On 8 May 2015, 34 per cent of those entitled to vote did not bother to turn up to the polling station. As Labour faces up to the dilemma of how a leftwing party can win the next election given that the electorate chose to give power to the right, these non-voters could offer a potential path to victory. A disproportionate number of the 34 per cent come from the working class, where the party has been steadily losing votes over the last 20 years. Clearly if we were to persuade a significant number of them to exchange apathy for a Labour vote, then this would be more than enough to secure a majority without needing a single existing Tory supporter to change their minds. It is an attractive idea that if Labour were to move to the left and offer a truly radical alternative to the Conservatives, then non-voters who currently see the major parties as virtually indistinguishable, would have a reason to shake off their indifference and come out to vote for Labour. It is an attractive idea that is also wrong.

First, it is worth pointing out that since 1979 the highest turnout in an election has been 78 per cent. If during the ideologically charged 1980s when Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot offered diametrically opposed alternatives, more than 22 per cent of eligible voters still did not vote then I think we have to be realistic in saying this 22 per cent is beyond the reach of any political party.

So the number of potential voters drops from 34 per cent to 12 per cent – but it is nevertheless true that if all of those 12 per cent could have been persuaded to come out for Labour on 8 May, it would still have been enough to deliver us a landslide. In a 2010 poll of non-voters, the two major reasons given for not voting in the election of that year were ‘all the parties are the same’ and ‘my vote won’t change anything’ which strongly suggests that if a more radical alternative were offered then many of these non-voters could be tempted back into the polling station.

However, the idea that this would automatically hand Labour victory rests on two very crucial assumptions – that all of these non-voters will be attracted – rather than repelled – by a more leftwing offering and, that the gains among the non-voters will not be offset by desertions among existing centrist Labour voters. If these assumptions were right then you would expect to see a low turnout in elections where Labour had a centrist leadership (as all the hard-left sympathising non-voters stayed at home) and a higher turnout when Labour was more leftwing. But looking at results from elections from 1979 this is not what has happened.

At Labour’s most left wing under Michael Foot in 1983, there was indeed a pretty high turnout (72 per cent). But he only managed to gain the votes of an abysmal 20 per cent of the total electorate (including non-voters) versus Margaret Thatcher’s 31 per cent. Any gains Foot made from previously apathetic leftwingers were far, far less than the losses from the centre, where former-Labour voters were repelled enough by Foot’s hard left offering to defect to the SDP/Liberals in droves. Meanwhile, in 1997 at its most rightwing under Tony Blair, turnout was almost as high at 71 per cent but the figures were almost exactly reversed with the Tories gaining 22 per cent of the total electorate and Labour 31 per cent as the centrist voters came back again.

But perhaps the most damning evidence comes from 1992, the election which saw the very highest turnout (78 per cent) since 1979. Neil Kinnock, leading a pre-new Labour party gained one of the highest shares of the total electorate at 27 per cent. Yet the Tories nevertheless won that election with a 33 per cent share. Previously apathetic Labour voters did indeed come out of the woodwork, but galvanised by the vicious assaults from the rightwing press, a greater number of previously apathetic Tories dragged themselves out of bed to ensure that Kinnock did not become prime minister – this despite the fact that Kinnock was on the modernising wing of the party.

The lesson that has to be learned from this is that while the 12 per cent contains many people who may well be motivated to vote Labour by a more left wing offer, but it contains just as many people (if not more) who will be motivated to vote Tory if Labour moves too far from the centre.

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Christabel Cooper is a member of the Labour party

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Photo: Epping Forest district council