UK Politics: Map for inconclusive Alliance breakthrough in 1983(4)

Actually, given the problems with getting a big Alliance score in 1983 or 1984 (the Alliance surge had died before the Falklands war and the economic recovery), I now reckon that the key is to somehow manouevre a PoD to have Parliament dissolved in late 1981, when the Alliance surge was just peaking.

Have the INLA continue to go for Mason instead of getting Neave, have them kill him, Thatcher's majority is heavily weakened and the SDP get a few more Tories to get things moving.
 
Actually, given the problems with getting a big Alliance score in 1983 or 1984 (the Alliance surge had died before the Falklands war and the economic recovery), I now reckon that the key is to somehow manouevre a PoD to have Parliament dissolved in late 1981, when the Alliance surge was just peaking.

A 1978 election leads to a tiny Tory majority which is then whittled away by by-election defeats?
 

Thande

Donor
Actually, given the problems with getting a big Alliance score in 1983 or 1984 (the Alliance surge had died before the Falklands war and the economic recovery), I now reckon that the key is to somehow manouevre a PoD to have Parliament dissolved in late 1981, when the Alliance surge was just peaking.

I agree, the assumption here is that they manage to sustain it or make a comeback. According to people who were around at the time, the main reason the surge died was because the Alliance and especially the SDP never seemed to actually commit to any firm policies rather than just being vaguely wishy-washy and inoffensive in an attempt to appeal to as many people as possible. They became a romantic cause more than anything.
 
I agree, the assumption here is that they manage to sustain it or make a comeback. According to people who were around at the time, the main reason the surge died was because the Alliance and especially the SDP never seemed to actually commit to any firm policies rather than just being vaguely wishy-washy and inoffensive in an attempt to appeal to as many people as possible. They became a romantic cause more than anything.

Actually, Owen wanted actual policies and to go beyond the party for a better yesterday, but found himself blocked by the Liberals, who were known for saying one thing in one area and the opposite in another and did not want to alienate a segment of support and Roy Jenkins who wanted to be Prime Minister and uniting with the Liberals. David Owen does like to go on about it in his autobiography.
 

Thande

Donor
Actually, Owen wanted actual policies and to go beyond the party for a better yesterday, but found himself blocked by the Liberals, who were known for saying one thing in one area and the opposite in another and did not want to alienate a segment of support and Roy Jenkins who wanted to be Prime Minister and uniting with the Liberals. David Owen does like to go on about it in his autobiography.

Yeah, I know. Constantly ;) I can understand his frustration with the Liberals though, who would basically agree to Owen's pro-nuclear position in an attempt to pick up people who found Foot's disarmament position overly naive, and then would immediately turn around and say they were anti-nuclear in a press conference.

Although there are a lot of people attracted to the Alliance as a romantic cause (even me to some extent, despite disagreeing with a lot of their actual policies) I do think that even if they had miraculously won a majority the resulting government would have soon collapsed due to this lack of coherency, as well as the large number of untested MPs mentioned above. Canada's NDP is a good analogy here: they have arguably put themselves in a better position by usurping the Canadian Liberals as the official opposition to the Conservatives in one election and then being able to plausibly form the government next time, than they would have if they'd actually won a majority in 2011 and then tried to govern with all those untested freshman MPs, many of whom never dreamed they would actually be elected and were just running in thought-to-be safe Liberal or Bloc seats as practice for the future.
 

Thande

Donor
Would you mind telling me how you did the map? I wanna use one for my TL.

Here's what I did: I took the OTL map of 1983 I made myself (see the link in the OP). I then did find-and-replace colour to replace all the colours with paler shades so I could tell what the OTL result was in each seat, but still tell the difference between the ones I had changed (by colouring in with the proper darker shades) and those I hadn't. I then took the data from the electoral calculator, which gives you an alphabetical list of which seats changed, and worked through each seat in alphabetical order. Often I had to look up the seat on Wikipedia so I could recognise it by its boundaries on the map. A few seats are difficult because there's little data on them and you often don't get a map silhouette--mostly Scottish and London constituencies. I used either Wikipedia or this more detailed site to find out whether it was a Liberal or SDP in each seat the Alliance won, because the electoral calculator site doesn't distinguish between them.

When I had finished colouring in all the seats that changed hands relative to OTL, I then did find-and-replace on the remaining pale-coloured seats that didn't change so they were also given the appropriate dark shades of colour. The whole process took about 3 hours. In the next post I'll post the pale-coloured map I started with so you can get an idea of what I mean.
 

Thande

Donor
And the pale-coloured OTL 1983 map:

alt-1983.png
 
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