How Successful Was Edward Heath as Leader of the Conservative Party Between 1965 and 1974?

Labour disunity was a huge contributing factor as to why the conservatives were able to dominate from 1951 to 1964. However, there are also other factors that assisted conservative dominance. Whether that be conservative strengths, good timing, the end of austerity or their handle on public opinion, all factors contributed to the dominant years. However, how long the conservatives actually dominated is also a question. Did they dominate for the whole period, or just part of it? The years 1962-1964 question conservative dominance and how labour reunited.

Although the UK Prime Minister is elected separately through Parliamentary elections, unlike the USA President, there is a trend for Prime Ministers to claim popular authority on the basis of electoral victory. Prime Ministers have therefore become the ideological consciences of their

In 1951 Winston Churchill's Conservative party, won the general election, and this would be the start of 13 years of Conservative rule spanning three prime ministers. This rule was ended in 1964 by Harold Wilson’s reunited Labour party. In this essay, I will look at the factors which led to the Labour victory.

The election campaign in 1964 was a close run contest even though there was a low public approval of the current Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home. The labour party only won a majority of 3 seats. The reason for the decline in support for the Conservative party was because of events and scandals such as the Profumo affair

This period of Labour rule is often marked down as a poor performance on behalf of the labour party, critically looked upon by many historians. There were many failings under the rule of this government however the circumstances they were placed in caused severe restraints in their options.

This essay will examine the impact of the Conservative party during their period in office between 1951 and 1964. The assessments by historians of these thirteen years vary widely as the Conservative rule left behind a mixed feeling about its achievements. We will therefore be discussing to what extent their period in office can be described as “thirteen years wasted”, based on their performances in the political, economic and social sectors.

Another contributing factor at this election may have been performance in office, which in the above statement is not seen as important as personality and image. However, performance in office may have been extremely detrimental for the conservatives in 1997 because of their crisis in 1992. This focuses on the retrospective model, as people saw the Conservatives as incompetent in handling the economy because of Black Wednesday in September 1992. The Conservatives and especially Noramnt Lamont, Chancellor of the Exchequer, were to blame for the crisis that saw the pound forced out of the ERM. This didn’t help at the 1997 general election where they did extremely badly in a huge Labour win.

Clarence Decatur Howe Clarence Decatur Howe was born January 15th 1886 in Waltham Massachusetts and passed December 31st 1960 in Montreal Canada after a long life during which he served in the Liberal party in parliament for 22 years. Some of the things that He did that made him a historically significant Canadian are: he helped to keep the liberals in power for 22 years, he persuaded his conservative colleagues to support the liberal government, and changed Canada’s government from agricultural based to industrial. Howe helped to keep the liberals in power for close to 22 years, helping to get the party massive wins. Within Howe’s first year of being in the liberal party, “the Liberals won a landslide victory, with 173 seats in the House

The Labour government of 1974-1979 also won two elections, the 1974 February election and the 1974 October election, however both were won by a minority. The February election was won by 4 seats and the October election was won by 42 seats. The reason for the slim win is to do with inflation. The Labour governments of 1974-1979 were in office at a bad time because Britain had started to suffer from huge inflation because of the oil price rise in 1973, and so voters didn’t have a clear decision on which they were going to vote for. This shows that at the moment the 1964-1970 Labour Government was more successful by far because of their majority of 110 seats in the 1966 election.

As stated by Holmes, in the 1980s, there was a lot of chaos in the party as Margaret Thatcher had moved the party to the extreme right amongst other things, making her members of parliament keen to replace her. She was replaced by John Major in 1990 who won four successive elections. Between 1900 and 2000, the conservatives were in power two-third of the time. The period in time when they were not in power, was in 1997 were they lost the election and also in 2001.At that point time, the conservative leaders were (William Hague and Iain Duncan smith) who struggled to win back votes of the people. The policies that were left by Margret Thatcher were not favoured by the people. In 2003, Michael Howard (right winger) revived the conservatives but the conservatives were defeated by the liberal democrat party in the 2005 general election. (Holmes pg276-277)

Nevertheless, prime ministers are powerful in the sense they dominate political agenda within government. Since Thatcher’s domination of the political agenda of the privatisation of public businesses in the 1980's other prime ministers have displayed their power in the same way. Cameron has dominated the political agendas since 2010 with his policy of the Big Society, which has been the centre piece for his leadership, thus it is constantly referee to throughout both the government and the media. In this case, prime ministers are as powerful as they claim, as they are the leaders in government, hence the political agenda is fully controlled by what they as leader wish to tackle most in government. Prime ministers set the tone for their leadership, they have the ultimate decision on the political agenda country and

Another major event that had an impact on the election was the retirement of Lord Salisbury who had been influential in the revival of the Conservatives and the alliance with the Unionists. Salisbury's successor, Balfour can be seen as another reason for the revival of the Liberal Party. As soon as Balfour was appointed the Unionist alliance began to break. Balfour is partly to blame for Chamberlains attempt to implement the tariff reform in 1903. Although Balfour had little to do with it he failed to stop Chamberlain putting the reform forward which

Whether or not there truly was a ‘post war consensus’ in British politics from 1951 to 1964 is a highly debatable topic of which historians can often appear to be in two minds about; on one hand, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson infamously described the period as ‘Thirteen years wasted’, whereas historian Robert Blake (a supporter of the Conservatives’, regards it as a ‘Golden age of growth’. The likes of Kevin Jeffrey’s even argue that consensus had even started before the war. Overall, the central issue was the idea of a mixed economy.

During her term of office she reshaped almost every aspect of British politics, reviving the economy, reforming outdated institutions, and reinvigorating the nation's foreign policy. She challenged and did much to overturn the psychology of decline, which had become rooted in Britain since the Second World War, pursuing national recovery with striking energy and determination. In the process, Margaret

In Tony Blair’s Socialist Manifesto (1994), he reinvents the idea of “social-ism” in order to “fit the ideology to the world” since the economic and social interests of people are constantly evolving. After World War II, the economy became a lot more global, the service industry grew and there has been an increase in human rights movements as the public have been less progressive. Aligned with the ideas of “socialism”, Blair supports a concept called the “Third Way” which is based on the idea of combining center-right economics and center-left social policies (“The Third Way”, n.d).The idea was developed by Anthony Giddens, the sociologist and director of the London School of Economics, he argued that the reformist governments could no longer rely only on the ideas of complete social and economic state control in the face of the forces and finances of globalization. Therefore, Giddens proposed an idea that would support center policies, but also remain committed to radical measures. Blair refers to the third way as his version of “socialism” which is in favor of economic growth and entrepreneurship as well greater state intervention to improve social justice and equality among civilians (“UK Politics: What is the Third Way,” n.d.). Using the ideas of the third way, Blair reformed the Labour Party and their ideas. Under his leadership, the Labour Party became the New Labour Party with a