Reply #19: You hit the nail on the head

[GCP]

I was in the UK during those years and he was regarded as the guy who put us on the 3 day work week and the electricity blackouts because of refusing to give in to wage demands of miners and elecrical workers. When people started to get pissed off with the whole situation, he called a snap election and basically put his reputation on the line. He lost to Labour, who then went on to lose to Thatcher who was 50 times worse than Heath had ever been.
So if he'd just been willing to negotiate more with the workers, he may have survived politically and (maybe) we would never have been saddled with Thatcher, who was the worst thing that ever happened to the UK and one of the main reasons we, as a family, came to live in the US.