Success has many fathers, particularly if you are a member of Labour’s hard-left and you are discussing elections. The triumphs of 1997, 2001, or 2005 have any number of antecedents: Black Wednesday, John Major, John Redwood, John Smith, Neil Kinnock, Michael Howard, William Hague, anyone really, as long as it isn’t Tony Blair. But curiously, failure, too, has more fathers than fingers: the rout of 1983 is variously, the fault of Leopoldo Galtieri, Roy Jenkins, and very probably Tony Blair as well. In this case, however, failure is from a single-parent family: and the 1983 defeat’s sole ancestor was the far-left.
To take those two other culprits first: as much as any number of people would like to pretend otherwise, psephology is in fact a science, and the Falklands war and the founding of the SDP had a combined effect on the outcome of the 1983 election of precisely zero. If the Liberal-SDP Alliance had ceased to exist on the eve of the poll, the beneficiaries would have been the Conservatives, as they would have been in 1987 and 1992. To the extent that the Gang of Four changed the outcome in 1983, they prevented a 1931-style share of the votes resulting in a 1931-style share of the seats: they helped Labour, not the Tories.
The Labour party took one hell of a beating in 1983, and it wasn’t because of the media or because the left was split, it wasn’t because of the Falklands factor or North Sea oil or right-to-buy, it wasn’t because the economy was growing and Michael Foot wasn’t very good on telly. Some of those would have been enough to narrowly re-elect Margaret Thatcher, but the only people to blame for the 1983 election being so bad that it turned the 1987 election into a foregone conclusion four years before the fact were in the Labour party. If you spend four years acting as if the voters do not exist and their concerns do not matter, if you are so unbearable to be around that members of your own party not only leave but actually set up a party in opposition to you, if you spend the entire election campaign talking to your own voters and pretending that being good on television is a bourgeois conceit that wins no votes, then you get thumped at the polls.
But 30 years on, why does it matter? Labour recovered, after all: amid all the chaos on the night of 9 June 1983, an MP was elected for an obscure constituency in County Durham who would eventually hit the Tories so hard, Benjamin Disraeli felt it. The party’s two most senior posts are occupied by two men who, as we saw last week, know what it takes for Labour to win. The hard left are an unconvincing remnant adrift in cyberspace. Three decades, three election victories on, why does 1983 still matter?
Because the lesson of 1983 isn’t just to make sure that the hard-left is never allowed to run anything, ever, and the biggest problem with the 1983 manifesto isn’t that it’s a far-left document. The problem is that it’s a fringe-left document: 70 pages of non-sequitor in search of an argument. It is impossible to imagine the Labour party now disgracing itself with a full-speed tilt to the hard-left; but all too easy to imagine the Labour party spending the best part of a half-decade talking about things of interest only to itself. The real risk to Labour today is not madness, but marginalia: the three pages of the 1983 manifesto devoted to abolishing the House of Lords are a better cautionary tale than unilateral disarmament or the nationalisation of the FTSE 100.
The lesson that Labour should heed from those awful days isn’t unity, or media savvy, or even sanity, although they remain important aspects of victory in 2015. It’s that if you talk about things that don’t matter to people, very soon, you don’t matter to them. That’s why 1983 is still important today.
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6pm Tuesday 11 June | Committee Room 9, House of Commons
Never again: What are the lessons from the 1983 election 30 years on? SIGN UP HERE
Three decades on from Labour’s historic defeat under Michal Foot, Progress and the Labour History Group have organised a debate to look at the lessons from that disastrous election that are still relevant today, with accounts from a panel of people who were there at the time and witnessed event first hand.
John Spellar MP Defeated sitting Labour MP in 1983
Polly Toynbee columnist, The Guardian and SDP candidate in 1983
Giles Radice Labour peer and Labour MP in 1983
Andy McSmith author and journalist and Labour party press officer in 1983
Chair: Mary Riddell columnist, The Daily Telegraph
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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Are you sure you have actually read the 1983 manifesto?
The online version of the manifesto I can find only mentions the plan to abolish the Lords in the introduction and one sentence later on. It doesn’t mention nationalising the FTSE 100 at all which isn’t really surprising as it didn’t exist until January 1984.
People remember unilateral nuclear disarmament, and some people remember the exchange and import controls Labour promised.
What many people forget (and your piece doesn’t mention) is that Labour also promised in 1983 to leave the EEC, as it was then, without a referendum. This only 8 years after people had overwhelmingly told a Labour government they wanted to stay in.
Since 1983, if one of the two main parties has been perceived as clearly the more Eurosceptic, it’s almost always lost the general election, and it’s never won. The parties began swapping places after Delors’s speech to the TUC (I think it was) in 1988. Perhaps 1992 was the one election at which it wasn’t all that clear which party was more and which less EU-friendly. But Labour won the Euro-elections in 1994 (when the Tories ran against ‘a diet of Brussels’). By 1997, Labour clearly was more pro-EU, and won as easily as the Tories had during Labour’s anti-EU years. Things just got worse for them as they banged on and on about Europe in 2001 and 2005, thinking it was a great vote-winner.
The only clear counterexample is 2010, when the Tories did better than Labour in spite of being more Eurosceptic. But remember, they didn’t actually win.
Anti-European populism is not the vote-winner it appears on the surface to be. I think it gives a party a credibility problem. Ed Miliband would be well advised to keep a steady course on the EU in line with the Blair/Brown years, and to leave referendum talk to the Conservatives.