This year’s Bristol Radical History Festival focused on the persistent threats of racism, xenophobia and, of course, our radical collective resistance to it across Ireland and Britain, reports LYNNE WALSH
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Thatcher’s Tory leadership victory at 50
KEITH FLETT looks back 50 years to when the Iron Lady was elected Tory leader…
EVEN FURTHER RIGHT: Margaret Thatcher
meets the press outside her Chelsea home
after her leadership victory in 1975
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A new report by Amnesty International pulls no punches in highlighting the Labour government’s human rights violations of those on benefits, says Dr DYLAN MURPHY
With Reform UK surging and Labour determined not to offer anything different from the status quo, a clear opportunity opens for the left, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE
A recent Immigration Summit heard from Lord Alf Dubs, who fled the Nazis to Britain as a child. JAYDEE SEAFORTH reports on his message that we need to increase public empathy with desperate people seeking asylum
IT’S 50 YEARS since Margaret Thatcher was elected Tory leader. Ted Heath had lost two elections to Labour in February and October 1974 and was eventually forced to call a leadership election in February 1975. He lost in the first round of voting on February 4 to a right-wing outsider — Thatcher. In the second ballot she got a majority of all Tory MPs over four other middle-aged white men in suits and became Tory leader. Just over four years later in May 1979 she became prime minister.
The 50th anniversary has already been marked by a two-part recreation of an interview Brian Walden did with her in 1989. An opera written by social historian Dominic Sandbrook is due later this year.
Thatcher’s victory was unexpected, not least because she represented a rightward shift in Tory politics — even if anyone active in the early 1970s in the labour movement would have thought Heath with his hard line anti-union stance was quite right-wing enough.
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