Why did the Labour Party need to change

• By challenging 'creeping socialism' so aggressively and so successfully, Thatcher forced the Labour Party to carry out some painful readjustments to make itself electable
• It took a disastrous performance in the 1983 general election, when it gained just 28% of the vote, before the lessons started to sink in
• Labour had suffered from the decline of their traditional northern industrial heartland before Thatcher came to power; her attack on manufacturing in the early 1980s, and closure of the coal mines in 1984, accelerated this erosion of 'natural' Labour supporters: working-class union members who would naturally gravitate towards socialism
• At the same time, disillusionment with Labour's record under Wilson and Callaghan in the 1970s led to the growth of extra-parliamentary Labour activism: demonstrations, protests and, through the trade union strikes
• The popular impression of a leftward lurch of the Party by the early 1980s and typified Military Tendency, a group of extreme left-wingers gained control of the Liverpool branch of the Party
• They were attacked in the right-wing press as the 'loony left'
• Many moderate Labour supporters grew concerned at this development and switched allegiance to a new centrist party launched in 1981; the Social Democratic Party