Election Night 1983 : The Anniversary

[Harry Hayfield]

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Thatcher landslide, BBC Parliament will be replaying the 1983 general election on Easter Monday (April 1st 2013) from 10.00am. I happen to have the 1979 notional election on this computer and will be adding it into a suitable programme so that as the results are announced I can do forecasts of the final result and was wondering if anyone would be interested in taking over Twitter with an #Election83 hashtag for the day?

If so, may I ask who would like to comment for (please copy and paste and add your Twitter handles):

Conservatives
Labour
Liberal Alliance
Social Democratic Alliance
Plaid Cymru
Scottish National Party
Any of the Northern Ireland Parties

The first forecast will come after Guildford and then a forecast every 65 seats.

[Harry Hayfield]

That's quite right. Election 55 was indeed the first to be televised (and it also saw the first appearance of the swingometer). It was just for Southampton Itchen and Test but everything has to start somewhere. So does this mean then that no one was to real time tweet the election then as it is being replayed? If not, that's a shame really.

[Harry Hayfield]

Notional Election 1979 map

[Harry Hayfield]

Well, first of all, #Election83 TRENDED. In fact, it trended so much in the morning that the people who look after the explainations for trends asked me "Why is #Election83 trending?" and I replied "BBC Parliament is replaying the 1983 general election and people with an interest in the election are commenting on the results", on the downside though we started to get a heck of a lot of spam tweets at the same time.

As to the results (which I tried to tally in replay time but failed miserably), what appeared to have happened is that there was a small swing from Con to Lib (about 1%) but the real swing was from Lab to SDP (well over 8%) and it was that swing that Labour tried to get back over Elections 1987 and 1992 and it wasn't until Election 1997 that they could finally start to tackle the Con / Lab swing that would enable them to govern, so in hindsight the SDP are responsible for the Conservative governments of 1983, 1987 and 1992 (which I get from listening to the SDP founders was not what they were planning for)