For Labour to have won would have required a larger swing than had ever occurred in any previous election. For the Tories to win meant a record of four election victories in a row, a feat never achieved by a modern political party. Both the major parties, therefore, went into the record books – Labour by doing worse than any other party had done previously by losing four consecutive elections; the Conservatives simply by doing the opposite.
Why did Labour lose so easily and by such a wide margin? The twenty-one-seat Tory majority over all other parties disguises the extent of Labour’s defeat. The Tory lead over Labour in the popular vote was a staggering 7.5 percentage points. Labour cannot this time make its usual cry of ‘we was robbed’ by the electoral system. The unfairness of the voting system is not working against Labour. Had Labour cornered merely half a percentage point more of the popular vote the Tories, still with a 7 percentage point lead, would have been denied an overall majority in the House of Commons. Tactical voting played its part in the final result. Despite the commonly held view that only the Liberal Democrats gain from tactical voting, Labour was a main beneficiary, almost halving Mr Major’s overall majority as a consequence.
What explanations have been put forward to account for Labour’s dismal record? Here I group the main arguments under four headings, starting first with the considered views of psephologists.
Psephologists
Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice explain Labour’s electoral failure not so much in terms of people switching sides, although that was what in part happened, as of the shrinking of the working-class base from which Labour has always drawn its main support. The size of the working-class population has fallen dramatically over the past two decades – by a sixth since 1971 – but even so this argument by itself is inadequate.
While the Heath thesis goes some way to explaining the long-term decline of Labour’s vote, it has nothing to say on the reasons why people from traditional Labour-voting families came to believe that Labour no longer adequately represented their aspirations. These families may not define themselves as working class any more, but their economic circumstances are not so different from those of other families who, also experiencing significant changes in their living standards, continue to vote Labour.
Closely allied to the Heath thesis is one centered on class conflict, the great exponents of which are psephologists David Butler and Donald Stokes. Their thesis is that, not surprisingly, a class-based appeal does well in times of clear class antagonism and vice versa.
It is hard not to recognize what Butler and Stokes write from conversations had on people’s doorsteps, where a fundamental feeling of ‘them and us’ helps to determine the votes of some households. It works both ways, of course, with Tory voters having a mirror image of the ‘them and us’ spectrum. But does the thesis adequately explain Labour’s long-term decline or does it point to other processes at work? The Butler/Stokes data highlight a decline in class antagonism and so one would expect, if they are right, to see Labour’s vote similarly fall. Yet in the late 1960s when, according to the authors, class antagonism peaked leading one to expect Labour to do particularly well, the Party was unexpectedly defeated by Edward Heath. Class antagonism appears to have been replaced by a more widely diffused political antagonism to the Labour Party by no less than 65 per cent of voters.
Similarly, Professor Ivor Crewe’s explanation accounts for only some of the main events. His thesis is that the working class is disintegrating from within as people no longer see themselves as working class, no longer propagate working-class values and, as a consequence, view themselves as Conservative voters.
The 1992 result did not prove the Crewe view entirely correct. There was a 1 per cent swing against the Labour Party from its supposed core working-class supporters, while a 4 per cent swing was notched up amongst the AB groups. Again, what Crewe describes, unsatisfactorily as a complete answer, is obvious to anyone who regularly canvasses in the same area over longish periods of time.
One other explanation of Labour’s failed voting appeal rests on a belief about how voters perceive the likely course of the economy, and how self-interest is related to its developments – what the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith calls the ‘culture of contentment’.
Conventional wisdom used to be that Oppositions not only could but probably would win when the economy was doing badly, causing concern to people about what the Government’s economic mismanagement might cost them in reduced living standards. The 1992 election was fought during a slump as severe as the 1930s with real disposable income falling between 1990 and 1991. Yet, despite this traditional reasoning, Labour failed to win.
In contrast to this James Alt asserts that only if people feel economically secure will they risk voting Labour. But the Alt line has a degree of incongruity absent from all other explanations of Labour’s electoral failure. Is it really believable that individuals will vote for a party on the basis that they are now well off enough to make themselves less well off by a government’s mismanagement of the economy? There may be here a partial explanation of the feeling of some affluent voters about the prospect of tax increases. But I would be surprised if most of this group did not wish to be on the receiving end of rising living standards over the life of a Labour government, even if they paid back in part for those improved conditions in increased taxation. That view, however, is somewhat different from the proposition advanced by Alt.
The Contented Culture of Conservatism
The latest explanation, not merely of Labour’s unelectability, but of the failure of radical parties in Europe and America, comes from the pen of J. K. Galbraith. After Labour’s 1992 defeat commentators fell like vultures upon Galbraith’s culture of contentment thesis. His line is as simple as it is eloquently expressed. Two-thirds of the electorate have a vested interest in the economic and therefore political status quo. Radical parties intent on redistributing to the underdog do not get elected. No sooner had Galbraith collected his royalties than this idea ran into the buffers of Bill Clinton’s election win.
What are the politician and voter supposed to make of these varying explanations of Labour’s failure to achieve a decisive breakthrough? And what lessons should Labour draw from the Clinton campaign?
Many of the psephologists step carefully around the obvious reason why Labour falters when voters have to decide on polling day. From the very start, and long before universal franchise, political parties in this country have been about representing interests. A major part of a political party’s function is to set out a stall which is attractive enough in representing interests and aspirations so that enough voters become regular customers.
The word ‘aspirations’ is important. I believe we are now in a transitional stage where the electoral system has moved on from simply representing major economic interests. To some extent, of course, that still applies. Traditionally, Labour represents what voters perceive as the interests of the working class and the underdog. But a majority of voters are not sufficiently attracted by such a slate alone to vote in a Labour government. Indeed, many people who would be classified by occupation as working class find Labour’s programme positively unattractive.
Labour’s representation of interests has an essentially static approach. For much of its existence the Party has been making an appeal to the voters when politicians were unappreciative of the effects that economic growth not only would have but was having on political aspirations. Wave upon wave of workers were made unemployed during the 1920s and 1930s. The fight was essentially to get out of this pit. Labour’s solution was socialism, which one day would rectify the injustices. Until then the struggle of opposing capitalism would continue and, because most working families were aware of what life would be like if their wage packet was denied them, Labour’s collective approach to security had a powerful appeal.
This approach went unquestioned even though during the 1930s many working-class families – particularly those in the South – were the grateful beneficiaries of economic growth. Living standards of those in work rose during that decade. Labour’s incompetence during the 1929–1931 Government was overshadowed by the world slump. Blaming as traitors Labour ministers who helped form the National Government was easier than looking for more deep-seated causes of such poor political