T4 Political Flashcards
1
Q
The Lady Cometh (2)
A
- After winning the 1979 General Election, outside 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher addressed the TV crews with the following words:
- ‘I would just like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope”
2
Q
Margaret Thatcher (8)
A
- Thatcher had led the Conservative Party since 1975
- She was a conviction politician. She rejected the post-war consensus and embraced the ‘New Right’ or ‘Neo-Liberal’ laissez-faire free market economics of the Chicago School.
- The government’s errors provided the opportunity for the Conservatives to challenge Labour’s hold on power.
- It was highly unlikely as a woman that she would be given a second chance. It was not so much a matter of the Conservatives winning the general election as Labour losing it.
- One of the most effective campaign posters in modern electioneering showed a long winding unemployment que with the caption ‘Labour isn’t working’.
- For a significant portion of the electorate, this was an accurate assessment of Labour’s record in office.
3
Q
Thatcher’s Swamped Rhetoric (2)
A
- In 1978, Thatcher, as Opposition leader, was interviewed by Granada TV’s World in Action about immigration and the Conservatives’ election policy surrounding it.
- ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’
4
Q
The Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Campaign (4)
A
- Ran 1979 election campaign.
- They famously trained her to lower her voice, exploited her traditional clothes and hair style to invoke the 1950s traditional family values image and had her pose for photographs.
- Provided the media with photo-opportunities, by swinging her shopping basket, drinking tea in a factory or cuddling a new-born calf.
- Saatchi & Saatchi produced the famous billboard poster which became the Conservatives iconic message.
5
Q
Callaghan delayed the General Election (2)
A
- Callaghan had had the option of calling an election in the autumn of 1978.
- However, he wrongly decided to carry on and face the country after the economy had improved. Then the Winter of Discontent happened!
6
Q
Callaghan’s Minority Government (5)
A
- In April 1976, Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was succeeded by Jim Callaghan.
- By April 1976, the government had lost its formal majority.
- The immediate reasons were a by-election defeat, the defection of two of Callaghan’s backbenchers to form a new ‘Scottish Labour Party’.
- By March 1977, after further by-election losses, he agreed to a parliamentary arrangement, with David Steel and the Liberal Party which became known as the ‘Lib-Lab Pact’.
- The Lib-Lab pact ended in August 1978. The pact had been unpopular with some activists in both parties and an election was expected soon.
7
Q
Callaghan’s Government’s Vote of No-Confidence (1979) (4)
A
- In the autumn of 1978, the Lib-Lab Pact to collapsed.
- With its tiny majority practically wiped out by by-election losses, Callaghan’s government was now dependent upon the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the House of Commons.
- When, however, a referendum on Scotland in March 1979 failed to provide a clear mandate for devolution, Callaghan’s Labour government dropped its proposal to introduce it.
- The SNP’s MPs immediately withdrew their support. The outcome was that on 28th March 1979 the government, with its majority gone, was defeated on a vote of no confidence.
8
Q
1970s Stagflation (Rising unemployment & Rising Inflation) (3)
A
- Callaghan had inherited the economic consequences of the 1973 OPEC Energy Crisis in the form of Stagflation.
- The need for the emergency 1976 IMF loan bailout had severely damaged Labour’s economic credibility.
- By 1975 unemployment had risen to 4.1%, by 1976 it had risen to 5.7% and by 1977 it had reached 6.2%. Inflation, which had been running at an annual average of 5.2% in the latter sixties and at 9.3% between 1971 and 1974, reached the frightening height of 25% in 1975.
9
Q
The Winter of Discontent (1978 - 1979) (4)
A
- The Winter of Discontent was a period of strikes and unemployment.
- Lorry drivers, Hospital porters and even grave diggers went on strikes.
- Bodies were not buried; rubbish was not collected; and the country seemed in anarchy.
- The government seemed as if it could not cope.
10
Q
Crisis? What Crisis? (3)
A
- The impact of the Winter of Discontent was made worse when Callaghan came back from an economic conference.
- When asked about the growing industrial crisis facing Britain, Callaghan denied any crisis existed, leading to his remarks being exploited by pro-Conservative right-wing newspapers like The Sun which rand the headline ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’
- This made Callaghan seem out-of-touch with public opinion and later became the basis of a Conservative political TV advert.
11
Q
The 1979 Election Results (7)
A
- The Labour government was not swept from power by an angry electorate; indeed, it very nearly held its 1974 position in terms of votes and percentage support.
- But there was sufficient disillusionment amongst voters for them to give the Conservatives an 8% increase on their 1974 General Election results and an additional three million votes.
- This provided the Conservatives, due to first-past-the-post electoral system, with a comfortable majority of 70 seats over Labour and a majority overall of 43 seats.
- It was enough to allow Margaret Thatcher to take office and to start the Thatcherite Revolution.
- Despite the problems facing the Labour government the result of the 1979 election was not a landslide.
- The Labour vote dipped by 3% overall, while the Conservatives benefited from a sharp drop-in support for the Liberals and the SNP.
- This produced a comfortable majority of 43 for the Conservatives.
12
Q
Thatcher’s Political Style (5)
A
- Thatcher styled herself as a ‘conviction politician’.
- This meant that she followed policies based on beliefs rather than because they would prove popular with the electorate.
- It also meant not being influenced to change direction due to public pressure.
- This was evidenced early in Thatcher’s career when Minister of Education over the withdrawal of free milk for school children leading to the chant ‘Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher!’
- Thatcher rejected the post-war consensus as being responsible for the economic and moral decline of Britain, and believed political parties should have distinctive policy approaches.
13
Q
The Influence of Thatcher’s Upbringing (4)
A
- Thatcher was strongly middle class, the daughter of a grocer – Alf Roberts, a Methodist lay preacher.
- Alf Roberts was also active in local politics, and imbued Margaret with her beliefs in self-reliance and self-improvement.
- Margaret epitomised this by gaining a place at Oxford. Her upbringing also meant she was not a traditional Tory, being suburban, from trade and a woman.
- This meant Thatcher always perceived herself as somewhat of an outsider and could be dismissive of Tory grandees.
14
Q
Thatcher’s Ideology (7)
A
- The ‘New Right’ drew on the work of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayeck (Chicago School of Economics) to challenge the Keynesian approach to the economy that was central to the post war consensus in the UK.
- The Centre for Policy studies in the UK set up by Keith Joseph in 1974 was also part of the ‘New Right’, along with the Adam Smith Institute formed in 1977. Both had a considerable influence on Thatcher’s thinking.
- New Right ideology rejected Keynsian economics in favour of monetarism and free market economics.
- Thatcherites viewed the free market as moral, as it encouraged individual responsibility.
- Thatcherites were dismissive of the ‘permissive society’ of the 1960’s – and put a high value on the family as the building blocks of social order.
- In many ways Thatcher was seen to have embraced ‘Victorian’ values in both moral issues and in trying to reduce the role of the State in the economy and society.
- Thatcherism was supportive of the police in order to maintain law and order.
15
Q
Thatcher’s Cabinet’s – Wets and Dries (4)
A
- When Thatcher became Prime Minister not all Conservative MPs or her first cabinet ministers were strongly supportive of her policies.
- Thatcher described several leading Tories as ‘wets’ - an insulting term meant to describe someone who was soft/weak about the social consequences of monetarist economics. Examples of senior Tory wets include Willie Whitelaw (Home Secretary) or Jim Prior (Employment Minister).
- Thatcher did ensure that ‘dries’ were given the key economic posts in her first Cabinet – such as Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Keith Joseph at the Department of Industry.
- Following Thatcher’s success in the 1983 General Election she was able to marginalise more ‘wets’ and the ‘dries’ were now firmly in the ascendancy.
16
Q
The reasons are clear (7)
A
- Michael Foot led the Labour Party and campaigned in an uninspiring way.
- The right-wing media exploited Michael Foot wearing a Donkey Jacket in 1981 Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph to portray him as unpatriotic.
- The Labour Party was weakened by internal disputes, especially with the rise of Militant who were far-left extremist Trotskyites [Communists] who were trying to ‘take-over’ the Labour Party which frightened the public away from voting Labour.
- In 1981 the ‘gang of four’ split from Labour to create the Social Democratic Party [SDP], in opposition to Michael Foot’s far left-wing polices, which further divided the opposition and split the left-wing electoral vote to the advantage of Thatcher.
- The Labour Party’s disastrous 1983 manifesto was largely a concession to its left-wing.
- Amongst its vote-losing pledges was the promise of unilateral disbarment and to withdraw from the EEC and NATO.
- A Labour MP, Gerald Kaufman, wittingly, if despairingly described Labour’s 1983 manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.
17
Q
Thatcher’s Political Benefits of the Falklands War (9)
A
- Margaret Thatcher was riding high following her successful leadership during the 1982 Falklands War.
- The apparent pacifism of Michael Foot during the Falklands War made the Labour Party look unpatriotic at a time of national crisis.
- The reward for her leadership during the Falklands Crisis came with the 1983 General Election. Carried to victory by the surge of popularity that the war had brought her, she won an overwhelming electoral victory in the 1983 General Election.
- In contrast, the Labour opposition led by Michael Foot, who had opposed military action found themselves in the unenviable position of trying to attack the government, while at the same time supporting British service men and women. It proved an impossible act to bring off and the Labour Leaders, Michael Foot and then later Neil Kinnock, suffered a dip in their personal standing.
- In addition, Thatcher had quietly abandoned her very unpopular Monetarist policies by the end of 1983.
- Moreover, she once again had the support of the right-wing press, especially Rupert Murdock’s The Sun newspaper and benefitted from the first-past-the-post electoral system.
- Impressive electoral success though it was, Thatcher’s achievement has to be put into context.
- What she had done was to recover the support that the opinion polls suggested she had lost in the early 1980s, as a result of her unpopular monetarism economic policies, and to restore herself and the Conservative Party to the position they held in 1979.
- The real explanation for the Conservative landslide in 1983 was the remarkable poor performance of the Labour opposition, which saw its total vote drop by three million and its share of the vote fall by nearly 9%.
18
Q
The 1987 General Election (4)
A
- The internal Conservative Party squabble over the Westland Affair did not greatly harm the government’s standing with voters.
- The year 1987 witnessed Thatcher’s third consecutive electoral victory.
- Although the results showed some recovery by the Labour Party from its disastrous performance in the 1983 General Election led by Michael Foot thanks to the reforms introduced by Neil Kinnock.
- The Conservative government, however, maintained its share of the popular vote and despite losing 22 seats still had an overall majority of 100 in the House of Commons.
19
Q
Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party Reforms (12)
A
- Michael Foot was replaced as the Labour Party leader in 1983 by Neil Kinnock.
- This was to prove a turning point in Labour’s political fortunes.
- Although Kinnock had earlier been on the Left of the party, he was realistic enough to appreciate that the hard-Left path was unlikely to lead the Labour Party back into power.
- He began a wide-ranging policy review that rejected many of the policies, like unilateral nuclear disarmament, in Michael Foot’s 1983 Manifesto.
- A key moment came in 1985 at the Labour Party conference when Kinnock denounced the ‘Looney -Left’ Militant councillors, such as those in Liverpool Council, whose extreme activities had earned the contempt of the public.
- There is a strong argument for regarding Kinnock’s 1985 Labour Party conference speech as having destroyed the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
- By advancing the notion of a Labour Party committed to reform, but determined to avoid extremes of the far left.
- He had stolen the SDP’s clothes. It has also been suggested that had the ‘gang of four’ shown patience and waited they would have found that New Labour perfectly fitted into their ideas.
- Kinnock had sacrificed his own party-political fortune by in battling with the far left of his party.
- But this provided the base for the future modernisation of Labour and the eventual creation of New Labour.
- He had, in effect, to execute a series of U turns, on the nuclear issue, nationalisation and on Europe.
- These were courageous moves on his part and unavoidable if his party was to progress, but the consequences for Kinnock personally was that he was never again fully trusted by either his own party members or the wider electorate.
20
Q
Conservative Strengths in the 1987 General Election (7)
A
- Despite this Thatcher had several strengths. After 1983 her monetarist policies were quietly abandoned, without fanfare and publicity, which had been deeply unpopular with voters.
- In its place Thatcher followed supply-side and free-market economics, including privatisation and deregulation, which were more popular with the public than monetarism.
- Thatcher had also gained public sympathy from her steadfastness and cool level-headed response to the 1984 IRA Brighton Bombing, when she decided to continue the Conservative Party conference, rather than be intimidated by terrorists.
- Her resolute leadership during the 1984 and 1985 Miners strike also won her admiration for destroying trade union power in Britain that had brought down Heath’s Conservative government (The-Three-Day-Week) and Callaghan’s Labour government (The Winter of Discontent) in the 1970s.
- The 1986 Big Bang transformed the City of London into one of the major banking, insurance, and financial capitals of the world.
- This was followed by the 1987 Lawson Boom when the economy was rapidly growing, and inflation was finally under control.
- Again, Thatcher benefitted from the support of the right-wing press and the first-past-the-post electoral system.
21
Q
A Weakened Labour Party (10)
A
- The 1980s were a disastrous decade for the Labour Party.
- Between 1979 and 1992 the Labour Party lost four general elections in a row.
- The Labour Party would not be back in power until 1997.
- The year of James Callaghan’s government in the 1978 to 1979 ‘Winter of Discontent’, a series of strikes by public sector workers, remained with the popular public imagination damaging Labour.
- The Labour Party’s traditional strong links with the trade unions were seen by voters as a contributory factor to the industrial strife and Labour’s inability to govern effectively.
- This view prevailed between 1979 and 1992. The public no longer seemed to regard the Labour Party as a credible party of government.
- In many respects the Labour Party was its own worse enemy in this period.
- It was constantly fighting with itself between its right-wing and left-wing factions.
- It presented the image of a divided party more concerned with its own internal wrangles than with preparing itself for government. A major problem was the hard left of the Labour Party.
- Callaghan had been a moderate, but was replaced by the ultra-left-winger Michael Foot in 1980.
22
Q
The Rise of the Labour Left (5)
A
- Tony Benn had interpreted Labour’s 1979 General Election defeat as a sign not that the Labour Party was too left-wing, but that it was not left-wing enough.
- He urged the Labour Party to embrace genuinely socialist policies instead of tinkering with capitalist ideas.
- As a step towards achieving this, he led a campaign to change the Labour Party’s constitution.
- At Labour’s 1980 and 1981 Party Conferences, the left-wing of the Labour Party forced through resolutions [policy demands] that required all Labour MPs to seek reselection by their constituencies.
- The aim was to give greater power to Labour’s left-wing activists who, although being a minority in the Parliamentary Labour Party MPs overall where stronger in the Labour Party membership and constituencies.
23
Q
The Rise of the Militant Tendency (3)
A
- Tony Benn hailed the changes as a victory for internal Labour Party democracy, but for Labour moderates it signalled the takeover of the Labour Party by left-wing extremist groups like Militant.
- The 1980s Militant Tendency was a Marxist group founded in 1964 with the aim of infiltrating the Labour Party and forcing Marxist revolutionary policies onto it.
- It had considerable success at a local level and became a dominant force in the 1970s and 1980s in the Labour-controlled Liverpool Council.
24
Q
‘The Longest Suicide Note in History’ (Labour’s 1983 Election Manifesto) (3)
A
- The Labour Party’s ill-thought 1983 manifesto was largely a concession to its left-wing and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
- Amongst its vote-losing pledges was the promise of unilateral disarmament and to abandon Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent.
- A Labour MP, Gerald Kaufman, wittingly, if despairingly described Labour’s 1983 manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.
25
Q
The ‘Gang of Four’ and The Social Democratic Party (SDP) (10)
A
- Un 1981 believing that the Labour Party was allowing itself to be divorced from people’s real needs by pursuing an unrealistic agenda, a number of Labour MPs broke away from the Labour Party to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
- The most prominent of the breakaway Labour MPs were Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owens and William Rodgers who were known as the ‘gang of four’.
- Although they had all held posts in the Labour governments of the 1970s, none of the ‘gang of four’ were happy with what they perceived to be the Labour Party’s domination by the trade unions and its anti-Europeanism.
- They had stifled their feelings and gone along with the main policies of both Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. But Labour’s defeat in 1979, the election of Michael Foot as Labour leader and the changes to the Labour Party constitution pushed the party further to the far left.
- This had convinced them that the time had come for a complete break with the Labour Party.
- The SDP leaders’ claim was that the new party would be radical and a reforming party, but not a socialist force in British politics.
- Their hope was that they would attract disaffected moderate voters from both the Labour and Conservative parties.
- In alliance with the Liberal Party, the SDP gained a quarter of the popular vote in the 1983 General Election.
- But, despite such early success, it was never able to establish itself as a credible alternative to the major two political parties.
- In 1988 the SDP had formally merged with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats.
