The worst local election results for decades and trailing far behind a younger and more charismatic opposition leader in the polls. Command of the news and policy agenda sacrificed, with the government seeming to do no more than bounce from crisis to crisis. Growing rumbles about the necessity of changing the party leader to stand any chance of avoiding electoral annihilation. This was the position in which the dying Major government found itself in 1995. But there are growing parallels with where Labour finds itself now.
In the last few months we’ve seen the Conservatives increase their lead into the mid-teens and, since the local elections, there have been a few cases of Tory leads of 20 points or more. Looking at ICM polls from back in 1995 – ICM being the only polling company who had corrected the mistakes of the 1992 debacle and the only one who would get the 1997 result correct – Labour’s leads varied between 15 points and, after the local elections, a brief but towering 29 point advantage. In terms of polls at least, Labour now seems to be headed for the sort of deficit the Conservatives suffered in 1995.
Looking at the local elections the vote share in the 1995 local elections was Labour 47 per cent and Conservative 25 per cent and was the Tories’ worst-ever performance. This year’s local elections had a projected national vote of 44 per cent for the Conservatives to 24 per cent for Labour and, unlike the Tories in 1995, the government was pushed into third place. Local elections are not necessarily a good sign of how people would vote at a general election, but councillors are often the foot soldiers who deliver leaflets, knock on doors and do the donkey work to get MPs re-elected. In 1995 the Conservatives sank below 5,000 councillors for the first time; following this year’s local elections, Labour aren’t far off the same point, clinging onto second place with 5,131 councillors. There are now 100 councils without a single Labour councillor.
The final electoral signposts for the Conservatives in 1995 were byelection defeats. By 1995 Labour had managed the first of three big byelections gains they would manage during the parliament by gaining Dudley West on a huge 29 per cent swing. The result in Crewe – the Conservatives’ first byelection gain for 26 years – has echoes of this period.
One can stretch the parallels too far, in both 1995 and 2008 we see tired governments with uncharismatic leaders facing more exciting opposition leaders who’ve managed to overhaul their party image. The circumstances confronting them, though, are different: there is not the same ideological war within Labour that the Tories suffered after the ousting of Margaret Thatcher and Labour don’t face the same size of sexual and financial sleaze. The differences aren’t all in Labour’s favour, though: in 1995 John Major was leading a country heading out of a recession and hoping it would help his re-election; Gordon Brown leads a country heading towards one, and must hope it doesn’t make things worse.
Even if some of the raw figures for Labour are not quite as dire as those the Conservatives faced in 1995, it is clear that they are in the same league, the polls, local election results (and byelection results) look like those of a government headed for electoral defeat. The only silver linings for Labour are that they do still have two years in which to turn things around and that they are somewhat insulated from the electoral landslide that Major suffered by more advantageous electoral boundaries: if at the next election the Conservatives emulated Tony Blair’s achievements exactly and got a 13 point lead in Great Britain, then a uniform swing would give them a majority of 34, compared to the 177 seat majority Blair achieved.