Second Shadow Cabinet of Edward Heath Second Shadow Cabinet of Edward Heath The Second Shadow Cabinet of Edward Heath was created after the Conservative Party lost the February 1974 general election. It was led by the Leader of the Conservative Party Edward Heath and featured prominent Conservative politicians both past and future. Included was Heath’s successor Margaret Thatcher, the future Home Secretary William Whitelaw, and two future Foreign Secretaries, Lord Carrington and Francis Pym. For the first time in history, a leadership election was held in 1975 for the Conservative Party whilst the position was not vacant. Margaret Thatcher challenged Heath, with whom the majority of
Racism in the UK Conservative Party fringes became a bastion of ugliness that the present-day party is still trying to distance itself from". He goes on to argue that this campaign had two legacies — initially, the degradation of race relations in the UK, which consequently "poisoned the debate over immigration" in the UK by "drag[ging] politics into the gutter". The racialised debate and discourse over immigration in British politics are said to have become popularised by Conservative MP Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech in April 1968, and the clamping down on postwar "new Commonwealth" non-white immigration while allowing concessions to the white-majority "old Commonwealth"