Welcome back to another Deep Dive. If you are
a curious learner looking for that perfect intellectual
shortcut today, you are in exactly the right
place. You really are. We know you want those
fascinating aha moments, but without having to
wade through a massive mountain of information
overload. And we have a fantastic one lined up
for you. Oh, absolutely. It's a great one. Today
we are looking at a Wikipedia article detailing
the history of a highly specific, curiously persistent
phrase in British politics, and that phrase is,
one more heave. Right. It sounds almost like
a, I don't know, a nautical command. Or something
you'd hear on a tug of war fuel. Yeah, exactly.
But it actually carries a remarkably rich and
honestly somewhat dark political history. It
really does. So our mission today is to explore
how this supposedly motivational political slogan
evolved. Because it started out as a very literal
call to action. But over the decades, it completely
morphed into a cautionary tale. And eventually
a really bitter insult about political complacency.
Which is such a fascinating trajectory for just
three words. Right. It turns out to be this brilliant
lens for looking at strategy, the illusion of
momentum and, you know, the stories we tell ourselves
when we think we are just on the edge of success.
But, oh, before we get into the timeline, there
is a very quick point we need to establish regarding
the source material. Yes. Very important point.
Because our source text deals with the real world
histories and the internal warfare of the British
conservative, labor and liberal parties. It is
vital to note that we are not taking sides. Right.
And no sides here. We are not endorsing any of
the political viewpoints discussed today. We
are strictly here as your guides to impartially
unpack the historical facts, the strategies and
the data presented in the text. Exactly. We are
just here for the strategy, the history and the
underlying psychology of it all. So, OK, let's
unpack this. We need to travel back in time to
the incredibly unpredictable, volatile political
landscape of 1970s Britain. Are volatile is the
perfect word for it. Set the scene for us. What
exactly is happening in early 1974? OK, so we
are looking at the February 1974 United Kingdom
general election. At this time, the Liberal Party
is being led by a man named Jeremy Thorpe. And
he'd been at the helm since 1967. OK. Now, their
previous election in 1970 had been quite disappointing.
They actually lost half their seats in the House
of Commons, dropping from 12 down to six. How
cute. Right. But February 1974 delivers a massive
shock to the political establishment. Thorpe
and the liberals just surge out of nowhere. They
win over six million votes. Wow. Which was capturing
19 .3 percent of the popular vote. And they increase
their members of parliament to 14. To put that
into historical perspective, this was their best
result in terms of seats since 1945 and their
best percentage of the popular vote since all
the way back in 1929. I mean, over six million
people looking at the two major parties and deciding
to park their vote with a third option. That
is a huge disruption. But the aftermath of this
election is just pure chaos, creating what is
known in the UK as a hung parliament. Right.
The dreaded hung parliament. And for those who
might not be familiar with the term, a hung parliament
happens when no single political party wins an
election. absolute majority of seats. You essentially
have a legislature where nobody has the sheer
numbers to pass laws on their own. Exactly. You're
paralyzed. So the governing conservative party,
often referred to as the Tories, was led by Prime
Minister Edward Heath. They actually won four
fewer seats than the opposition Labor Party,
which was led by Harold Wilson. But Heath doesn't
just immediately pack his bags and leave number
10 Downing Street. He tries to cling to power
by forming a coalition government. Right. Heath
is just desperate to cobble together a working
majority so he can stay in power. Right. So he
reaches out to Thorpe and the liberals as well
as the Ulster Unionist Party. OK. But Thorpe
was never particularly enthusiastic about propping
up a weakened conservative government. He looks
at his six million votes and decides to play
absolute hardball. Naturally. He demands major
electoral reforms in exchange for his party's
support. Which makes total sense from his perspective,
considering millions of votes only translated
into 14 seats for his party. Yeah. The math is
incredibly frustrating for them. But Heath balks
at this. He is unwilling to fundamentally change
the voting system. So the negotiations completely
collapse. Heath finally resigns and Labor's Harold
Wilson returns for his second spell as prime
minister. But here is the catch. There's always
a catch. Wilson doesn't have an overall majority
in parliament either. He is running a minority
government. Which means everyone in the country,
from the politicians all the way down to the
voters, knows this government cannot possibly
last. They're going to have to go back to the
polls very soon to get a decisive result. Right.
And indeed, Wilson calls for another general
election, setting it for September 1974. That
is a fast turnaround. Incredibly tight. And this
is exactly where our phrase is born. Jeremy Thorpe
is looking at this upcoming election, and he
senses a massive, historic turning point for
his party. He doesn't just want to be a junior
partner in a coalition anymore. He views a coalition
as an absolute last resort. He wants a complete
electoral breakthrough. He feels they are right
on the precipice. And so an advertising agent
and liberal parliamentary candidate named Adrian
Slade coins a campaign slogan to capture that
specific feeling. The slogan is one more heave.
One more heave. The idea is that they have already
done the heavy lifting back in February. They
pushed the boulder most of the way up the mountain.
And now they just need one final collective push.
One more heave. One more heave to break through
the establishment entirely. It's a very physical,
visceral metaphor. Yeah. But according to the
source material. The public generally considered
it quite uninspiring at the time. Oh, really?
Yeah. And unfortunately for Thorpe, the reality
of the October 1974 election was incredibly disappointing.
It was a complete flop. Wow. Despite the slogan
and all that internal optimism, the liberals
actually lost momentum. They received over 700
,000 fewer votes than they had in February, and
they returned with 13 MPs actually dropping a
seat. A future leader of the Liberal Party, David
Steele, had a rather brutal, completely unvarnished
He called the October campaign a slightly less
successful rerun of February. Ouch. But wait,
let's look at the mechanics of this. If they
just pulled in six million votes a few months
prior, why wouldn't Thorpe naturally assume they
were on the verge of replacing the major parties?
It seems logical. It seems entirely logical to
think that just a little more effort would put
them over the top. What was actually stopping
them? What's fascinating here is the underlying
mathematics and the voter psychology of the time.
The historian David Dutton wrote extensively
about this in his book, A History of the Liberal
Party Since 1900. Okay. Dutton points out the
inherent flaw in the one more heave logic. By
adopting that phrase, the party fell into a massive
cognitive trap. They were experiencing an illusion
of momentum. An illusion of momentum. Exactly.
They mistook the structural ceiling of a protest
vote for the floor of a genuine political realignment.
Meaning? The people who voted for them in February
were just angry at the main parties, not necessarily
newly minted, lifelong liberals. Precisely. They
were fighting a near impossible two front war.
First, they had to somehow retain all that fickle
protest vote support they had unexpectedly attracted
in February. Which is hard enough. Right. And
at the exact same time, to actually gain seats,
they had to persuade an entirely new substantial
tranche of voters to completely abandon their
traditional lifelong party preferences. That
is a tall order. It is. And beyond voter psychology,
the electoral system itself was working heavily
against them. Britain uses a first past the post
voting system. Just to clarify for listeners
who might be used to proportional representation,
first past the post means whoever gets the most
votes in a specific local district wins that
district's single seat. Right. If you consistently
come in second place in every district across
the entire country, you could theoretically have
millions of votes and zero seats in parliament.
Exactly. Get nothing for second place. And Dutton
highlights just how punishing this math was for
the liberals. He points out that even if they
had managed to find an extra 5 percent of the
total vote nationally, And if that vote was evenly
distributed across the country, it would have
only produced six extra MPs for them. Wow. So
you could go out, move mountains on the campaign
trail, convince hundreds of thousands of new
people to back you, and your reward is just a
handful of seats. It's brutal. It really highlights
how a slogan, one more heave, implied a simple
effort to reward ratio that absolutely did not
exist in the reality of the British electoral
map. Pushing harder doesn't work if you are pushing
against a reinforced concrete wall. It just leaves
you exhausted. Right. And this massive disappointment
marks the beginning of the end for Jeremy Thorpe's
tenure as leader. And it ends in a way that sounds
like it was scripted for a true crime show. It
really does. It is one of the more shocking postscripts
in British political history. His leadership
totally unravels. He is ultimately ousted as
liberal leader in May 1976 because of what became
known as the Thorpe Affair. The Thorpe Affair.
Yes. This scandal centered around his alleged
homosexual relationship with a man named Norman
Scott. And it involves a hired hitman. It does.
The scandal escalated to include the bizarre
and tragic shooting of Norman Scott's dog by
a hired gunman, which was allegedly part of a
botched plot to silence Scott. Unbelievable.
Thorpe was actually later tried for conspiracy
and incitement to murder. And while he was acquitted
of those criminal charges, the political damage
was absolute. He ultimately lost his parliamentary
seat at the 1979 UK general election. What an
incredible rise and fall. So the phrase one more
heave starts out as this very literal physical
metaphor for a campaign pushing for a breakthrough.
And it ends up associated with a completely stalled
movement and a disgraced leader. Yeah. But the
phrase does not die in the 1970s. It goes dormant
and then it gets resurrected decades later in
the 1990s, completely transformed. Let's fast
forward to 1992. Set the stage for us. OK, so
we are looking at the landscape. ahead of the
1992 UK general election. The Conservative Party,
again the Tories, is in power and they are attempting
something historic. They are campaigning for
a fourth straight election victory. Four in a
row. Yeah. They have recently undergone a massive
internal shift, replacing the iconic and polarizing
Margaret Thatcher with John Major as prime minister.
But the environment is highly unfavorable for
them. The UK economy is approaching a recession
and the Conservative Party is heavily racked
by internal divisions regarding their relationship
with Europe. Meanwhile, the Labour Party is being
led by Neil Kinnock and they are consistently
ahead in the polls. Pretty much everyone expects
Labour to finally break the Conservative winning
streak. Everyone thought it was a done deal.
But the Tories completely confound the pollsters.
They win the election. Not only do they win,
they receive the most votes of any party at any
general election in history up to that point.
It was a stunner. It's worth noting they only
return a very slim 10 -seat majority, but a win
is a win. Kinnick is devastated and announces
his resignation. And this paves the way for a
man named John Smith to win the 1992 Labor Party
leadership election. Prior to this, Smith was
the shadow chancellor of the Exchequer. For our
global listeners, the shadow chancellor is basically
the lead financial spokesperson for the opposition
party, the person whose job it is to critique
the government's economic policies. Exactly.
And this transition brings us right back to our
phrase. Under John Smith, Labor adopts a strategy
that many observers see as intensely cautious.
His approach is essentially to avoid controversy
at all costs and to plan on winning the next
election simply by capitalizing on the growing
unpopularity of the conservative government.
Here's where it gets really interesting. This
deliberate, cautious, waiting game strategy gets
a nickname. People start calling it one more
heave. Yeah. But this time it is not an optimistic.
campaign slogan. It is being used pejoratively.
It becomes an insult hurled by his own side.
It caused deep fundamental rifts within the Labor
Party itself. It sparked a fierce debate about
what an opposition party is actually supposed
to do. Let's look at the critics first. In 1993,
the Fabian Society, which is a highly influential
socialist think tank tied to labor, openly claimed
that one more heave actually meant doing nothing
and changing nothing. They accused the party
leadership of sleepwalking to oblivion. Sleepwalking
to oblivion. That is quite the indictment from
an organization on your own side of the aisle.
It illustrates the profound frustration. And
this exasperation was shared heavily by a growing
faction within labor known as the Modernizers.
These were figures like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown,
and Peter Mandelson. Right. They looked at Smith's
strategy and considered it terribly timid. They
were highly critical of it in private at the
time, and they spoke out about it even more openly
in the years that followed. They felt the party
needed to actively transform its image and policies,
not just passively wait for the Tories to implode.
But wasn't there any merit to just letting a
failing government defeat itself? John Smith
was not without his defenders. There were people
who pushed back against this narrative that he
was just sitting on his hands. Yes. Former cabinet
minister and former labor deputy leader Roy Hattersley
came out in 1997 and argued that one more heave
was a deeply unfair description of what Smith
was actually trying to do. Hattersley's perspective
provides crucial balance here. He stated that
Smith absolutely was determined to modernize
the party. How so? As Hattersley put it, Smith
was looking for intellectual improvements, not
ideological alternatives. He wanted to sharpen
the existing tools, not throw out the toolbox
entirely. But is intellectual improvement really
enough when the voters have rejected you four
times in a row and are begging for a completely
new direction? It's the classic debate between
steady evolution and radical revolution. But
here is the ultimate what if of British political
history. John Smith's one more heave strategy
was never actually put to the test of a general
election. Tragically, he died of a heart attack
in May 1994. Yeah. In the subsequent leadership
election, Tony Blair won. He and Gordon Brown
completely overhauled and rebranded the party
as New Labor, shifting heavily to the political
center. And as we know, they went on to win a
historic absolute landslide in the 1997 UK general
election. Which leaves historians and political
strategists constantly debating. With Smith's
cautious approach have worked. Our source provide
a really compelling retrospective verdict from
a labor strategist named Peter Hyman, who wrote
about this in his memoirs in 2005. What did he
say? Hyman admitted that he could sense and actually
shared the exasperation that the modernizers
felt for Smith's one more heave strategy. He
understood the frustration with the assumption
that if labor simply held tight and let the Tories
collapse, they would win the next time around.
But Hyman makes a really nuanced concession.
He does. He writes, I think he was right. We
would have won. So even a harsh critic of the
strategy admits it likely would have resulted
in an electoral victory for John Smith eventually.
But Hyman follows that up with a critical caveat.
He says that while Smith might have won a single
election to sustain the party in power and to
effectively lock out the Tories for a generation,
that required what he called far more brutal
changes. Winning one election by default because
the other guy stumbled is one thing. But reshaping
the political landscape and building a lasting
coalition requires something more than just waiting.
It requires brutally reassessing your own identity.
It really does. And what is amazing is that political
commentators refuse to let this phrase die. Even
today. echoes through British politics. The source
notes that commentators frequently hurled the
phrase at the Labour Party following the 2017
UK general election. And we should spend a minute
on this because it perfectly mirrors the 1974
liberal situation. It's a striking parallel.
In 2017, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn and
they unexpectedly surged, wiping out the conservative
majority and creating another hung parliament.
Just like Jeremy Thorpe, in February 1974, Corbyn's
Labour Party significantly outperformed expectations.
And almost immediately, critics noticed that
the party apparatus adopted a distinct one more
heave mentality. They assumed the momentum was
permanent. Right. They believed that because
they came so close in 2017, they simply needed
to push the exact same platform a little harder
in the next election. And just like the liberals
in October 1974, that assumption proved fatal.
When the next election happened in 2019, Labor
suffered a massive defeat. The political landscape
had shifted, but their strategy hadn't. No. The
source also notes the phrase has been used to
critique the early leadership style of Corbyn's
successor, Keir Starmer. Whenever a political
party seems to be relying on inertia or hoping
that simply persisting with the current plan
will eventually yield a different result because
the governing party is unpopular, one more heave
gets thrown right at them. If we connect this
to the bigger picture, the reason this political
phrase has survived for 50 years years is because
it targets a universal human flaw. It is a brilliant
illustration of the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk
cost fallacy, yeah. It is so much more comfortable
for any of us, whether you are running a national
political campaign, launching a startup, or even
managing a team, to believe that just applying
10 % more effort will fix everything. Admitting
that the core strategy is broken is painful.
It's the comfort of familiarity masked as perseverance.
It's easier to say we just didn't push hard enough
than it is to say we are pushing against the
wrong wall entirely. Perfectly said. What this
source material shows us, from Jeremy Thorpe's
shattered ambitions in the 70s to the intense
internal warfare of labor in the 90s, is the
profound danger of assuming that a structural
ceiling is actually a floor for future growth.
Sometimes you don't need one more push. You need
to look at the math, realize that an extra 5
% effort won't get you where you need to be,
and completely rewrite the playbook. The transition
of the phrase itself is the real lesson here.
It goes from a rallying cry of hopeful exertion
in the 1970s to a cynical shorthand for intellectual
laziness and strategic complacency in the 1990s
and beyond. So what does this all mean? We started
with a liberal campaign in 1974 aiming for the
stars with a catchy physical slogan. We watched
that slogan shatter against the reality of the
British electoral math and a voting system that
punishes evenly spread support. We then saw the
phrase resurrected decades later as a weapon.
It was used to describe John Smith's cautious
wait -and -see strategy against the conservatives,
sparking a fierce debate about the soul of the
Labor Party and whether opposition means waiting
for your turn or actively reinventing yourself.
Through it all, one more heave has transformed
into a permanent warning label against political
complacency. Which leaves us with a rather provocative
thought based on the evolution of this strategy.
We've spent this entire time dissecting why one
more heave the act of stubbornly refusing to
change your platform and just waiting for the
other side to fail is a flawed, lazy strategy.
But it leaves you wondering, in an era of modern,
hyper -partisan, data -driven echo chambers,
is the one more heave strategy actually making
a comeback? When political parties increasingly
only speak to their absolute most loyal base
and swing voters become a mathematical rarity,
maybe waiting for the other side's coalition
to collapse isn't a failure of imagination anymore.
That's a scary thought. Maybe in a polarized
world where persuasion is dead, simply digging
in your heels and waiting is the new math of
modern elections. Now, that is a fascinating
angle. If the whole world is polarized, maybe
standing perfectly still is actually the most
efficient play. Something to chew on the next
time you watch a modern campaign unfold. We want
to warmly thank you for joining us on this deep
dive today. We hope it gave you that aha moment
and a new way to think about the illusions of
momentum. Keep questioning the information around
you, and we will catch you on the next one.