The End of the Road?, 1979–92

Abstract

In the decade that followed the election defeat of 1979, it was widely assumed that Jim Callaghan would be the last Labour Prime Minister. Mrs Thatcher’s economic record during her first adminstration was far from impressive. Her promised assault on Britain’s post-war settlement, with its attempt to shake off state collectivism and replace it with an ‘enterprise culture’, was overshadowed by a fresh recession. Two years into office unemployment was rising steadily towards three million — a figure that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. This, together with tough penal legislation, finally helped to quell the trade union militancy of recent years, but it also led to a sharp fall in manufacturing output, with the north of England most severely hit. And yet in 1983 the Conservatives were returned to power with the second-largest majorty of seats since the war. As all the frustrations of the Wilson-Callaghan era came to the surface, Labour had destroyed any prospect it had of regaining power by engaging in protracted blood-letting. The party fared even more abysmally in 1983, on a platform reflecting the increased assertiveness of the left, than it had done in 1979. So dismal was Labour’s performance that it was seriously challenged for second place by a nascent ‘centre force’, the Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance, which made the best third party showing since the 1920s.