Political defections, commonly known in Westminster parlance as ‘Crossing the Floor’, have been a phenomenon in Parliament since at least the 17^th century. This has either happened en masse, as part of major schisms within pre-existing parties (such as the establishment of the Liberal Unionists in the late 19^th century, or the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and The Independent Group/Change UK in 2019), or on an individual level, motivated either by political issues of national significance, or as a result of local contexts. In the History of Parliament’s Oral History archive, multiple former MPs have recounted their decision to ‘cross the floor’ and change party affiliation. These were frequently extremely difficult decisions, often at huge personal cost, in some instances causing the end of long-term friendships or associations. They also frequently reflected major changes in British politics happening well beyond their immediate experiences.

Some MPs took the difficult decision to leave their party because of local issues, typically involving conflicts with their constituency parties. In 1973, Dick Taverne, the moderate Labour MP for Lincoln (1962-74), resigned the whip after his local party deselected him due to his pro-European views, particularly for voting in favour of the UK joining the European Economic Community (EEC).

Taverne would subsequently resign his seat to trigger a by-election, which he won under the ‘Democratic Labour’ label. It was the first time a candidate other than the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberals had won an English by-election in the post-war era. While Taverne’s parliamentary career after Labour was brief (he was defeated at the October 1974 general election by Labour’s Margaret Beckett), it anticipated later political events, most notably the defection of Labour’s ‘Gang of Four’ and the establishment of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. Taverne himself would join the SDP, and later stand again for Parliament (in Dulwich, unsuccessfully) in 1983, before becoming a Liberal Democrat peer in 1996. In 1977, Reg Prentice (Newham North-East, formerly East Ham North, 1957-79; Daventry, 1979-87) left the Labour Party due to similar local conflicts, but took the far more controversial decision of defecting directly to the Conservatives. He would later change constituencies and serve as a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s first government. Once again, Prentice’s defection partly showcased the various political divisions emerging within the Labour Party at the end of the 1970s.

Other defections were directly motivated by national political issues. In 1976, Scottish MPs Jim Sillars (South Ayrshire, 1970-79; Glasgow Govan, 1988-92) and John Robertson (Paisley, 1961-79) both resigned from Labour to set-up the ‘Scottish Labour Party’ (SLP). They were motivated by the issue of devolution, and frustration with the failure of the incumbent Labour government to establish a devolved Scottish Assembly with substantial economic powers.

While Sillars never regretted his decision to leave Labour and set up the SLP, he did admit that it was a ‘rush to the head’ and not fully thought through.  

Nevertheless, though the SLP ultimately enjoyed little electoral success, and was dissolved by 1981, Sillars and Robertson’s defections reflected the growing influence of Scottish nationalism in British politics, and anticipated the left-wing, pro-European form it would take in the following decades. In 1988 Sillars was returned to Parliament following a by-election in Glasgow Govan, this time standing as a candidate for the Scottish National Party (SNP), on a platform designed to outflank Labour from the left

Like other defections, Nicholson’s departure from the Conservatives reflected wider developments, but was also of notable personal significance, being the member of a very prominent Conservative family.  

Our interviews with both Sillars and Nicholson emphasise the emotional cost of leaving their parties. Party membership is more than a collection of people with shared political outlook; very deep relationships are made and it can be a key part of a politician’s identity.  For Sillars, leaving the Labour Party was ‘like a Catholic leaving the church […] it’s a tremendous trauma, personal trauma’ and the pressure really affected his health (he developed ulcers), his family and marriage. Nicholson described being ‘extremely angry’ with the Conservatives before she left. In part her defection was her response to feeling ‘bullied’ by the whips and a determination to resist that behaviour. Yet it was a decision she reached ‘very sadly, because I am intrinsically a Conservative.’

One of the most unusual political defections recounted in our project was that of Andrew Hunter. Having sat as the Conservative MP for Basingstoke since 1983, Hunter resigned the party whip in 2002, before joining the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 2004. This was the first time an MP for a mainland British constituency represented a Northern Irish party since T.P. O’Connor, the Irish Nationalist MP for Liverpool Scotland (1885-1929). Hunter’s decision was motivated by conflicts with the Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, particularly over the party’s controversial links to the right-wing Monday Club (which Hunter supported), disillusionment with the Westminster system, and a desire to pursue a political career in Northern Ireland, owing to his long-standing connections to the DUP and wider unionist community, particularly the Orange Order.  

Unsurprisingly, many of these defections sparked outrage among their former colleagues. Sillars would describe the ‘vicious’ reaction he received, while others would describe being accused of opportunism, cowardice or treason. In some instances, the defectors’ new political allies were not always entirely welcoming either. Interestingly, in many cases these defections were explained as not due to any significant change in the views of the MPs themselves, but out of discontent with their former party’s trajectory. Versions of the phrase ‘I didn’t leave the party, the party left me’ was commonly used by Labour defectors to the SDP in the 1980s, as well as by Emma Nicholson in 1995. Indeed, while some of these defections proved permanent, such as in the case of the SDP or Sillars, others were ultimately temporary. In 2016, Emma Nicholson rejoined the Conservative Party ‘with tremendous pleasure’ (BBC News, 10 September 2016), while more recently, Luciana Berger, who left Labour to form The Independent Group/Change UK in 2019 and later joined the Lib Dems, now sits in the Lords as a Labour peer. Both instances suggest that while defections have often been dramatic and bitterly divisive, reconciliation has also occasionally been possible.

Ultimately, stories from our Oral History Project reveal that political defections are often highly personal decisions and experiences, but can also reflect wider political developments, and even play a role in shaping subsequent events.

A.S. & E.P.

Download ALT text for all audio clips here.

Further Reading

Andy Beckett, ‘Emma Nicholson: Not her sort of party’, Independent, 31 December 1995.

Tom Chidwick, ‘“Return Taverne”: 50 years on from the Lincoln by-election’, Mile End Institute blog, 1 March 2023

Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Geoff Horn, Crossing the Floor: Reg Prentice and the Crisis of British Social Democracy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

Ben Jackson, ‘From British Labourism to Scottish Nationalism: Jim Sillars’ Journey’, Scottish Affairs 31:2 (2022), pp.233-239.

Rebecca McKee and Jack Pannell, ‘MPs who change party allegiance’, Institute for Government blog, 12 March 2024.

Emma Peplow and Priscilla Pivatto, The Political Lives of Postwar MPs (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

On Monday 20 July 1789, Henry Beaufoy, MP for Great Yarmouth, moved the third reading of a bill he had sponsored through the House of Commons for instituting a perpetual commemoration of the 1688 Revolution. The bill was a relatively simple one, seeking merely to insist that in December every year, clergy in the Church of England would read out the Bill of Rights, thereby reminding their congregations of the events that had seen James II expelled and William III and Mary II installed as monarchs.

Beaufoy’s bill had to compete with other rather more urgent measures. These included one for continuing an Act passed in the previous session for regulating the shipping of enslaved people in British ships from the coast of Africa; and another for granting over £20,000 towards defraying the costs of the Warren Hastings trial, which had commenced the previous year and would continue to annoy the House until 1795. Consequently, it was late in the day when Beaufoy got to his feet and, although his motion carried by 23 votes to 14, it was determined that as the House now lacked the requisite 40 members present to make a quorum, the Commons should adjourn.

Next day, Beaufoy tried again. Once more, there was opposition. During the two days when the bill was debated objections were raised by Sir William Dolben and Sir Joseph Mawbey, the latter arguing that Beaufoy was merely mimicking the Whig Club in seeking popularity, while Henry James Pye considered the measure ridiculous as it would result in two commemorative events each year. Others were warmly in favour, though and, when it came to a division, the motion to give the bill a third reading was carried. Following a failed effort by Mawbey to introduce an amendment granting to each clergyman required to read the declaration 20 shillings, the bill was passed and sent up to the Lords. [Commons Journal, xliv. 543-7]

Beaufoy’s bill had its origins in the centenary celebrations of the Revolution, which had been marked across the country the previous autumn. Like his bill, not everything had proceeded smoothly. Not least, there were obvious rivalries between the clubs and societies heading up the various events. There was even disagreement on precisely when to mark the day. The Revolution Society had chosen 4 November, on the basis that this was both William III’s birthday (and wedding anniversary) and the day that he had made landfall. The Constitution Club, on the other hand, chose to hold its entertainment on 5 November, which chimed with the date chosen by John Tillotson (soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury), when preaching his 1689 commemorative sermon. It also echoed celebrations of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot and this dinner was rounded off with toasts to the ‘three eights’: 1588 (Armada), 1688 and 1788. [Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser, 6 November 1788]

Aside from somewhat petty disagreements about whether 4 or 5 November was most apt, several of the societies also had strikingly different political outlooks and exhibited fierce rivalry. Speaking at the Whig Club, Richard Sheridan concluded his remarks with proposing a subscription for erecting a monument to the Revolution, which appeared to get off to a fine start with £500 being pledged almost at once. The plan was for the edifice to be located at Runnymede, emphasizing the links between the safeguarding of English liberty with Magna Carta, and the completion of the process with William of Orange’s successful invasion.

Not everyone liked the idea of a physical monument, though, and when the proposal was read out at other clubs, it received either muted or downright hostile responses. Speaking at the Constitution Club’s dinner at Willis’ Rooms, presided over by Lord Hood and featuring around 700 diners, John Horne Tooke made no secret of his contempt for the Whig Club’s plan. It was at this meeting that Beaufoy first raised his idea for a day of commemoration to be legislated for by Parliament, though at least one paper reported that his speech had been drowned out by the noise around him.

Elsewhere, there was more harmony. One of the grandest celebrations of 1688 took part at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, where Thomas Coke (future Earl of Leicester) laid on a spectacular firework display as well as mounting a recreation of William’s landing at Brixham having brought in squadrons of horses and loaded them onto miniature ships, which were launched on a canal. Perhaps the most evocative event, though, was one of many held in London taverns, where an unidentified man, said to be 112 years old, was reported to have been in attendance and chaired by the company. According to the paper he was one of ten centurions residing in the French hospital on Old Street, but at 112 he was likely the only one of them who actually remembered the Revolution taking place. [E. Johnson’s British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, 9 November 1788]

All of this was cast thoroughly into the shade by the very unhelpful timing of the king’s illness, which had commenced that summer but become steadily more acute through October and finally reached a crisis on the symbolic date of 5 November. The Prince of Wales had been on his way to Holkham to take part in Coke’s celebrations, but was forced to turn back after being alerted to the king’s deteriorating condition. At a time when the stalwarts of the Revolution Settlement were trying to make the case for the stability it had provided in settling the throne on the House of Brunswick, the prospect of a king no longer able to fulfil his constitutional functions was a disaster.

By the time Beaufoy finally made his motion in the Commons, the king had recovered but that did not ease the progress of what always seems to have been a rather unwanted bill. Having made its way through the Commons, the measure was presented to a thinly attended House of Lords on Thursday 23 July 1789, and a motion for the bill to be given a first reading was moved by Earl Stanhope – a leading member of the Revolution Society.

Stanhope’s motion was objected to by the Bishop of Bangor, who insisted that a prayer was already said for the Revolution in church each year. Stanhope attempted to argue in favour of the ‘pious and political expediency’ of the bill, insisting that the event was not commemorated satisfactorily in church. [Oracle, 24 July] The Lord Chancellor left the wool sack to enable him to offer his own opinions on the matter, backing up Bangor’s view and arguing the bill to be absurd, before a final contribution was made in favour of the proposed measure by the Earl of Hopetoun. The motion for the first reading was then negatived by six votes to 13, after which the Lords resolved without more ado to throw the unwanted bill out. [Diary or Woodfall’s Register, 24 July; The World, 24 July] Sheridan’s wish for a grand monument met with a similar fate, though an obelisk celebrating the centenary was raised at Kirkley Hall near Ponteland in Northumberland, by Newton Ogle, Dean of Winchester, and another at Castle Howe near Kendal in Cumbria.

As far as commemoration of 1688 was concerned this was far from the end of the story. Two centuries on, the tercentenary witnessed an unusual expression of unity from the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock. Moving a humble address to the Queen, expressing the House’s ‘great pleasure in celebrating the tercentenary of these historic events of 1688 and 1689 that established those constitutional freedoms under the law which Your Majesty’s Parliament and people have continued to enjoy for three hundred years’, Thatcher was answered by Kinnock, agreeing that it was: ‘a worthy act, not only because it celebrates a significant advance, as the Prime Minister just said, but because it requires us all to consider the character of our democracy…’

Father of the House, Sir Bernard Braine, was next to speak. He welcomed the rare moment of political harmony and underlined the key principal about what 1688 meant to everyone in the chamber:

‘It is the knowledge that the parliamentary system which we jointly serve is greater than the sum total of all who are here at any one time.’

RDEE

Further Reading:

John Brooke, King George III (1972)

Journals of the House of Commons

Journals of the House of Lords

In recent months the Black Lives Matter campaign has incited demonstrations and protests on an international scale, including in towns and cities across Britain. The means of conducting such protests have been debated in Parliament and the media, provoking controversy and division. Thus, the politics of protest has been thrust into the public sphere, further complicated by Covid-19 restrictions. Parliamentarians and Parliaments in the past have also come under scrutiny in these debates. The statue of MP and slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol, bringing to the fore a broader ongoing debate about appropriate memorialisation and frustrations between Bristolians and their local authorities. The politics of protest is an ongoing area of debate, and the violent disorders that spread around England in 1980–81 provide a historical demonstration of what can happen when sections of society believe their voices are being wilfully ignored.

Beginning with several hours of disorder in Bristol in April 1980, disturbances subsequently spread around England the following year – most prominently in Brixton, and later reaching Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, to name but a few locations. With a backdrop of deep-rooted social and economic problems, thousands of people took to the streets to protest as almost 200 disorders occurred around England in July 1981 alone.

While it is important not to oversimplify or overemphasise the uniformity of events in 1980–81, they can be broadly characterised as anti-police uprisings largely involving Black Britons. In the years since, in some quarters at least, they have acquired something of an air of legitimacy as a rational response to ongoing racism, discrimination, and disadvantage – coupled with a perceived failure of state mechanisms to address the situation. At the time, the Bristol Council for Racial Equality concluded that the disorders displayed a widespread feeling amongst Black people that there was ‘no other way to make their points of view known’. As John Solomos, Professor of Sociology who has published extensively on race and ethnicity, has argued: ‘not all groups enjoy the same opportunity to participate politically through channels defined as legitimate’.

While in 1981 the Labour Shadow Home Secretary, Roy Hattersley, announced in Parliament that ‘the Opposition deplore[s] the violence that took place’, Labour MPs generally took a more sympathetic viewpoint to the disorders than their Conservative counterparts – which is perhaps unsurprising from an opposition Party. Hattersley himself declared that he had ‘no wish to allocate blame or responsibility, but the breakdown of the relationship between the police and the public is an undoubted fact’. John Fraser, MP for Norwood in South London, spoke of the ‘deep disaffection about relations with the police’, and prominent left-wing figure Tony Benn reasoned that increasingly over-relying on the police to ‘deal with problems … fundamentally political and economic in character’ – such as rising unemployment, social deprivation and other inner-city issues – was placing an unfair ‘burden’ on the police. Thomas Cox, MP for the Greater London constituency of Tooting, agreed that such issues, in addition to daily racist discrimination and violence, had made life for many in South London a ‘desert of despair’.

However, particularly during the years of Margaret Thatcher’s often controversial Government, the Conservative Party – the ‘party of law and order’ – were unlikely to accept violent disorders as a ‘legitimate’ form of protest. For instance, Conservative MP Anthony Grant declared in Parliament that ‘the first duty of a democratic Government … is to maintain law and order’. Thatcher herself described the events as ‘criminal’, concluding that ‘nothing, but nothing justifies what happened’, and Home Secretary William Whitelaw concurred that ‘No reason, no explanation, for recent troubles justifies what has occurred’. Conservative MP David Mellor furthered this position in Commons debate by deeming it ‘grossly wrong and unfair to talk about social protest’ when he believed the disturbances should be viewed simply as ‘sheer criminality’ – concluding that ‘the day that we confuse the two is the day that we shall be speaking of the end of civilised society’.

Some members of the Conservative Monday Club, an anti-immigration political pressure group, portrayed the disorders as being the consequence of postwar immigration, and the apparent movement away from a (perceived) previously monoracial society. Harvey Proctor urged the Government to ‘end large-scale, permanent immigration from the New Commonwealth and encourage repatriation’, and John Stokes portrayed ‘these riots [as] something new and sinister in our long national history’. While Whitelaw conceded that many protestors were British-born, he also argued that ‘a large number of those concerned came here between 1957 and 1962, and all of us who were in the House at that time bear a similar share of the responsibility’ – 1962 being the year of the first Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which began to tighten restrictions on immigration.

By disregarding Britain’s long history of violent protest and staunchly retaining long-standing attitudes that racial harmony could best be achieved through stricter controls, this reaction attempted to shift focus away from wider issues or governmental policies and clearly portrayed immigration – and, by extension, migrants and Black Britons themselves – as the cause of this ‘new and sinister’ disorder. Scholars such as Michael Rowe have argued that respect for the law is often considered to be part of the British national character, and that arguments regarding broader social, economic, or political factors are thus generally rejected when such public disorder is regarded as being ‘un-British’.

When a public inquiry, chaired by Lord Leslie Scarman, into the events of 1981 was announced, it was criticised by Conservative MPs who suggested this appeared to have legitimised violence: that such a governmental response signified some form of ‘victory’ for ‘rioters’ who had protested in the ‘wrong way’. However, Whitelaw strongly rejected suggestions that this inquiry ‘encouraged violence on the streets’, and warned: ‘If we do not take action to make this clear to people who feel the bitterness that they do, and if we do not take action to try to overcome that, we shall make the situation more dangerous.’ Despite acknowledging the dangers of inaction, subsequent governmental measures were an inadequate response to the scale of the problems, and further disorders occurred in 1985.

Many recommendations made by Scarman in 1981 were not implemented, and it would take until Sir William Macpherson’s 1999 public inquiry into the ineffectual police investigation of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence before official acknowledgement of institutional racism within the police. Macpherson’s inquiry had only been established after a persistent years-long campaign by Lawrence’s family and supporters, demonstrating the difficulty of obtaining such governmental-established responses and actions. However, events in subsequent years have demonstrated that many of the fundamental issues remain unresolved – including continuing debates on ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ methods of protest.

S P

Further reading:

• John Benyon (ed.), Scarman and After: Essays Reflecting on Lord Scarman’s Report, the Riots and Their Aftermath.
• Michael Keith, Race, Riots And Policing: Lore and Disorder in a Multi-racist Society.
• Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation.
• Trevor Phillips and Mike Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain.

The long 1980s deserves to be seen as a watershed in the history of the Conservative Party and its relationship with Britain’s ethnic minorities. Contemporary commentators, such as Stuart Hall, Ambalavener Sivanandan, and Paul Gilroy argued for as much at the time, highlighting a new racism that punctuated crises of unemployment, crime, and immigration and led to ethnically-narrower conceptions of the nation. Such characterisations of conservatism have percolated into the academy. Thus the few works that discuss the relationship between the Thatcher governments and British Indians focus on the promotion of an exclusive social, cultural, and economic ideology in which the majority of the non-white population were unable to participate and on moments of visible confrontation between the state and its coloured citizens. In short, scholars have tended to operate within the blunt discourse of ‘racist Tories/non-racist Tories’ that emerged at the time.

Long overdue is a more subtle analysis of the Conservative Party and its relationship with the plural society in the 1980s, one that recovers the full diversity of encounters and does not confuse what was most visible with what was representative. This is not to deny the persistence of racism throughout the decade, but simply to acknowledge that more collaborative relationships between the Conservative Party and ethnic minorities coexisted alongside those historically marked by mutual suspicion and hostility. Underused sources, such as Indian-language periodicals, the records of the Conservative Party’s Ethnic Minority Unit (est. 1976), and oral interviews with British Indian Tories, reveal a Party eager to strengthen its ties with select cadres of the ethnic minority population. These sources also debunk many uncritically-accepted stereotypes of British Indian lifestyles, such as the passivity of Indian women voters.

Building allegiance

Much like they did with Jews decades earlier, the Conservative Party contended with the realities of a plural society by pioneering implicit and explicit allegiances with upwardly-mobile British Indians in the 1980s. Features of Indian culture and lifestyles helped the Thatcher governments to fulfil three aims. Firstly, the respect nurtured by strong Indian families allowed politicians to pursue a laissez-faire approach to race relations without increasing the size of the state. Secondly, the possibly imagined, but nonetheless widely accepted, consonance between Indian values and ‘Victorian values’ assisted the Thatcher government in its crusade to remoralize the nation. Thirdly, the number of British Indians engaged in business helped to grow the ‘enterprise economy’ and reduce raw figures of unemployment. Far from being excluded as ethnic minorities, successful British Indians were invoked as model citizens in Thatcher’s Britain, with features of their ethnicity reified, repackaged, and extended into new national ideals.

…we so much welcome the resourceful Indian community here in Britain. You have brought the virtues of family, of hard work and of resolve to make a better life. Children are encouraged, grandparents cherished, family links preserved. And in countless firms and shops up and down the country, you are displaying splendid qualities of enterprise and initiative which benefit not just you and your families, but the Indian community and indeed the nation as a whole. – Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech at the Diwali Banquet’, 16 September 1981

As a result, British Indians found themselves inadvertently developing and executing the goals of Thatcherism: as nuclear families (91% of Indian families were headed by two parents compared to 77% of white families and 46% of Afro-Caribbean families in 1991), as homeowners (92% of Sikhs, 78% of Muslims, and 65% of Hindus owned their own homes compared to a national average of 57% in 1981), and as the self-employed (13% of British Asians compared to 8% of white citizens and 3% of Afro-Caribbeans in 1981).

Significantly, the relative success of Indians was often determined by their experiences of British rule in East Africa and India. Many Hindu and Jain ‘twice migrants’ had entered the financial, medical, and government professions whilst still in Africa, enabling them to accumulate considerable cash savings prior to arrival in Britain. In Punjab, educated Sikhs had allied themselves with the British to create a subaltern ruling class that benefitted from an English-language education. Although the social sciences have produced some useful writing on the resettlement of Indian lifestyles, too often immigration is conceptualised as rupture rather than an ongoing legacy shaped by incomplete decolonisation. The opportunities offered to select subjects by the British colonial government in India and East Africa meant that some Indian communities had a far better chance of economic success post-migration. It was these British Indians that came to occupy a special place in Thatcher’s Britain. Their upward social mobility, facilitated in part by the opportunities that they had encountered in their ‘home’ countries, was proudly publicised by the Tories as evidence of what could be achieved under a Conservative government with a bold new vision for the nation.

Wooing the British Indian voter

This perceived affinity between British Indian and Conservative ideals was weaponised into a new electoral strategy. Although the Thatcher governments chose to erase race as category in official ideology and any suggestion of ‘ethnic voting’ was vehemently denied by several minority groups, there was no definitive consensus on ethnicity in this period. Even those Tories that chose to disregard the impact of ethnicity on an individual’s life course accepted that it was still an indispensable category of group identification with important linguistic and cultural implications that could help the Party to develop more precise appeals to voters.

As such, the Conservative Party’s Ethnic Minority Unit began to field British Indian candidates, such as Narindar Saroop and S. Popat, and established an Anglo-Asian Conservative Society, which had over 1000 members in twenty-six local branches by 1983. The Party also began to generate content for the ethnic minority press. During the 1987 general election, an English-language poster criticising Labour’s education policy was published in Gujarati to emphasise the shared dislike for liberal education amongst right-wingers and traditional families. However, whilst the English-language version contained very little text, the Indian-language version specified how ‘The Conservative Party believes that your children’s education should respect every community’s religious and moral values.’ It also exploited the growing divide between Indians and Afro-Caribbeans by stating that Labour would expose Indian children to the social pariah that was the ‘Black lesbian in white America’. The differences between the English and Gujarati versions suggest that the Conservative Party had developed increasingly targeted ways of winning the British Indian vote by 1987.

Conservative Party Election Poster and its Gujarati-language adaptation, 1987.

In this way, a study of the Ethnic Minority Unit reveals the increasing precision with which the Conservative Party conceptualised and made appeals to British Indians across the decade, often exploiting the ideological affinity between the social conservatism of British Indians and the proclivities of Thatcherism. Although there is evidence to suggest that many British Indians still felt alienated by the racist and classist image of the Conservative Party, especially once the Anglo-Asian Conservative Society became dominated by privileged, Anglicized Indians who were once complicit in the British Raj, the Ethnic Minority Unit succeeded in making ethnic minority involvement an indispensable priority for the Tories by 1990.

Of course, it is impossible to separate the impact of the Unit from other factors that mobilised British Indian support. For example, oral interviews with former British Indian Tories suggest that they found their personal views of self-improvement reflected in the Party’s seemingly deracialised tenets of ‘merit’ and ‘open competition.’ Nevertheless, the statistics are clear: the Conservative share of British Indian votes, particularly in the suburbs of Greater London, increased from 9% in 1979 to 24% by 1987. This understudied and unprecedented defection from the Labour Party is yet another reason why the relationship between the Conservative Party and British Indians in the 1980s demands further scholarly attention.

JS

We are currently launching our undergraduate dissertation competition for 2018. Undergraduate students must enter through their history departments. Sammy Sturgess will be contacting university history departments over the next week with information about the rules and how to enter. Please email ssturgess@histparl.ac.uk with any questions or if you are interested and do not hear about this through your institution within the next few weeks. Good luck!

Thatcher remains a controversial figure in British politics, and this is no less true in our interviews with former Conservative MPs. Whilst many were great admirers, a number remember that by 1990 they had become alienated by her policies (in particular the attempts to introduce the Community Charge, better known as the poll tax) and what they felt was an increasingly arrogant leadership style. For example, Sir Philip Goodhart, MP for Beckenham, remembers that he was ‘violently opposed’ to the poll tax, and Michael Irvine, Ipswich MP between 1987 and 1992, felt that he had been ‘correct’ in opposing the policy and had the support of his local Conservative party in doing so. For David Nicholson, MP for Taunton, his decision to vote against Thatcher combined misgivings about the poll tax, the government’s growing unpopularity and her leadership style, as he explains in this clip:

The mechanics of Thatcher’s downfall have been well recorded. Commentators have generally agreed that the crisis began with Sir Geoffrey Howe’s resignation from the cabinet and his speech in the Commons attacking the Prime Minister; in particular his call for others to act:  ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties, with which I myself have wrestled for perhaps too long.’ In his interview with us, Howe stated he was ‘sad’ to have made the speech, but felt he had ‘no alternative’. This then led to a leadership challenge by Michael Heseltine.

For several of our interviewees, Thatcher’s actions during this period only made matters worse. She has since been criticised for not taking the challenge seriously and for deciding to attend a European Summit as normal on the day of the vote. For David Mudd, MP Falmouth and Camborne, who admitted it was a ‘relief’ when Thatcher was challenged, he was still surprised at the manner of the change:

It came as no particular shock to me that Margaret was ousted, I was surprised though, that it happened the way that it did. The fact that here was the government, or here was the Prime Minister, facing a crisis, and she swans off to Paris. It just didn’t make sense.

Thatcher’s failure to win enough support in this first ballot to end the contest meant that on her return to London cabinet support for her leadership collapsed. On 22 November she announced that she would step down, and John Major subsequently won the leadership election.

Even amongst our interviewees who had wanted Thatcher to step down, many felt that the process itself was – in the worlds of the Cornish MP Sir Robert Hicks – ‘a very sad reflection on what she had achieved’. Dame Marion Roe, MP for Broxbourne, described the period as ‘very emotional’, whilst the MP for Batley and Spen Elizabeth Peacock was full of admiration for Thatcher as she returned to the Commons the week after her resignation, as she explains in this clip:

EP

For more on our oral history project, see our website or our oral history blogposts.