Labour’s third election victory, as has been widely pointed out, delivered a convincing majority of seats on the lowest share of the vote ever secured by a winning party in a modern British election. In terms of actual votes, Labour slipped by a further 1.1m from its already reduced 2001 total, so that Tony Blair has a majority three times the size of John Major’s in 1992, yet based on only two-thirds of Major’s endorsement at the ballot box. But this was ultimately a negative election: voters chose the least disliked of the alternatives, and the polls suggest that while only a minority voted for Tony Blair, if forced to choose a comfortable majority would have preferred his re-election to the alternative of a Tory government led by Michael Howard.
The previous two New Labour triumphs at the ballot box were based on a more diverse coalition of support than those of earlier Labour governments – with little difference in voting by gender and less sharply defined by age or class than before – and these characteristics remain true of the Labour vote in 2005.
When Harold Wilson narrowly won his last election in October 1974, Labour took 40 per cent of the total vote, yet only 19 per cent support among the ‘middle class’ (those in households where the chief income earner is in a non-manual occupation – ABC1s in opinion poll terms); in 2005 Blair’s middle-class support was 30 per cent and, allowing for turnout, made up nearly half of the whole Labour vote.
But, of course, this was a necessary development for any party hoping to win power in Britain. Changes in Britain’s economic base have left a class structure very different from that of the past, with ABC1s having increased in size from barely a third of the adult population in Harold Wilson’s day to a little over half now. It is no longer even theoretically possible to amass an electoral majority based entirely on working-class support.
Similarly, the virtual elimination of the ‘gender gap’, which at most earlier elections delivered a much stronger Conservative vote among women than among men, was one widely noticed feature of the first two Blair victories. In the months before the 2005 election, however, there was a widespread myth that women had been disproportionately ‘turned off’ Tony Blair because of Iraq. In fact the opposite was true, both before the election and in the eventual vote. Indeed, the 2005 election was unprecedented: a higher proportion of women than of men voted Labour, and a lower proportion voted Conservative, probably for the first time in British electoral history.
Men split evenly between Labour and the Tories, 34 per cent voting for each, whereas women voted for Labour by 38 per cent to 32 per cent. Nor was this a flash in the pan – the same pattern of support held true throughout the campaign and indeed for most of the preceding year.
Of course, this is not to deny that many women had become disillusioned with the prime minister or the government (Labour’s share of the female vote fell by four percentage points), merely to emphasise that among men they performed even worse. Nor is there any evidence of disproportionate female discontent in other attitudinal measures. For instance, there was no difference between the numbers of women and men who said that they liked Mr Blair when asked in mid April: 44 per cent of each sex said that they did; and more men than women (58 per cent against 55 per cent) said they thought that Tony Blair should stand down as PM before the next election if he won in 2005.
But, in any case, it is a mistake to characterise ‘the women’s vote’ as a single phenomenon. Different groups of women vote in different ways for different reasons. In particular, there are – and have been as long as our polls have been measuring it – very substantial differences in the voting behaviour of women of different ages. Because of this, it is misleading to think of Tony Blair having ‘closed the gender gap’ in 1997 and 2001; what happened was the separate gender gaps among different age groups changed so as to cancel each other out. Labour’s big advantage among the youngest women offset the Tories’ more modest lead among older women, who were a bigger voting group. In 2005, much the biggest fall in Labour support was among men aged 25-34; the party now does better among women than among men in all age groups bar those aged 55+ (who, however, make up more than a third of the electorate).
Iraq played much less prominently as an issue at the election than many expected – it ranked 14th out of 16 issues, selected by only 18 per cent of the public as being ‘very important in helping you decide which party to vote for’, though it featured more among Lib Dems and was certainly a factor in their increased vote share. More fundamentally, though, Iraq acted as an ‘image-issue’ rather than an ‘issue-issue’ – it damaged Tony Blair’s personal standing, and the public’s trust in the government, thus having its effect on a much wider front. Labour’s plummeting lead as the best party on healthcare and education, and the Tories’ re-establishment of a lead on law and order, all owed more than a little to the general damage to confidence in the New Labour ‘brand’.
Turnout was little improved, up from 59 per cent last time to 61 per cent now. With the single exception of that 2001 election, the 2005 turnout was lower by 10 per cent of the electorate than in any other general election since the advent of the universal franchise. That, too, most likely owes more than a little to disillusionment with the political classes, which Iraq exacerbated.
Furthermore, while turnout rose slightly among most groups, it fell further among the young, with just 37 per cent of 18-24 year- olds getting to the polls. The fall was biggest among young men, pulling their turnout down towards that of young women, and the fall was probably greatest among those who would otherwise have voted Labour.
While turnout has always been lowest among the young, the degree to which it has slumped under the present government is quite unprecedented (in 1997, 51 per cent of under 25s voted), and an obvious threat to Labour’s longer-term prospects. Acquiring the voting habit at an early age is a crucial factor in future turnout; the danger is that an entire generation which would otherwise form the bedrock of the Labour vote at the next few elections may now never become fully mobilised.
The next general election is likely to take place on new boundaries that are likely to further reduce the pro-Labour bias in the electoral system. This has already been slightly eroded by a stronger-than-average Tory performance in marginal seats and the loss of some tactical votes to the Liberal Democrats. Another 36 per cent vote share may well not be enough to secure victory in 2009 or 2010; the recapture of the loyalties of some of the millions who once voted Labour, but who no longer do so, would be a major step on the road to securing a fourth term.