The Anglo-Saxon Social Model

unemployment rose to 12.5% over the same period, a level not seen since the 1930s. Unemployment was particularly bad in Ireland, where nearly 20% of the adult population was out of work.
This might be a little too close to OTL, whereas in your TTL there are a lot more co-operatives and fewer industries were outright nationalised and will have had a degree of ongoing modernisation and rationalisation as well. Not to mention government not having its back to the wall To be fair to the Iron Lady (and Keith Joseph) they did try and cram about thirty years of needed modernisation and deferred decision making into four years in office OTL. And new industries like computing are already on the rise. I think 7-8% unemployment would be the maximum with maybe 14% in Ireland. And that would be bad enough for an economy not used to it.
 
This might be a little too close to OTL, whereas in your TTL there are a lot more co-operatives and fewer industries were outright nationalised and will have had a degree of ongoing modernisation and rationalisation as well. Not to mention government not having its back to the wall To be fair to the Iron Lady (and Keith Joseph) they did try and cram about thirty years of needed modernisation and deferred decision making into four years in office OTL. And new industries like computing are already on the rise. I think 7-8% unemployment would be the maximum with maybe 14% in Ireland. And that would be bad enough for an economy not used to it.

Interesting thoughts. I've shaved 3% off the figure in the original post.
 
Not much, to be honest. The fact is that the US already has good relationships with Spain/Cuba and Mexico in the Caribbean and doesn't really need another strategic partner in the region. The fact is that Puerto Rico's notice to withdraw is basically a threat that has got out of hand and, while there are certain members of the political elite in that country who do want to leave (it's not as if they've been treated well by that organisation in the past decade and as a Hispanophone country many people do feel culturally quite distinct from the rest of the Commonwealth) I think most of the political leaders are hoping that something comes up which means they can back out the whole process. Remember that the actual referendum wasn't explicitly one about leaving the Commonwealth as such.
Gee, why does that sound familiar...

Speaking of, something that I've been wondering about, and which this latest update put front and center, is whether we might see an analogue to OTL's Euroskepticism in the form of anti-Commonwealth sentiment. We're already seeing it in full flower in Puerto Rico, and I'm willing to bet that Newfoundland is also having second thoughts. What I'm thinking about is the Big Four, particularly the UK, especially if Thatcher's overreach leads to the UK's power over the Commonwealth being reduced in the future. I'm not expecting it to be too pronounced in Australia; there, I'm willing to bet that ore mining (uranium, iron, nickel, bauxite, copper) and agriculture are supplying the working class with all the well-paying, hard-to-outsource jobs they could ever want, and so anti-Commonwealth views are a fringe minority. Even in Canada, where there are undoubtedly more politicians who think that the Commonwealth gets in the way of a closer relationship with the US, you'll also have a massive natural resource industry (ores, grain, timber) to keep the working class from joining them -- and likely just as many politicians who are afraid of Canada becoming a vassal of their much larger neighbor to the south, and see the Commonwealth as an effective antidote. Pakistan, meanwhile, is among the clear winners; everybody there knows where their bread is buttered.

In the UK, however? Their only major natural resources are fish (the Commonwealth is likely gonna tell Iceland where to stuff it in the Cod War) and North Sea oil. Coal is on its way out thanks to the UK's embrace of nuclear power (fueled by Canadian and Australian uranium); they've been trying to build plants in former coal-mining regions in order to limit the damage to working-class communities, but I doubt that the skills to operate mining machinery translate all that readily to operating a nuclear power plant, and I think you've mentioned that there's still been a lot of dislocation. Manufacturing, meanwhile, is being outsourced to Pakistan, the workshop of the Commonwealth, and now that Pakistani wages and living standards are reaching British levels, I expect it to start going to Commonwealth Africa after that. Sure, the UK as a whole is prospering, but there are some substantial sectors of the country that are being left behind, their livelihoods rendered obsolete to the point where, like you mentioned, some have emigrated to Pakistan looking for work. (On the same token, I imagine a lot of British coal miners winding up in Edmonton and Adelaide.) While you didn't bring it up in the 1976 election update, I think this may have been an unstated factor in the Liberals' victory: not only did the new middle class produced by the "new economy" have less affinity with working-class politics, but the traditional British working class, even after thirty years of Labour government, was seeing its position decline relative to the educated middle class, and their disillusionment with Labour caused them to either stay home or consider voting Liberal. (After all, the Whigs ain't the Tories, and they still have a tradition of standing up for the working man, right?)

I doubt that we'll ever see a full Brexit where the UK straight-up secedes from its own Commonwealth. As my phrasing there ("their own" Commonwealth) suggests, there is a ton more romantic attachment to the Commonwealth than there's ever been to the European Union; after all, there's direct continuity between the Commonwealth and the British Empire, the period of the UK's greatest glory, whereas the EU was a construct led by the French that initially had an almost purely economic purpose, the UK only joining later. And TTL's Britain still has a ton of real weight behind it as the core of one of the world's three superpowers, as opposed to its OTL post-Imperial decline to middle power status. Commonwealth skeptics in the UK will be like Euroskeptics in OTL Germany, in that the UK has too much to obviously lose from leaving and everything to gain by staying. However, I expect that, even if it's firmly rejected by the mainstream and never going to happen, the idea of pulling out of the Commonwealth will hold some appeal on the fringes of British political discourse. The far left, the ones who think Labour under Attlee sold out and that he should've nationalized the heavy industries, would accuse the Commonwealth of being the new Empire, an instrument for capitalist power with only a coating of democratic socialism to lubricate its sodomy of the working class whose jobs it now ships to Pakistani sweatshops (colorful language that will no doubt be used in the pages of TTL's version of the Morning Star or Living Marxism). Some of them might go as far as to point to Bengal and Puerto Rico as examples to follow; this would undoubtedly be a very sore point in the '70s, one that Labour will likely use to discredit anybody to their left, but if Bengal and Puerto Rico don't turn out to be total shitshows (even if they're just middling post-colonial states), then later on they might whitewash them and use them to bolster their case. The far right, meanwhile, would blame the Commonwealth for all the brown people in Britain and bemoan how London is no longer running the show and putting the "colonies" in their place like when they called it the Empire (especially if Thatcher's attempt to exert British control over the central bank backfires), and claim that migration within the Commonwealth is being used to destroy national identities that would offer resistance to the elite's rule. You already brought up that, in the 1962 Commonwealth elections, there was a far-right grouping in the Commonwealth Assembly led by A. K. Chesterton that managed just over five percent of the vote, campaigning on opposition to South Africa's expulsion. I'd imagine that, in later years as the non-white Commonwealth members grow increasingly powerful, the "rising tide of color" would become a talking point in the right-wing tabloid rags.

On a similar note, how's Quebec, particularly as far as separatism is concerned? The fact that we've heard nothing about it indicates that, like anti-Commonwealth sentiment, it's probably a fringe position in TTL's Quebec, especially as compared to OTL where there were two referendums on the matter (one of them a nail-biter). There are certainly a handful of people who dream of an independent Quebec, but they can't command any popular support. I imagine that the success of the Commonwealth has suppressed nationalist sentiment in Quebec -- in OTL, an independent Quebec would've merely gone from being part of America's hat to being America's other hat, with little practical change in their status next to their most important ally, while ITTL, becoming a small nation of only six million people next to a superpower of over 200 million (using '70s census figures) would've meant a serious loss of status and prestige versus when they were part of one the Commonwealth's Big Four. And that's without PRexit going pear-shaped; if it does, then that would likely kill support for an independent Quebec stone-dead outside of a small fringe.
 
Lots of really interesting points here. I'll try and answer them as best I can one by one.

Speaking of, something that I've been wondering about, and which this latest update put front and center, is whether we might see an analogue to OTL's Euroskepticism in the form of anti-Commonwealth sentiment. We're already seeing it in full flower in Puerto Rico, and I'm willing to bet that Newfoundland is also having second thoughts. What I'm thinking about is the Big Four, particularly the UK, especially if Thatcher's overreach leads to the UK's power over the Commonwealth being reduced in the future. I'm not expecting it to be too pronounced in Australia; there, I'm willing to bet that ore mining (uranium, iron, nickel, bauxite, copper) and agriculture are supplying the working class with all the well-paying, hard-to-outsource jobs they could ever want, and so anti-Commonwealth views are a fringe minority. Even in Canada, where there are undoubtedly more politicians who think that the Commonwealth gets in the way of a closer relationship with the US, you'll also have a massive natural resource industry (ores, grain, timber) to keep the working class from joining them -- and likely just as many politicians who are afraid of Canada becoming a vassal of their much larger neighbor to the south, and see the Commonwealth as an effective antidote. Pakistan, meanwhile, is among the clear winners; everybody there knows where their bread is buttered.

This is generally on the money and we will see anti-Commonwealth sentiment coming to the fore in the next decade. (I've decided to call it Angloscepticism because I think it sounds better than something like Commonscepticism or equivalent but let me know if anyone has any better ideas because I'm not completely happy with it.) There are going to be significant reform of Commonwealth institutions in the 1980s (as many people have suggested, the next election is going to be tough for the Liberals) and that's going to play a major part in what sentiment looks like, or even if it's going to be that coherent. As far as Angloscepticism in the Big Four goes, you're right about how that looks.

In the UK, however? Their only major natural resources are fish (the Commonwealth is likely gonna tell Iceland where to stuff it in the Cod War) and North Sea oil. Coal is on its way out thanks to the UK's embrace of nuclear power (fueled by Canadian and Australian uranium); they've been trying to build plants in former coal-mining regions in order to limit the damage to working-class communities, but I doubt that the skills to operate mining machinery translate all that readily to operating a nuclear power plant, and I think you've mentioned that there's still been a lot of dislocation. Manufacturing, meanwhile, is being outsourced to Pakistan, the workshop of the Commonwealth, and now that Pakistani wages and living standards are reaching British levels, I expect it to start going to Commonwealth Africa after that. Sure, the UK as a whole is prospering, but there are some substantial sectors of the country that are being left behind, their livelihoods rendered obsolete to the point where, like you mentioned, some have emigrated to Pakistan looking for work. (On the same token, I imagine a lot of British coal miners winding up in Edmonton and Adelaide.) While you didn't bring it up in the 1976 election update, I think this may have been an unstated factor in the Liberals' victory: not only did the new middle class produced by the "new economy" have less affinity with working-class politics, but the traditional British working class, even after thirty years of Labour government, was seeing its position decline relative to the educated middle class, and their disillusionment with Labour caused them to either stay home or consider voting Liberal. (After all, the Whigs ain't the Tories, and they still have a tradition of standing up for the working man, right?)

Couple of points to make here, although I would say you're generally right but with a more negative spin than I'd put on it. Firstly, it's not really right that all manufacturing has been outsourced to Pakistan: to the contrary most of what has moved there has been heavy industry. High tech (and high paying) jobs have remained in the UK, albeit that there has been an overall reduction in the amount of people in the manufacturing sector. You're right that there has been a fair amount of dislocation with the closing of mining jobs and that did play a non-trivial part in some of Labour's losses in 1976, especially on the margins. That said, the strategic placement of nuclear and renewable energy plants means that you're not going to see the kinds of multi-generational economic displacement that we have seen OTL, at least not for the most part. (The model I had in my head was actually Homer Simpson - albeit obviously a fictional character - who works in a nuclear power plant but isn't a nuclear physicist.) The other thing I would say is that the relative strength of the union movement OTL means that the jobs in the 'new industries' (computing, nuclear power etc.) are heavily unionised so I don't think we're going to see Labour and the trades unions moving apart just yet.

As regards the Cod War, you're right that the changed geo-political position of the UK in the late '40s and '50s means that the dispute is ended to the UK's advantage. This has contributed to the revitalisation of 'Scandinavianist' sentiment in Iceland and elsewhere but that won't pay off for a few more years.

I doubt that we'll ever see a full Brexit where the UK straight-up secedes from its own Commonwealth. As my phrasing there ("their own" Commonwealth) suggests, there is a ton more romantic attachment to the Commonwealth than there's ever been to the European Union; after all, there's direct continuity between the Commonwealth and the British Empire, the period of the UK's greatest glory, whereas the EU was a construct led by the French that initially had an almost purely economic purpose, the UK only joining later. And TTL's Britain still has a ton of real weight behind it as the core of one of the world's three superpowers, as opposed to its OTL post-Imperial decline to middle power status. Commonwealth skeptics in the UK will be like Euroskeptics in OTL Germany, in that the UK has too much to obviously lose from leaving and everything to gain by staying. However, I expect that, even if it's firmly rejected by the mainstream and never going to happen, the idea of pulling out of the Commonwealth will hold some appeal on the fringes of British political discourse. The far left, the ones who think Labour under Attlee sold out and that he should've nationalized the heavy industries, would accuse the Commonwealth of being the new Empire, an instrument for capitalist power with only a coating of democratic socialism to lubricate its sodomy of the working class whose jobs it now ships to Pakistani sweatshops (colorful language that will no doubt be used in the pages of TTL's version of the Morning Star or Living Marxism). Some of them might go as far as to point to Bengal and Puerto Rico as examples to follow; this would undoubtedly be a very sore point in the '70s, one that Labour will likely use to discredit anybody to their left, but if Bengal and Puerto Rico don't turn out to be total shitshows (even if they're just middling post-colonial states), then later on they might whitewash them and use them to bolster their case. The far right, meanwhile, would blame the Commonwealth for all the brown people in Britain and bemoan how London is no longer running the show and putting the "colonies" in their place like when they called it the Empire (especially if Thatcher's attempt to exert British control over the central bank backfires), and claim that migration within the Commonwealth is being used to destroy national identities that would offer resistance to the elite's rule. You already brought up that, in the 1962 Commonwealth elections, there was a far-right grouping in the Commonwealth Assembly led by A. K. Chesterton that managed just over five percent of the vote, campaigning on opposition to South Africa's expulsion. I'd imagine that, in later years as the non-white Commonwealth members grow increasingly powerful, the "rising tide of color" would become a talking point in the right-wing tabloid rags.

That's definitely one way of thinking about it and there are certainly still far left and far right people who will see TTL's developments in this way. But I don't think it's simple for right wing imperial nostalgia to become strongly Anglosceptic. After all, many of the markers of continuing Commonwealth/British greatness aren't only 'British' anymore. Take the military for instance: while there are still lots of white British people in it, it is also heavily populated with Pakistani soldiers, West Indian and Polynesian sailors and Maori special forces (not that it's terribly important but my head canon is that the Maori regiments are TTL's equivalent of the Gurkhas). Of course, British nationalism has been isolationist as often as it has been expansionary so maybe that would become part of the narrative: that the untrustworthy foreigners are keeping us involved in the world, spending our money or whatever. But you're right about the general contours of what opposition to the Commonwealth looks like from both the left and right. Basically the hard left thinks the UK has found a way to change the empire's name but keep the colonies subordinate and the hard right thinks the foreigners are free riding off of the UK's wealth and strategic brilliance. However, as you say, this is really only confined to the fringes and everyone with any particular influence of British geo strategy understands that staying in the Commonwealth is vital.

On a similar note, how's Quebec, particularly as far as separatism is concerned? The fact that we've heard nothing about it indicates that, like anti-Commonwealth sentiment, it's probably a fringe position in TTL's Quebec, especially as compared to OTL where there were two referendums on the matter (one of them a nail-biter). There are certainly a handful of people who dream of an independent Quebec, but they can't command any popular support. I imagine that the success of the Commonwealth has suppressed nationalist sentiment in Quebec -- in OTL, an independent Quebec would've merely gone from being part of America's hat to being America's other hat, with little practical change in their status next to their most important ally, while ITTL, becoming a small nation of only six million people next to a superpower of over 200 million (using '70s census figures) would've meant a serious loss of status and prestige versus when they were part of one the Commonwealth's Big Four. And that's without PRexit going pear-shaped; if it does, then that would likely kill support for an independent Quebec stone-dead outside of a small fringe.

That's about the size of it. Quebecois politicians remain pretty important in the Liberal party, which helps too: Louis St Laurent and Pierre Trudeau have served as prime minister at different points since 1945 and Jean-Luc Pepin is going to become prime minister in 1981 too. The biggest separatist movement is actually western alienation, which is actually getting reasonably serious by this point.
 
Rattigan, I want to put a question about TTL- How a Falkland-esque situation would unravel in TTL ?

It's an interesting question: for a bunch of reasons (not least of which is that Argentina is much wealthier and politically stable) the Falklands aren't going to be a major player at least for the near future.

That being said, if it did go down then I suspect that the war would probably go down much as it it did OTL. I suspect that the Argentinian army might be better equipped but I imagine that the superior resources and manpower of the Commonwealth would tell eventually.
 
I'll comment regarding the Falklands that one of the reasons the junta decided to invade in the first place was the perception of British weakness and inability to defend its possessions so far away from home. While the Commonwealth doesn't quite dominate so much as the Empire did at the start of the century it would still be foolish to think it didn't have resources aplenty to strike back on an invasion of any of its parts. And anyway, Argentina is democratic. That doesn't mean it's pacifistic, just that it would only attack if it was absolutely certain of victory, any doubt takes war off the table.

You're right that there has been a fair amount of dislocation with the closing of mining jobs and that did play a non-trivial part in some of Labour's losses in 1976, especially on the margins. That said, the strategic placement of nuclear and renewable energy plants means that you're not going to see the kinds of multi-generational economic displacement that we have seen OTL, at least not for the most part. (The model I had in my head was actually Homer Simpson - albeit obviously a fictional character - who works in a nuclear power plant but isn't a nuclear physicist.)

It's quite unlikely that most miners would be able to walk right into Homer's job as Safety Inspector, but one imagines that an accommodation could've been reached, with the older boys getting a nice pension and the younger workers getting courses to retrain and first placement in the trade jobs in the new stations. Heck, working as a team, operating heavy machinery, handling Health and Safety procedures, there's more in common between working in a mine and a power station than you might first think.
 
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still be foolish to think it didn't have resources aplenty to strike back on an invasion of any of its parts. And anyway, Argentina is democratic. That doesn't mean it's pacifistic, just that it would only attack if it was absolutely certain of victory, any doubt takes war off the table.

Apparently the Royal Navy is still the largest in the world, so that would surely factor into their thinking.
 
Apparently the Royal Navy is still the largest in the world, so that would surely factor into their thinking.

And just to explain a bit further, the Royal Navy's current doctrine emphasises the use of aircraft carrier battle groups to bring air power to bear and cover the transportation of troops. So they'd be very ready to engage in the South Atlantic.
 
And also, who would the Hong Kong lease would be going( if it actually existed TTL)? Would they return to china or what would be their course of action?
 
Thatcherite Environmental Reform, 1976-1981
A Blueprint for Survival: Environmentalism at the Heart of Government and the Death of King Coal
david_attenborough_clip_1_1980.jpg

David Attenborough answers questions about his white paper, December 1976


Both at the time and since, Thatcher’s government has been most famous for its economic and Commonwealth policy and this did indeed take up much of its energy. But this should not obscure the way that it was also active on environmental policy. Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine and Food and Rural Affairs Secretary Russell Johnston pursued a policy of energy independence for the UK, building on the work that David Attenborough had accomplished during his eleven years in the role. In December 1976, Heseltine, Johnston and Attenborough collaborated on the production of ‘A Blueprint for Survival.’ Part white paper, part popular science, the book advocated an ambitious policy to have the UK’s energy mix entirely free of fossil fuels by 2002, something or an irony considering how the SWF would continue to be one of the world’s major fossil fuel exporters for at least another decade.

By 1976, the UK was already a world-leader in nuclear and clean energy but Heseltine decided to push that even further. Use of coal had decreased over the decades and part of Heseltine’s plan was to close the final coal pits by 1991. In 1979, the UK experienced its first day without burning coal for fuel (for several centuries, at least) and in 1981 it experienced its first ‘coal-free’ week. Heseltine’s aggression in closing the remaining mines occasioned a series of strikes in Nottinghamshire (where the remaining mines were mostly based) over the course of the winter of 1980-81, part of the wider Winter of Discontent. It was, however, unsuccessful and the remaining miners returned to work in March 1981 with the closure plans unchanged.

Part of this was down to Thatcher’s inflexible attitude towards strikers of any stripe. But, at the same time, it was also illustrative of the decline in the importance of the National Union of Mineworkers since 1945. Once the most important union in the TUC, by 1981 it was already significantly smaller than the largest union for nuclear power workers (the Power Plant Union) and IT professionals (National Union of Computers). Together with the civil service union (the Public Service Union) and the doctors and nurses union (Confederation of Health Service Employees), they formed a powerful quartet at the head of the TUC that spread across the public and private sector. Under the surface, this was an important demonstration of the changes wrought in British society over the past few decades, as well as the way that Labour had interwoven itself into almost every facet of society.

Heseltine did much to force the issue of the environment into the British, Commonwealth and even global mainstream in the late 1970s. Previously the transition away from fossil fuels (for the domestic economy at least) and conservation of natural parks (both in the UK and around the Commonwealth) had been expressed in terms of nationalist energy independence and a certain sentimental attachment to animal rights. Heseltine and Attenborough worked closely with one another, a relationship that continued with less partisan rage about it after the latter was appointed the Environment Commissioner to the Commonwealth Cabinet in 1980. They were responsible for convening the first UN conference considering global carbon emission reduction targets in 1977.

Heseltine’s environmentalist work had two main legislative results. The first was the 1979 Arusha Protocol, an international treaty designed to phase out chemicals causing the depletion of the ozone layer. The second was the Environmental Protection Act 1981, passed into law only two weeks before Parliament was dissolved. The act gave wide-ranging powers to the Environment Secretary to identify and draft regulations regarding certain emissions processes and empowered him to draft regulations to cover the disposal of waste. The Act itself thus left much to the interpretation and vigor of whoever the relevant Environment Secretary was at the time but it was still a significant step forward, creating a framework for a dramatic future regulation of the UK’s environmental impact.

Much of this was a set up for important developments down the line. With Attenborough serving as Environment Commissioner ensuring that environmental issues were never far from the top of the Commonwealth agenda, he and Jonathon Porritt, the Environment Secretary after the 1981 election, would embark on ambitious new programmes.
 
I think that Thatcher's lasting legacy in TTL will be environmental policy and not so much economic transformation as in OTL. I wonder what the Liberal's Commonwealth policy will be since in the last post, two prominent Commonwealth countries just went and do their own things over the agreed policy of the wider Commonwealth body. This kind of position won't be sustainable in the long run and will create resentment in other Commonwealth members. This probably will lead to reform, but what it'll look like, I guess we'll see.
 
One side effect of this is that environmentalism ITTL won't be seen as a strictly left-wing issue, at least not in the Commonwealth. Here, Thatcher, Heseltine, and Attenborough just weaponized environmentalism as an issue with which to beat the coal miners' union, while also laying down an explicit clean energy policy designed to eliminate the UK's reliance on fossil fuels with explicitly nationalist aims. Labour won't turn to anti-environmentalism, not with the "new economy" jobs also having powerful unions that are likely celebrating this policy (especially the nuclear plant workers' union), but it does ensure that they won't have a monopoly on the issue, and will have to actively compete with the Liberals on the environment. A pleasant side effect is that, once climate change becomes a major issue, you won't see one major party beholden to a vocal lobby of people who deny or minimize the problem. (I don't know how bad the OTL Tories' views on climate change are, but I do know that the UK has produced some vocal climate change deniers who generally line up with the right wing.)

That being said, I imagine the Tories, having embraced an ultra-libertarian platform following their decline to third party status, embracing anti-environmentalism and later climate change denial as part of their anti-government ideology. I can also see some voices on the far left, particularly older socialists involved in the "old" manufacturing industries (seeing the "new" unions in IT, nuclear energy, the civil service, and health care as insufficiently "working class"), attacking environmentalism as a bourgeois ideology designed to break the power of the workers. In OTL, there is the example of Alexander Cockburn, a leftist who claimed that the idea of "virgin forest" was a purely Western one (and used this to justify logging in the Amazon) and that the greenhouse effect was a myth, as well as Lyndon LaRouche, who, even in his leftist days, claimed that environmentalism was a ploy by the Western elite to keep the Third World poor, undeveloped, and weak.
 
General Election of 1981
Pre-emptive apologies for the slightly dodgy infobox this time.

* * *​

A New Hope? The General Election of 1981

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Thatcher delayed going to the country for as long as possible, eventually setting the election date for June 1981. By this point, the Winter of Discontent had resulted in negative growth in the first quarter of 1981 and few thought that the second quarter wouldn’t see the UK returning to recession. Few, also, thought that the election would be a positive one for the Liberals The troika at the top of the government - Thatcher, Joseph and Haughey - were divisive figures whose autocratic and confrontational style was seen to have worsened the crisis in the UK while causing chaos in the Commonwealth at the same time.

Matters were not helped when, in May 1981, Evan Durbin released a statement formally disagreeing with the policy of the Big Four as regards the Commonwealth crisis and providing the broad sketches of an alternative route. This was a gift for Labour, the biggest that they could have hoped for. Previously, the party had generally taken an oppositional attitude towards whatever the government’s economic policy had been at the time. But now they had a ready-made economic policy and Shadow Chancellor Roy Jenkins announced that Labour would adopt the Bank of England’s suggestion and urge fiscal reform on the Commonwealth to bring an end to the crisis.

When they had lost the 1976 election, many analysts expected Labour to fall into factional fighting now that the sticking plaster of power was gone. However, that did not happen. Roy Jenkins and Michael Foot stood for the leadership at the head of the right and left wings of the party but a factional fight was headed off when Bill Rodgers successfully stood as the moderate candidate and won on two ballots. Rodgers had had a reasonable cabinet career, serving as Minister for Transport (1966-69), Minister for Supply (1969-71) and Chief Whip (1971-76). He had not become identified with any of Labour’s various factions and had instead distinguished himself as a good party manager well liked by his colleagues. Labour MPs, it turned out, valued competent managerialism over factionalism, a fitting view for a party that had had so much success under leaders like Attlee, Gaitskell and Castle. Demonstrating his skills, Rodgers immediately populated his shadow cabinet with a figures from all corners of the party. Both of his leadership opponents found positions, with Jenkins as Shadow Chancellor and Foot as Shadow Defence Secretary.

By keeping his party together and focused on regaining power, Rodgers did enough. The Liberals had been trusted with power for the first time since 1945 and, in the view of the public, had failed to prove themselves worthy of that trust. In a desperate attempt to hold down their losses, Thatcher had announced in 1979 that Jenkins’ reforms to the makeup of Parliament would be implemented for the next election. She also sacked Joseph in March 1981, replacing him with the more conciliatory Douglas Hurd. Nevertheless, the night itself was a disaster for the government. Liberal support collapsed nationwide in the face of a ruthless Labour campaign highlighting the Liberal incompetence which had lead to continuing misery at home and humiliation abroad. The result was a landslide for Labour. Their total of 447 seats was larger than after the famed landslide of 1945 (albeit with a larger Parliament). On the morning after the election night, Rodgers announced that the military would withdraw from the streets of Ireland by August.

The Conservatives too managed to make great strides, scooping up 23 more seats. In Ferdinand Mount the party had found another witty and urbane leader but this time one who combined that with a coherent message and good party management. Nearly doubling their previous seat total, the Conservatives were a beneficiary both of the Liberal collapse and of the introduction of proportional seats, where they made several gains.

The changes in UK politics were dramatic and reconfigured the political response to the Commonwealth crisis. Further impetus behind the change would, however, have to come from elsewhere.
 
It was impossible for Liberals to redeem themselves in order to keep power- elections had to be called quite shortly after the winter of discontent, the economy fell several times into depression into their goverment and there was no Falkland moment from which to take the winning laurels and their environmentalist cause couldn't prop up an entire new election. All these combined, i see that it will be quite 20 years before the british population would give their second chance to the liberals, if not more
 
It was impossible for Liberals to redeem themselves in order to keep power- elections had to be called quite shortly after the winter of discontent, the economy fell several times into depression into their goverment and there was no Falkland moment from which to take the winning laurels and their environmentalist cause couldn't prop up an entire new election. All these combined, i see that it will be quite 20 years before the british population would give their second chance to the liberals, if not more

Honestly at this point they've been in the wilderness so long, and failed at their only attempt at government, it's possible they would start reorienting, or even break apart and have the opposition reconstitute itself in a different manner.
 
Puerto Rican General Election, 1981
Heroic Failure: Puerto Rico and the Politics of Pain

Following the reversal in the British political scene in June, events in Puerto Rico in August and September 1981 proved to be a watershed in Commonwealth history. Over the past two years, Ruben Berrios’ Puerto Rican government had been negotiating terms on which the country would leave the bloc. However, these talks had been slow-moving, with Tony Crosland doing everything he could behind the scenes to prevent Puerto Rico being offered reasonable terms, all the while working to ensure the accession of Belize as a new member state. When he retired in June 1981 (Belize being inducted as a member on his final day in office) he was replaced by the former West Indian prime minister Michael Manley. Manley, a critic of many aspects of the Commonwealth (not least the distribution of seats in the Assembly), had been expected by some to be an ally of Puerto Rico in their fight for debt relief.

However, the opposite turned out to be the case. Having cut his teeth in the hard-nosed confederal politics of the West Indies in the first decade of the country’s existence, Manley had a clear view of the dangers facing small countries in the world. Consequently, he privately resolved to cut off at the knees any attempts at Puerto Rican secession, not only because he reasoned that this would be better for Puerto Rico itself but in order to discourage similar attempts by any Caribbean islands. In this he found an ally in Lord Hailsham, the new Commonwealth President and a paternalistic aristocrat of the old school. Both worked together to spike the negotiations with Puerto Rico, the beginning of what would be a fruitful working relationship despite coming from seemingly opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Frustrated by the ending of the negotiations, Berrios returned to his previous strategy of high-stakes brinkmanship. On 28 July he produced his own unilateral exit terms and announced a vote on it in the Puerto Rican parliament for the following week. Designed to appeal to the more extreme factions of his own party and scare the Commonwealth, the document would have Puerto Rico leave the Commonwealth on 31 May 1982 and (among other things) repudiate the debt it owned denominated in sterling and float its own currency, all the while continuing to receive remittances from the Asset Management Agency.

It was an incoherent document, effectively demanding that Puerto Rico retain all the benefits of remaining in the Commonwealth while also leaving it, and one which bore little resemblance to the tentative discussions that had been sketched out with Commonwealth officials. However, if the main purpose was to antagonise the Commonwealth, it certainly did that. It was immediately met with a furious response from the Commonwealth. Crosland, only two months into his retirement, denounced it as a threat to his life’s work and this was echoed in statements made by both Hailsham and Manley. When the Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev cheekily suggested that a departed Puerto Rico could find a home in the Soviet sphere of influence, the Commonwealth attitude only hardened.

Furthermore, in an effort to appease his extreme flank, Berrios’ ‘deal’ had managed to alienate moderates in his party. Smelling blood in the water, both the Conservative and Popular Democratic parties came out against the deal and aggressively whipped their MPs to vote it down. With a majority of only two in the first place, Berrios told his MPs that he would treat the vote as a matter of confidence but, with it becoming clear that, even if the deal did pass the Puerto Rican legislature, it would be a dead letter as a matter of negotiating with the Commonwealth, his hopes were doomed and his deal went down to a loss of 25-76. Berrios immediately resigned and called a snap election for 26 September.

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The results were both dramatic and confusing. Berrios’ New Progressive Party split, with a moderate faction led by Fernando Martin Garcia opposing the deal and in favour of a different one. (What this meant in practice, of course, was unclear.) Both the Conservatives and Popular Democrats, however, adopted an explicitly anti-exit position, arguing that Berrios’ brinkmanship had brought the island to the verge of catastrophe. In the days after the election, an effort was made to reach out to Martin’s Green Party but these proved fruitless when it became clear that they did not favour ending the exit process, merely trying to renegotiate it. Instead, the Conservatives and Popular Democrats agreed to form a grand coalition under the Conservative Carlos Romero Barcelo. In truth, the two parties had little in common and had been avowed enemies for their entire existences. Nevertheless, under the pressures of the Commonwealth crisis, they could agree that it was vital for Puerto Rico to remain in the bloc.

In this, they were helped by the other elections in the Big Four that took place over 1980-81. As we have seen, 1981 saw a change in government in the United Kingdom. In Canada, Jean-Luc Pepin’s Liberals ended Flora MacDonald’s disastrous tenure in 1981 and Gough Whitlam’s Labour and Zulfikar Bhutto’s PPL had both returned to government in 1980 promising a change of approach towards the Commonwealth debt crisis. The change of Commonwealth leadership, with Hailsham and Manley now sitting in the top jobs, also pressaged a different way of dealing with the crisis countries. All of the important players were now united in the belief that Puerto Rico should remain and that the Commonwealth should be reformed in order to put the nightmares of the previous decade behind them.

On 1 October, Barcelo formally went to London and delivered a withdrawal of Puerto Rico’s original intent to leave. A week later, Durbin gave a press conference in which he stated that he would do “whatever it takes” to ensure the continued stability of the single currency and the coherence of the Commonwealth. This calmed the financial markets and gave the governments around the Commonwealth room to breathe and develop what would eventually become a more comprehensive package of reforms.
 
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