibraltar; and France demanded the return of the Channel Islands, on the grounds that they were far closer to the French coast than to the British.
None of this would have much mattered had not the Americans, under President Ronald Reagan, enraged by Foot's support of CND, supported moves to bring an end to Britan's occupancy of her seat on the United Nations Security Council. The result was that a weakened Britain was unable to muster any international support against these aggressive acts on her sovereign territory.
To widespread scorn, Foot capitulated on the new date for the Hong Kong handover, then ceded control both of Gibraltar and the Channel Islands.
Even by Roberts' standards, this is ridiculous. As Thande points out, what would be the point for the Chinese to get HK ahead of schedule, when all they had to do is wait five more years? Perhaps he wanted Foot to look even worse than his personal goddess Margaret Thatcher, who negotiated the HK handover in the first place.

As for the French annexation of the Channel Islands, give me a fucking break.
 
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