Remaking the Opposition?

Abstract

The failure of either the Conservative or Labour parties to deal successfully with Britain’s relative economic decline in the post-war decades had a profound impact on party politics. Between 1959 and 1983 neither party won re-election after serving a full term of office. The volatility of the electorate undermined the two-party system as the Liberal and nationalist parties claimed large shares of the vote (Chapter 3). From the 1960s the energies of many disenchanted with the performance of the mainstream parties were directed into single-issue pressure groups from the Child Poverty Action Group and (social security) Claimants Unions to the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and broader social movements like the women’s liberation movement and the Gay Liberation Front. The inflationary world, deflationary policies and mass unemployment of the 1970s further damaged the cohesion of the main parties, especially Labour (Ludlam, 1994), and created the opportunity for the Thatcherite agenda to capture the Conservative Party (Chapter 2). By the mid-1980s Margaret Thatcher was claiming to have marked out new territory in British politics, and to have forced rival parties to follow her on to it.