What went wrong: Explaining the fall of the Labour Government

by Michael Barratt Brown, Geoff Bish, Ken Coates

The defeat of the Callaghan Administration in May 1979 brought into office a sharply committed, doctrinaire and radical Conservative Government. Mrs. Thatcher was certainly nothing to do with the "Butskellite" tradition of conservative Labour governments, and moderate Conservative ones, which enabled correspondents in the late fifties to join the names of Hugh Gaitskell and R.A. Butler in a portmanteau expression symbolising the essential similarity between the parties. No more. Yet the conservative revival did not happen in a vacuum. During 1974 Conservative policies had been rejected by the electorate, but Labour's policies were never implemented. The political context in which first Mr Wilson and later Mr Callaghan drifted further and further into difficulty, while their surrounding economic circumstances steadily worsened, is carefully documented in this book.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1979