United Kingdom General Election of 1979

Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives won 339 seats, making her Europe's first woman prime minister.

Overview

After the winter of discontent's strikes paralyzed Britain, Thatcher's campaign pledge to restrain union power and the Conservatives' 43.9 percent won 339 seats to Labour's 269, unseasing James Callaghan, who had quipped that the government had lost the election without losing the argument. Thatcher's majority initiated eighteen years of Conservative rule. The election marked the turn from the postwar Keynesian consensus to market liberalism, the politics that would define the next decade in Britain and echo globally.