The British general election of 1983

Abstract

The General Election of 1979 saw the Conservatives return to power with the largest parliamentary majority since 1966 and also the largest lead in the popular vote attained by any party since 1945. The new Conservative government repudiated the policies of Keynesianism which had guided economic management for most of the past 30 years and decided to pin its faith on strict control of the money supply. The new emphasis upon monetarism, already foreshadowed under the Labour government, coincided with the onset of the most severe recession to hit the Western world since the 1930s. Unemployment grew steadily worse. When the Labour Party left office in 1979 unemployment stood at 5.2 per cent. By March 1983 it had reached 12.7 per cent.l The government's economic strategy rested pardy on cutting back public expenditure, a measure which in the short term at least, increased unemployment. It was not surprising, therefore, that in spite of cuts in direct taxes the Conservatives became highly unpopular during their first year of office. However, the Labour Party, after its heavy defeat, swung sharply to the Left. Bitter controversy broke out over the method of selecting the party leader, and over the re-selection of MPs. When Mr Callaghan resigned as Labour leader in the autumn of 1980, Michael Foot, once champion of the Labour Left, was chosen to succeed him by a margin of 10 votes. The constitutional disputes culminated at a special party conference held in Wembley, in January 1981, where the party adopted a new way of choosing the Leader. This decision was the signal for 11 Labour MPs and two prominent figures from the party's right wing outside Parliament to announce the creation of the Council for Social Democracy. Two months later, in March 1981, the Council for Social Democracy was transformed into the Social Democratic Party, or the SDP, as it became widely known; more MPs defected to it during the next nine months, all but one from Labour, making 29 in all. In September 1981 the Liberal Assembly approved the formation of an alliance with the SDP, one of the features of which was a negotiated share-out of constituencies and an electoral pact between the two parties. The next six months were dominated by the rise of the Alliance. In October 1981 the Liberals won the Conservative seat of Croydon North West at a by-election and in late November Shirley Williams won the very safe Conservative seat of Crosby for the SDP, registering one of the biggest by-election triumphs of modem times. The opinion polls parallelled these dramatic by-election victories. In December Gallup found more than 50 per cent of their sample saying they would vote for the SDP/Liberal Alliance at an immediate general election, with the Conservative and Labour parties trailing at 23 and 23tA per cent respectively. Already there was talk of the Alliance forming the next government and of Roy Jenkins becoming the first Alliance prime minister. Both major parties seemed equally unpopular--the Labour Party because of its lurch to the Left, and the Conservative Party because of the rise of unemployment and the reduction of public expenditure. Early in 1982 the opinion polls registered a significant fall in Alliance support but it remained above 30 per cent and in March, Roy Jenkins won the Conservative seat of Glasgow, Hillhead. The Alliance hoped that Hillhead would mark another upward move in their fortunes but everyone's calculations were suddenly disrupted by the Argentine seizure of the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982. After a