What are the five grammatical mistakes in the paragraph below? How would you correct them? Few of the problems of the 1980s was entirely new....

Below is a list of directions to correct the mistake, as well as the corrected paragraph. There seems to be more than 5 errors in the original paragraph. In addition, certain spellings of words are specifically British and therefore not "corrected," as regional variations are not errors (for example: "recognised," "labour").

Few of the problems of the 1980s was entirely new.

Sentence 1: change "was" to "were" for subject-verb agreement in number with "few."

However, many people blamed them on the new Conservative government, and in particular, Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher

Sentence 2: Add a comma before "in particular" in order to set apart this conjunctive adverbial phrase from the rest of the sentence.

Thatcher had been elected in 1979 because she promised a new beginning for Britain.

The need for such a break with the past had been widely recognised for any years.

Sentence 4: Change "any" to "many" for noun/adjective agreement with "years."

As a result the old Conservative-Labour agreement on the guiding principles of the welfare state had already broken down.

Sentence 5: Add a comma after "As a result" in order to set apart this conjunctive adverbial phrase from the rest of the sentence.

In the Conservative Party there had been a strong movement to the right, and in the Labour Party it had been a similarly strong move to the left.

Sentence 6: change "it" to "there" to create parallel structure and remove a vague pronoun reference.

Both moved further away form the “centre” of British politics than they had done in living memory.

Sentence 7: Spelling error: change "form" to "from."

The basic change in british politics caused a major crisis for the Labour Party.

Sentence 8: Capitalization error. Capitalize "British."

Corrected paragraph:

Few of the problems of the 1980s were entirely new. However, many people blamed them on the new Conservative government, and, in particular, Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher had been elected in 1979 because she promised a new beginning for Britain. The need for such a break with the past had been widely recognised for many years. As a result, the old Conservative-Labour agreement on the guiding principles of the welfare state had already broken down. In the Conservative Party there had been a strong movement to the right, and in the Labour Party there had been a similarly strong move to the left. Both moved further away from the “centre” of British politics than they had done in living memory. The basic change in British politics caused a major crisis for the Labour Party.