Word: callaghan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...which left the Labor Party dispirited and divided. Party membership has dwindled to a meager 284,000, only 3% of the vote cast for Labor in May. At the local level, it is increasingly dominated by hard-left activists opposed to the centrists and rightists who look to Callaghan. When Benn and his core of radicals who dominate the party's national executive committee mounted their challenge at Brighton, Callaghan and his allies put up surprisingly feeble resistance...
...party platforms; 2) the degree of control that the "constituency parties," or local committees, exercise over their M.P.s; and 3) the method of choosing the party leader. Constitutional changes were necessary, the Benn forces argued, in order to make the party more accountable to the rank and file. Callaghan and his fellow moderates denounced the plan as a power play that might wreck the party, but they could not stem the leftist tide...
...veto power in shaping policy. From now on Members of Parliament will have to submit to renomination by their local constituency parties midway through their terms-making them "poodles" on a short leash, as one moderate M.P. angrily remarked. Only the bloc votes of some moderate trade unions saved Callaghan from defeat on the third proposal: the choice of the party leader will remain in the hands of the "parliamentary party," the elected M.P.s, and will not shift, as the Benn faction demanded, to a broad-based electoral college...
...right was battered at the rostrum in three days of bitter and derisive debate. At the outset, Party Chairman Frank Allaun, a left-wing M.P., blamed Callaghan and the Cabinet directly for losing the election. Defeated M.P. Tom Litterick, from Birmingham, angrily hurled a sheaf of papers on the conference floor and shouted, "This is what Jim did with our policies-aye, he fixed all of us! He fixed me in particular." A stream of leftist speakers complained that Callaghan's party had traded socialist doctrine for "watered-down Toryism...
...time Callaghan took the podium in the Brighton Center, the fight was all but lost. The hall bristled with hostility as he rose to speak. Unruffled, the former Prime Minister delivered a dignified defense of his record: "I claim without apology, I claim proudly, a fine record of manifesto achievements carried out by a minority government." The blame, he implied, lay with the winter of strikes and labor unrest that had set the national mood for the Tory victory. He concluded with a call for unity: "Let's avoid party-bashing among each other. Let's have...