| |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
The 1961 Labour Party leadership election was held when, for the second year in succession, the incumbent leader was challenged for re-election. Normally the annual re-election of the leader had been a formality.
The challenge followed factional in-fighting over issues like nuclear disarmament. The leader favoured the retention of nuclear weapons by the UK, whereas the left wing of the party supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Two candidates were nominated.
The result of the only ballot of Labour MPs on 2 November was as follows:
| Only ballot: 2 November 1961 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Votes | % |
| Hugh Gaitskell | 171 | 74.35 |
| Tony Greenwood | 59 | 25.65 |
| Majority | 112 | 48.70 |
| Turnout | 230 | N/A |
| Hugh Gaitskell re-elected | ||
Michael Mackintosh Foot was a British Labour Party politician who served as Labour Leader from 1980 to 1983. Foot began his career as a journalist on Tribune and the Evening Standard. He co-wrote the 1940 polemic against appeasement of Adolf Hitler, Guilty Men, under a pseudonym.
Aneurin "Nye" Bevan PC was a Welsh Labour Party politician. Born into a working-class family in the Gwent valleys of South Wales, he was the son of a coal miner. He left school at 13 and worked as a miner during his teens where he became involved in local union politics. He was named head of his Miners' Lodge when aged 19, where he frequently railed against management. He joined the Labour Party and attended Central Labour College in London. On his return to South Wales he struggled to find work, remaining unemployed for nearly three years before gaining employment as a union official, which led to him becoming a leading figure in the 1926 general strike.
The 1983 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 9 June 1983. It gave the Conservative Party under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher the most decisive election victory since that of the Labour Party in 1945, with a majority of 144 seats.
Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell was a British politician who served as Leader of the British Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1955 until his death in 1963. An economics lecturer and wartime civil servant, he was elected to Parliament in 1945 and held office in Clement Attlee's governments, notably as Minister of Fuel and Power after the bitter winter of 1946–47, and eventually joining the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Facing the need to increase military spending in 1951, he imposed National Health Service charges on dentures and spectacles, prompting the leading left-winger Aneurin Bevan to resign from the Cabinet.
Denis Winston Healey, Baron Healey was a British Labour Party politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979 and as Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970; he remains the longest-serving Defence Secretary to date. He was a Member of Parliament from 1952 to 1992, and was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. To the public at large, Healey became well known for his bushy eyebrows, his avuncular manner and his creative turns of phrase.
Charles Anthony Raven Crosland was a British Labour politician and author. A social democrat on the right wing of the Labour Party, he was a prominent socialist intellectual. His influential book The Future of Socialism (1956) argued against many Marxist notions and the traditional Labour Party doctrine that expanding public ownership was essential to make socialism work, arguing instead for prioritising the end of poverty and improving public services. He offered positive alternatives to both the right wing and left wing of the Labour Party.
The 1959 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday, 8 October 1959. It marked a third consecutive victory for the ruling Conservative Party, now led by Harold Macmillan. For the second time in a row, the Conservatives increased their overall majority in Parliament, this time to a landslide majority of 100 seats, having gained 20 seats for a return of 365. The Labour Party, led by Hugh Gaitskell, lost 19 seats and returned 258. The Liberal Party, led by Jo Grimond, again returned only six MPs to the House of Commons, but managed to increase its overall share of the vote to 5.9%, compared to just 2.7% four years earlier.
Arthur William James Anthony Greenwood, Baron Greenwood of Rossendale, was a prominent British Labour Party politician in the 1950s and 1960s.
The 1935 Labour Party leadership election took place on 26 November 1935 when Herbert Morrison and Arthur Greenwood challenged Clement Attlee, the incumbent party leader of only one month and one day. Attlee, previously Deputy Leader, had been appointed as an interim leader the previous month when George Lansbury resigned and the general election was looming.
The 1980 Labour Party leadership election was held following the resignation of James Callaghan, who had been Prime Minister from 1976 to 1979 and had stayed on as leader of the Labour Party for eighteen months in order to oversee an orderly transition to his favoured successor, Denis Healey, over his own deputy Michael Foot. However, during this period the party had become bogged down in internal arguments about its procedures and future direction.
The 1955 Labour Party leadership election was held following the resignation of Clement Attlee. Attlee was Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951 and stayed on as party leader until he lost the 1955 general election.
The 1960 Labour Party leadership election was held when, for the first time since 1955, the incumbent leader Hugh Gaitskell was challenged for re-election. Normally the annual re-election of the leader had been a formality. Gaitskell had lost the 1959 general election and had seen the Labour Party conference adopt a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament which he considered disastrous and refused to support. A vacancy in the deputy leadership was first made by the death of incumbent Aneurin Bevan.
The 1963 Labour Party leadership election was held following the death of Hugh Gaitskell, party leader since 1955. He died on 18 January 1963 and was succeeded by deputy leader George Brown.
The Ebbw Vale by-election on 17 November 1960 was a by-election for a single seat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. Caused by the death of Labour Party Deputy Leader Aneurin Bevan, the constituency was very safely held by Labour and never in significant danger of changing hands. The selection of Michael Foot, a prominent left-winger out of sympathy with the party leadership on nuclear disarmament and other issues, led to a lively campaign. Foot's handy win was seen as causing problems for party leader Hugh Gaitskell.
Gaitskellism was the ideology of a faction of the British Labour Party in the 1950s and early 1960s. It opposed many of the economic policies of the trade unions, especially regarding nationalisation and the control of the economy for the benefit of union members.
The Campaign for Democratic Socialism or CDS was a social democratic and democratic socialist organisation in the British Labour Party, serving as a pressure group representing the right wing of the party. Established in 1960, the CDS was composed of Gaitskellites, Labour members who supported the then-party leader, Hugh Gaitskell.
Herbert Stanley Morrison, Baron Morrison of Lambeth, was a British Labour politician who held a variety of senior positions in the Cabinet. During the inter-war period, he was Minister of Transport during the 1929–1931 Labour Government, then, after losing his seat in Parliament in 1931, became Leader of the London County Council in the 1930s. Returning to the Commons in 1935, he was defeated by Clement Attlee in the Labour leadership election that year, but later acted as Home Secretary in the wartime coalition.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is an organisation that advocates unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United Kingdom, international nuclear disarmament and tighter international arms regulation through agreements such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It opposes military action that may result in the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and the building of nuclear power stations in the UK.
The 1960 Labour Party deputy leadership election took place in November 1960, after the death of sitting deputy leader Aneurin Bevan.
There was a by-election in the British parliamentary constituency of Copeland on 23 February 2017, following the resignation of Labour Member of Parliament (MP) Jamie Reed. Conservative candidate Trudy Harrison gained the seat from Labour, the first gain for a governing party in a by-election since 1982.
| Political career |
|  |
|---|---|---|
| Shadow Cabinet elections | ||
| Party leadership elections | ||
| General elections | ||
| Family | ||
| Related topics | ||
  | This United Kingdom election-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
