Talk:Thatcher Survives

OTL background info on John Major
Source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Major

The economy had entered recession during the final year of Thatcher's Premiership, and the recession continued to deepen throughout 1991 and into 1992. The Conservatives had been consistently behind Labour in the opinion polls since 1989, and the gap widened significantly during 1990.

Within two months of Major becoming Prime Minister, the Conservatives had managed to regain a lead in the opinion polls, briefly enjoying a comfortable lead after the Gulf War. Polls also showed that Major was at this time the most popular Prime Minister since Harold Macmillan some 30 years previously.

Major was Prime Minister during the first Gulf War of 1991, and played a key role in persuading US President George H. W. Bush to support no-fly zones. During the war, Major and his Cabinet survived an IRA assassination attempt by mortar attack.

At the 1993 Conservative Party Conference, Major began the "Back to Basics" campaign, which he intended to also be about a wide variety of issues including the economy, education and policing, but which was interpreted by many (including Conservative cabinet ministers) purely in the context of returning to the moral and family values that they associated with the Conservative Party.

Major opened talks with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) upon taking office.

On becoming Prime Minister Major had promised to keep Britain "at the very heart of Europe", and claimed to have won "game, set and match for Britain" – by negotiating the social chapter and single currency opt-outs from the Maastricht Treaty, and by ensuring that there was no overt mention of a "Federal" Europe and that foreign and defence policy were kept as matters of inter-governmental co-operation, in separate "pillars" from the supranational European Union. By 2010 some of these concessions, but not Britain's non-membership of the Single Currency, had been overtaken by subsequent events.

Some commentators compared the Major Government's policy to 'amoral equivalency' because it appeared to judge the Bosnian Government and the Bosnian Serbs equally culpable.

To some extent these critics of Major's policy were vindicated when in an article published in 2011, the then Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind accepted that the arms embargo was a 'serious mistake' by the UN.

Few observers doubted that he was an honest man, or that he made sincere and sometimes successful attempts to improve life in Britain and to unite his deeply divided party. He was also perceived as a weak and ineffectual figure, and his approval ratings for most of his time in office were low, particularly after "Black Wednesday" in September 1992. Conversely on occasions he attracted criticism for dogmatically pursuing schemes favoured by the right of his party, notably the privatisation of British Rail, and for closing down most of the coal industry in advance of privatisation.

Source- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Major

Whipsnade (talk) 20:04, June 17, 2014 (UTC)