page_title: History of the Labour Party (UK)
section_title: Michael Foot
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Labour Party (UK) / "Wilderness Years" / Michael Foot
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Bijeenkomst in Den Haag van vertegenwoordigers van socialistische partijen uit de kleine NAVO-landen "Scandilux"; Michael Foot, 19 oktober 1981 English: Michael Foot attending a meeting of Scandilux (a cooperation forum between the Social Democratic parties of the North European NATO countries) on 19 October 1981 in The Hague
context_page_description: The British Labour Party grew out of the trade union movement of the late 19th century and surpassed the Liberal Party as the main opposition to the Conservatives in the early 1920s. In the 1930s and 1940s, it stressed national planning, using nationalization of industry as a tool, in line with Clause IV of the original constitution of the Labour Party which called for the "common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service".
  Labour has had several spells in government, first as minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929–1931. MacDonald and half his cabinet split with the mainstream of the party and were denounced as traitors. Labour was a junior partner in the wartime coalition from 1940–1945. After the famous 1945 general election landslide under Clement Attlee it set up the welfare state with the National Health Service, nationalised a fifth of the economy, joined NATO and opposed the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Under Harold Wilson in 1964–1970 it promoted economic modernisation.
context_section_description: The aftermath of the 1979 election defeat saw a period of bitter internal rivalry in the Labour Party which had become increasingly divided between the ever more dominant left wingers under Michael Foot and Tony Benn (whose supporters dominated the party organisation at the grassroots level), and the right under Denis Healey. It was widely considered that Healey would win the 1980 leadership election, but he was narrowly defeated by Foot, who succeeded Callaghan as party leader late in 1980.
  The Thatcher government was determined not to be deflected from its agenda as the Heath government had been. A deflationary budget in 1980 led to substantial cuts in welfare spending and an initial short-term sharp rise in unemployment. The Conservatives reduced or eliminated state assistance for struggling private industries, leading to large redundancies in many regions of the country, notably in Labour's heartlands. However, Conservative legislation extending the right for residents to buy council houses from the state proved very attractive to many Labour voters. (Labour had previously suggested this idea in their 1970 election manifesto, but had never acted on it.)
  The election of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) veteran Michael Foot to the leadership disturbed many Atlanticists in the party. Other changes increased their concern; the constituencies were given the ability to easily deselect sitting MPs, and a new voting system in leadership elections was introduced that gave party activists and affiliated trade unions a vote in different parts of an electoral college.
  The party's move to the left in the early 1980s led to the decision by a number of centrist party members led by the Gang of Four of former Labour cabinet ministers (Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers, Roy Jenkins, and David Owen) to form the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP) on 25 January 1981. The broader aims of the party were set out in the Limehouse Declaration the following day.
  In 1981 the St Ermin's group of senior trade union leaders was created, meeting secretly every month initially at the St Ermin's Hotel, who organised to prevent the Bennite left taking over the party. Four MPs also attended, Denis Howell, John Golding, Denis Healey and Giles Radice. The group was created following the 1981 special conference decision to establish an electoral college (40% trade unions, 30% members, 30% MPs) to elect the Labour Party leader and deputy rather than the Parliamentary Labour Party choosing. A major effort of the group was to use union block votes to overturn the left's majority on the Labour National Executive Committee and the Trades Union Congress general council.
  The departure of members from the centre and right further swung the party to the left, but not quite enough to allow Tony Benn to be elected as Deputy Leader when he challenged for the job at the September 1981 party conference.
  Under Foot's leadership, the party's agenda became increasingly dominated by the politics of the hard left. Accordingly, the party went into the 1983 general election with the most left wing manifesto that Labour ever stood upon. It was indeed dubbed by the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman as "the longest suicide note in history".
  The manifesto contained pledges for abolition of the House of Lords, unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Economic Community, withdrawal from NATO and a radical and extensive extension of state control over the economy and financial institutions.
  This alienated many of the party's more right-wing supporters. The Bennites were in the ascendency and there was very little that the right could do to resist or water down the manifesto, many also hoped that a landslide defeat would discredit Michael Foot and the hard left of the party moving Labour away from explicit Socialism and towards weaker social-democracy.
  Much of the press, particularly the sections backing the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, attacked both the Labour Party's manifesto and its style of campaigning, which tended to rely upon public meetin
caption: Michael Foot, leader of the party in opposition against Margaret Thatcher
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