It is now almost 30 years since the last inconclusive general election in Britain. In the six elections since Labour won its majority of three in October 1974, the winning party has never been less than seven percent ahead of its main rival. In four of those six, the government majority has been in three figures, and even the superficially tight election of 1992 saw the Tories 2.5 million votes ahead of Labour.
We are conditioned to the clear outcomes and dominant political trends of the last 25 years. Indeed the attractive symmetry involved has lulled some into drawing easy parallels between the fortunes of Labour since 1997 and those of the Conservative government after 1979. At this stage of the second term they look towards the 1987 election as a potential model for how Labour may renew and present its message when all novelty has worn off.
The 1987 election was ultimately about who came second. ‘Wobbly Thursday’ – when a poll for the Daily Telegraph showed the Tory lead at only four percent and Mrs Thatcher switched the management of her campaign from the Saatchis to Tim Bell – and inaccurate exit polls provided distractions. But it was clear at the time that the real contest was a battle for survival between Labour and the Alliance. The Conservatives’ third term was won over a divided left vote and from a loyalty generated by a real fear of Labour.
There are some important lessons here, but also clear differences, and while the Conservative achievement in 1987 – which included gaining seats in London and the West Midlands – is a valuable precedent, Labour’s task in 2005/2006 will be in a different context.
Throughout their sequence of four victories, the Conservatives maintained a remarkably consistent level of support. It seemed that whatever happened in mid term they were able to deliver their 13 million supporters when they needed them. Indeed in this sense the 1992 election was their pinnacle, with over 14 million voters – more than any other party has ever achieved.
The New Labour generation has already proved more fickle. There were fewer Labour voters in 2001 than in 1992, and barely more than in the heavy defeat of 1987. So the winning coalition of support from 1997 has already proved electorally fragile, with only one in five electors having voted Labour in both 1997 and 2001. In the context of an electorate which chooses not only who to vote for but whether to vote at all, we cannot rely on that coalition reassembling itself automatically every four years when the threat of the Conservatives looms, particularly if that threat is as feeble as it appeared in 2001.
So there are limits to how many lessons can be drawn from the Tories’ efforts to secure a third term in 1987, let alone the partial precedents of 1959 and 1970. These sub-conscious assumptions could lead to dangerous complacency.
In the wake of the monumental defeats of the last two elections, the task facing the Conservatives may appear to be impossible. The stark statistics are that they must make 124 net gains from Labour to be the largest party, and they need to double their number of MPs and make 164 gains for a majority of one – more gains than Labour made in 1997. The 164th seat on their target list – Plymouth Sutton – requires a swing of 9.6 percent to change hands.
If the Conservatives were to achieve a uniform swing of 9.6 percent from Labour then they would have a national lead of almost 10 percent. Yet even this by itself would not give them a majority. To manage that they need the same swing from the Liberal Democrats. On this model they need to reach 44 percent to win the necessary 330 seats. They could easily have a lead comparable to 1987 yet still be in a minority.
There are three main factors that worked to the Conservatives’ disadvantage in 1997 and even more in 2001. First, Conservative seats are on average 7,000 electors larger than Labour seats, partly, though not wholly, due to the smaller electoral quota in Scotland and Wales. Second, turnout in Conservative-won seats was 63 percent compared with 57 percent in Labour won seats.
This will be partly mitigated by the boundary review in Scotland, which is now nearing completion and if implemented in time for the next general election will bring Scotland’s electoral quota in line with that in England. Its notional net effect will probably be a loss of twelve Labour and one Liberal Democrat seats, with the Westminster winning post reduced to 324 MPs.
The third and more telling factor was the efficiency with which 2001 Labour and Liberal Democrat votes were distributed. Most significantly, the 105 seats where Labour is behind both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats contributed just 7.4 percent of all Labour votes nationally but 37.6 percent of Liberal Democrat votes. Moreover, the effects of differential turnout were felt most in the safest Labour seats, effectively reducing Labour’s national vote share by about two percent, while about half of Labour’s most marginal seats experienced a favourable swing.
The fashionable explanation for these trends was that the electorate was voting tactically to defeat the Conservatives, although most voter choices were probably rather less instrumental and calculating than the term implies. We understand this better as what happens when a party is reduced to an ideological core vote. Its inability to reach out to unattached voters means that it is peculiarly vulnerable to local organisation on top of the prevailing national swing. Essentially the seat outcome accurately reflected the pariah status in which the Conservatives were held by most of the electorate.
The LibDems have now almost exhausted the pool of vulnerable Conservatives – just fifteen are within their reach on a swing of five percent (although these do include Virginia Bottomley, Oliver Letwin, David Davis, Tim Collins and Teresa May). Indeed, they lose seventeen seats on a modest switch of one in ten of their voters to the Conservatives. Progress against Labour looks equally problematic. There are only twelve Labour seats where they are less than 20 percent behind, including some – like Leeds North West and Colne Valley – where the Conservatives are in second place.
In reality, the Conservatives’ electoral bind is probably rather less daunting than it seems. Any electoral breakthrough that they make in attracting previous Labour or Liberal Democrat voters is very likely to occur disproportionately in the marginal seats where it will matter most.
There are many Labour seats, even some outside the 100 most vulnerable, which contain few of Labour’s traditional working-class supporters and have virtually no social housing or ethnic minority communities. Are these areas – the seaside towns, white collar suburbia, the big market towns – going to develop Labour roots (at least in general elections) or might they revert to their Conservative traditions? Will the white working-class voters of the ‘new’ towns and the Pennine belt begin to form a basis for Tory revival? Will the urban liberal salariat become more Liberal? These are the electoral questions that will begin to be resolved as Labour seeks its third term.
The danger in 2005/2006 is not of some unlikely new surge to the Conservatives, ejecting Labour in another of those seminal elections. Much more insidious is the prospect of gradual fragmentation – disengagement, declining turnout, a narrowing of the Labour lead and a drift towards an inconclusive election. That is why Labour must aim high for the third victory, why we must not be satisfied with a reduced majority as though all that can be hoped for is to delay inevitable decline. The best should be yet to come.