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Do You Agree With The View That The Con
Do you agree with the view that the Conservatives were certain to win in 1979?
Thatcher offered different and better ideas for the country and government which many people believed an improvement, gaining her a lot of popularity amongst the public but before the Conservatives were in government with Thatcher, the Labour party had a few difficulties (such as the winter of Discontent) whilst in power, which is possibly why the Conservatives won the General election. However this win could be purely down to the conservatives and their new policies or it could’ve been down to the failure of the Labour party. I believe that it was combination of the two that led to the Conservatives win but the win, as much as it seemed likely wasn’t indefinitely certain.
Some people believed at the time that the “Conservatives were certain to win” [source 7] the election in 1979. A major blow to the Labour party in 1978 was the Winter of Discontent which was seen as one of the most “catastrophic” events of their time in government and a factor that severely weakened the party. “That winter enabled Thatcher to come to grips with Callaghan” [source 7] Young expresses here that the way the Labour party handled that situation showed their weakness as a government giving Thatcher and the Conservative party a chance to observe and analyse what they had to do in order to win the election. Although the Winter of Discontent made out that the Labour party was definitely going to lose the election, “a Labour defeat was not a predestined certainty” [source 9]. Rowe says that “Callaghan might have won if he had gone for an election in 1978” [source 9] as at this time, Thatcher was far from popular and Callaghan was ahead of her in the opinion polls which shows the government had support. In 1978, the Daily Mail did a poll which showed 50% of the population were satisfied by the way Callaghan was running things and only 44% were for Thatcher. But it was the fact that “Callaghan tried to downplay
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