Abstract
The Conservatives’ victory in 1979 was decisive but not overwhelming. The party’s share of the vote recovered from its low point in 1974 to reach 43.9 per cent. The Conservatives won 339 seats, a majority over all other parties of 43. A Conservative victory had seemed probable after the collapse of the authority of the Government during the IMF negotiations at the end of 1976. Labour had trailed the Conservatives by as much as twenty-five points in the opinion polls in some months between the autumn of 1976 and the summer of 1977. The party had suffered some major by-election losses in this period,1 as well as enormous losses in local government seats.
Our country’s relative decline is not inevitable. We in the Conservative party think we can reverse it. We want to work with the grain of human nature, helping people to help themselves … The Conservative Government’s first job will be to rebuild our economy and reunite a divided and disillusioned people.
Conservative Election Manifesto 1979
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Notes and references
See Richard Rose, Do Parties Make a Difference? (London: Macmillan, 1984).
See William Keegan, Mrs. Thatcher’s Economic Experiment; Colin Thain, ‘The Medium Term Financial Strategy’, paper presented to the Political Studies Association Conference, April 1985; and
Grahame Thompson, The Conservatives’ Economic Policy (London: Croom Helm, 1986) ch. 2.
For contrasting assessments of the 1981 budget see Keegan, Mrs. Thatcher’s Economic Experiment, and Alan Walters, Britain’s Economic Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Patrick Cosgrave judged it to be the ‘true strategic beginning of the introduction of Thatcherism into government’.
Prior’s caution over trade union reform and the conflict this created is described by Patrick Cosgrave in Thatcher: The First Term (London: Bodley Head, 1985).
See John Burton, The Job Support Machine (London: CPS, 1979) and
Jock Bruce-Gardyne, Mrs. Thatcher’s First Administration (London: Macmillan, 1984).
See Ian Bradley, Breaking the Mould (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981);
D. Kogan and M. Kogan, The Battle for the Labour Party (London: Fontana, 1982); and
Patrick Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left (London: Macmillan, 1987).
The internal splits in the cabinet are detailed by Patrick Cosgrave, Thatcher: The First Term; Peter Riddell, The Thatcher Government (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985);
Martin Holmes, The First Thatcher Government 1979–1983 (London: Wheatsheaf, 1985); and
Dennis Kavanagh, Thatcherism and Britain Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
This is argued strongly by Grahame Thompson, The Conservatives’ Economic Policy; William Keegan, Mrs. Thatcher’s Economic Experiment; Nick Gardner, Decade of Discontent (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); and
David Smith, The Rise and Fall of Monetarism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).
For a full account see Cento Veljanovski, Selling the State (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987).
See Mike Goldsmith, ‘The Conservatives and Local Government, 1979 and after’, in D. Bell (ed.) The Conservative Government 1979–84 (London: Croom Helm, 1985); and
Patrick Dunleavy and Rod Rhodes, ‘Government beyond Whitehall’ in Henry Drucker et al. (eds) Developments in British Politics 2 (London: Macmillan, 1986) ch. 5.
See Huw Beynon, Digging Deeper; and Martin Adeney and John Lloyd, The Miners’ Strike: loss without limit (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
See Michael Moran, ‘Industrial Relations’ in Drucker, Developments in British Politics 2, ch. 12, and
Tony Lane, ‘The Tories and the Trade Unions’ in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds) The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983) pp. 169–87.
The Labour Research Department estimated that in June 1986 the official government figure of 3 229 400 would have been 3 865 000 on the same basis as the 1979 count. In addition MSC programmes increased the numbers on special training and community schemes from 250000 in 1979 to 737 000 in 1986; of these an estimated 561 000 would otherwise be registered as unemployed. See Labour Research, A State of Collapse: The UK economy under the Tories (London, 1987) pp. 24–5.
See Anthony Barnett, ‘Iron Britannia’, New Left Review, 134 (1982) pp. 5–96; and Hall and Jacques, The Politics of Thatcherism, Part iii(chapters by Eric Hobsbawm, Robert Gray and Tom Nairn).
See Peter Jenkins, Mrs. Thatcher’s Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987) ch. 9.
See Peter Hennessy, Cabinet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) ch. 3.
See Maurice Milliard’s analysis of the Thatcher Government’s record on public spending, The Politics of Public Expenditure (London: Croom Helm, 1987) ch. 6.
See Thompson, The Conservatives’ Economic Policy, and Wyn Grant, The Political Economy of Industrial Policy (London: Butterworths, 1982).
See Hans Kastendiek et al. (eds) Economic Crisis, Trade Unions and the State (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
John Lloyd and Charles Leadbeater, In Search of Work (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).
See Bob Rowthorn, ‘Britain and Western Europe’, Marxism Today, 26:5 (May 1982) pp. 25–31.
Sir John Hoskyns, ‘Whitehall and Westminster: An outsider’s view’, Parliamentary Affairs, 36 (1983); and
‘Conservatism is not enough’, Political Quarterly, 55 (1984).
The Policy Unit is discussed by Fry, Hennessy and Kavanagh. See also, for an insider’s view, David Willetts, ‘The role of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit’, Public Administration, 65:4 (1987). Willetts reveals that the first two questions asked by the Policy Unit about every departmental paper are (i) is there a less interventionist solution which has not been properly considered or has been wrongly rejected and (ii) is there a less expensive option?
For Thatcher’s style as Prime Minister see Anthony King, ‘Margaret Thatcher: the style of a Prime Minister’, in A. King (ed.) The British Prime Minister (London: Macmillan, 1985).
After the speech the Conservative party’s poll rating leapt nine points. For a discussion of race and the Conservative party see Z. Layton-Henry, The Politics of Race in Britain (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984).
Two influential treatments of this theme are Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge University Press, 1981) and
Corelli Barnett, The Audit of War (London: Macmillan, 1986); see also
David Coates and John Hillard (eds) The Economic Decline of Modern Britain (London: Wheatsheaf, 1985).
See, for example, David Eccles, Popular Capitalism (London: Conservative Political Centre, 1954).
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© 1988 Andrew Gamble
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Gamble, A. (1988). The Thatcher Government 1979–87. In: The Free Economy and the Strong State. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19438-4_4
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