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A by-election was held in the Bermondsey constituency in South London, on 24 February 1983, following the resignation of Labour MP Bob Mellish. Peter Tatchell stood as the candidate for the Labour Party, and Simon Hughes stood for the Liberal Party. Following a bitter campaign, the Liberals made huge gains and took the seat, with a majority of votes cast. Labour's vote fell from 63.6 per cent in May 1979 to 26.1 per cent as Tatchell came a distant second, while the Conservative candidate, Robert Hughes, managed only fourth place. With a swing of 44.2%, the 1983 Bermondsey by-election remains the largest by-election swing in British political history. ==Preliminaries== Bob Mellish had represented the constituency and its predecessors in the House of Commons since 1946. He was the Labour Chief Whip from 1969 until 1976, but had become disenchanted with the left-wing drift of the Labour Party, and resigned from both the Party and his Parliamentary seat in 1982. He was recruited by the Conservative government to the board of the London Docklands Development Corporation; as he did not wish to be disqualified, the post was made non-salaried until such time as Mellish chose to accept payment. This meant that Mellish had a paid job to go to as soon as he wanted. On 7 November 1981, Bermondsey Labour Party selected Peter Tatchell, its Secretary, as prospective Parliamentary candidate. Tatchell was a leading member of the left-wing faction that had taken control of the local party the previous year. He was also a contributor to ''London Labour Briefing'', a magazine that circulated among the London left, and had written an article suggesting the use of extra-Parliamentary direct action by the Labour Party. This article came to the attention of James Wellbeloved, a former London Labour MP who had defected to the Social Democratic Party; Wellbeloved then referred to it in a Parliamentary Question to Margaret Thatcher on 3 December.〔(Oral Answers to Questions — Prime Minister House of Commons debates, 3 December 1981 ) TheyWorkForYou.com〕 Labour Party leader Michael Foot denounced the article and declared "the individual concerned is not an endorsed member of the Labour Party and as far as I'm concerned never will be". (It was suggested by some that Foot had confused Peter Tatchell with Peter Taaffe, then the leader of the Trotskyist Militant tendency, and that his denunciation was so strong that he could not later retract it without appearing weak.) Foot later changed "endorsed member" to "endorsed candidate", and at the next meeting of the Labour Party National Executive Committee, Tatchell was narrowly rejected as a candidate. Mellish was not reassured about the future direction of the Labour Party and resigned from it on 2 August 1982, a clear preliminary to resigning his seat, which he did by taking the Chiltern Hundreds on 1 November that year. The left wing of the Labour Party, defending the right of Bermondsey to select a candidate of its own choosing, managed to obtain agreement that Tatchell would be eligible for selection, and Tatchell was duly selected again in January 1983. Tabloid newspapers opposed to the Labour left had begun researching his background when Michael Foot denounced him, and in particular Tatchell's activities with the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s. Several stories were published which made it clear by implication that he was gay. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bermondsey by-election, 1983」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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