RP: UK general election, 1970

UK Votes: 18 June 1970


  • Total voters
    48
630 seats in the House of Commons

Standings at dissolution, 29 May

Labour: 364 seats
Conservative: 253 seats
Liberal: 12 seats
Other: 1 seat

Incumbent Prime Minister: Harold Wilson (Lab)
 
I shall be voting for Labour. I like and respect Wilson greatly, he kept us out of Vietnam and the EEC and I think that the country needs time to modernise further. The government should also be given plaudits for legalising homosexuality and abortion, I simply don't trust the Tories on social issues.

Also, Heath is a lightweight and a totally unprincipled Europhile, I rather like him on a personal level but he simply doesn't look Prime Ministerial to me, hopefully he'll lose, resign and the Conservatives can get a proper leader by the end of the year, someone like Macleod or Whitelaw.
 
I'm voting Liberal myself- though a (Powellite) Tory, I see only an echo, not a choice. I disagree with Heath on everything. Not just domestic policy, but parodiable Europhilia, knee-jerk Amerophobia and distaste for the Commonwealth.
 
I shall be voting for Labour. I like and respect Wilson greatly, he kept us out of Vietnam and the EEC and I think that the country needs time to modernise further. The government should also be given plaudits for legalising homosexuality and abortion, I simply don't trust the Tories on social issues.

Also, Heath is a lightweight and a totally unprincipled Europhile, I rather like him on a personal level but he simply doesn't look Prime Ministerial to me, hopefully he'll lose, resign and the Conservatives can get a proper leader by the end of the year, someone like Macleod or Whitelaw.

OOC: Roem, he makes Gordon Brown or Mrs. T. look warm and cuddly in comparison. :confused:
 
Going with Wilson. While I lean away from Labour as a political party, Wilson is a pretty canny politician and quite frankly anyone is better than Heath in 10 Downing Street.
 
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Wilson, although with hindsight it was probably the best possible time for Scotland to become independent so if the SNP could muster a strong enough campaign I may go for them.
 
Other. Ulster Unionist Party but they seem to fall under the Conservative category of the poll at the time according too wiki.
 
OOC: Roem, he makes Gordon Brown or Mrs. T. look warm and cuddly in comparison. :confused:

Not in character: Heath was a very physical, superficially attractive guy--look at this clip of Andrew Marr's 'History of Modern Britain'.

British party leaders were all old-looking men before Heath. He had a tan. That's just unheard of in the UK of the time.

Your (alter ego's) man Powell looks absolutely ancient for a man in his mid fifties when he gives that speech, f'rinstance.
 
Not in character: Heath was a very physical, superficially attractive guy--look at this clip of Andrew Marr's 'History of Modern Britain'.

British party leaders were all old-looking men before Heath. He had a tan. That's just unheard of in the UK of the time.

Your (alter ego's) man Powell looks absolutely ancient for a man in his mid fifties when he gives that speech, f'rinstance.

OOC: I was going to post that clip as well, I couldn't find it that was all. Aside his rather strangled vowels, Heath was a major generational change for the Tories, like Mrs. Thatcher, he came from an ordinary background and made his way to the top. Heath wasn't perfect, but he was a talented, moderate individual (I can't think of any other politician who won major Yacht Tournaments and conducted the LSO!)
 
Other: Speaker .

While the Speaker had previously been a Labour politician, due to his campaigns at raising awareness of autism and his neutrality in parliament now I feel I can vote for the cultured and decent man.

OOC: In the neighboring constituency where I was born (Southampton Itchen), it was a fight between the Speaker (Horace King), National Democrats or an Independent.
 
Aside his rather strangled vowels, Heath was a major generational change for the Tories, like Mrs. Thatcher, he came from an ordinary background and made his way to the top. Heath wasn't perfect, but he was a talented, moderate individual (I can't think of any other politician who won major Yacht Tournaments and conducted the LSO!)

Heath is a lot like an amalgam of the post-Menzian conservative PMs in Australia at around that time. He's Holt and Gorton when it comes to being a breath of fresh air, in touch with the bourgeois values of younger people who'd never known depression or war; he's McMahon in that he's politically helpless against the Left; yet he's also Fraser, in that he is a steely patrician who ultimately doesn't want the new free market liberals to take over the centre-Right of politics (let alone the whole country!)
 
It's our Hal all the way. He'll do right by us, anyone who says different has been buying the 'pinko' bollocks being spread by the rightists.
 
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