Dennis Kavanagh (born 27 March 1941) is a British political analyst and since 1996 has been Professor of Politics at the University of Liverpool, and now Emeritus Professor. He has written extensively on post-war British politics. With David Butler, he wrote the series of books on British general elections, such as The British General Election of 2010, [1] and most recently, The British General Election of 2015. [2]
Sir John Major is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997. He served in the Thatcher government from 1987 to 1990 as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and was Member of Parliament (MP) for Huntingdon, formerly Huntingdonshire, from 1979 to 2001.
Sir Edward Richard George Heath was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975. Heath also served for 51 years as a Member of Parliament from 1950 to 2001. Outside of politics, Heath was a yachtsman, a musician, and an author.
The 1979 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 3 May 1979 to elect 635 members to the British House of Commons.
New Labour is a period in the history of the British Labour Party from the mid to late 1990s until 2010 under the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The name dates from a conference slogan first used by the party in 1994, later seen in a draft manifesto which was published in 1996 and titled New Labour, New Life for Britain. It was presented as the brand of a newly reformed party that had altered Clause IV and endorsed market economics. The branding was extensively used while the party was in government between 1997 and 2010. New Labour was influenced by the political thinking of Anthony Crosland and the leadership of Blair and Brown as well as Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell's media campaigning. The political philosophy of New Labour was influenced by the party's development of Anthony Giddens' Third Way which attempted to provide a synthesis between capitalism and socialism. Mark Bevir argues that another motivation for the creation of New Labour was as a response to the emergence of the New Right in the preceding decades. The party emphasised the importance of social justice, rather than equality, emphasising the need for equality of opportunity and believed in the use of markets to deliver economic efficiency and social justice.
The Referendum Party was a Eurosceptic, single-issue political party that was active in the United Kingdom from 1994 to 1997. The party's sole objective was for a referendum to be held on the nature of the UK's membership of the European Union (EU). Specifically, it called for a referendum on whether the British electorate wanted to be part of a federal European state or to revert to being a sovereign nation that was part of a European free-trade bloc without wider political functions.
In the United Kingdom, the word liberalism can have any of several meanings. Scholars use the term to refer to classical liberalism; the term also can mean economic liberalism, social liberalism or political liberalism; it can simply refer to the politics of the Liberal Democrat party; it can occasionally have the imported American meaning, however, the derogatory connotation is much weaker in the UK than in the US, and social liberals from both the left and right wing continue to use liberal and illiberal to describe themselves and their opponents, respectively.
The post-war consensus was the economic order and social model of which the major political parties in post-war Britain shared a consensus supporting view, from the end of World War II in 1945 to the late-1970s. It was abandoned by Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher. Majorities in both parties agreed upon it. The consensus tolerated or encouraged nationalisation, strong trade unions, heavy regulation, high taxes, and a generous welfare state.
Philip Cowley is a British political scientist and an academic at Queen Mary University of London in the School of Politics and International Relations. He previously held the same title at the University of Nottingham. Within academia he is particularly notable for his analysis of Parliamentary voting behaviour in the UK House of Commons and House of Lords and secondly his opposition to a lowering of the UK voting age below 18.
Sir George Arthur Gardiner was a British Conservative Party politician and journalist. Two months before the 1997 general election he defected to the Referendum Party, becoming the only MP it ever had. The party dissolved later that year.
Sir Anthony Francis Seldon is a British educator and contemporary historian. As an author, he is known in part for his political biographies of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May. He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020, when he was succeeded by James Tooley. In 2009, he set up The Wellington Academy, the first state school to carry the name of its founding independent school. Before that, he was head of Brighton College.
Sir David Edgeworth Butler, is an English political scientist, with a special interest in elections. He is based in Oxford.
Sir Ivor Martin Crewe DL FAcSS was until 2020 the Master of University College, Oxford, and President of the Academy of Social Sciences. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex and also a Professor in the Department of Government at Essex.
Archibald Haworth Brown,, commonly known as Archie Brown, is a British political scientist. In 2005, he became an emeritus professor of politics at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, where he served as a professor of politics and director of St Antony's Russian and East European Centre. He has written widely on Soviet and Russian politics, on communist politics more generally, on the Cold War, and on political leadership.
Anthony Stephen King was a Canadian-British professor of government, psephologist and commentator. He taught at the Department of Government at the University of Essex for many years.
Colin Hay is Professor of Political Sciences at Sciences Po, Paris and Affiliate Professor of Political Analysis at the University of Sheffield, joint editor-in-chief of the journal Comparative European Politics. and Managing Editor of the journal New Political Economy.
The Nuffield Election Studies are a series of scholarly works on British General Elections that have been published since 1945. The series take their name from Nuffield College, Oxford. R. B. McCallum, who was a fellow at Nuffield discussed the idea of a book capturing the upcoming election after the break-up of the wartime coalition. His colleagues suggested that he should undertake the matter as it was his idea, and so with the help of Alison Readman, a research assistant, they co-authored the first book. David Butler has written extensively in the series.'The British General Election of 2010' by Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley was the first book in the series where neither of the principal authors were based at Nuffield.
This bibliography includes major books and articles about British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her policies in office.
Stuart Ryan Ball, CBE, FRHistS, is a political historian who retired in 2016 as professor of Modern British History at the University of Leicester, having taught there for 37 years; he is now emeritus professor of Modern History there. He specialises in the history of the Conservative Party.
The social history of the United Kingdom (1979–present) began with Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) entering government and rejecting the post-war consensus in the 1980s. She privatised most state-owned industries and worked to weaken the power and influence of the trade unions. The party remained in government throughout most of the 1990s albeit with growing internal difficulties under the leadership of Prime Minister John Major (1990–1997).