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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 177 Contents

Socialist Review, July/August 1994

Judith Orr

Last hope for Labour?

From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Can Labour win the next election? A new report looks at why the party lost last time round – and comes to some quite different conclusions from those of the Labour leadership. Judith Orr explains and draws some lessons for the future

Is the next election Labour’s last chance to form a government? Certainly many of those now backing Tony Blair for leader feel that he can win over those still reluctant to vote Labour in 1992, and that this aim overrides any other considerations.

But are they right to believe that winning the middle class vote is key to Labour’s success? Or does Labour’s recently improved vote reflect a growing class polarisation of which Blair has little understanding? A close examination of the details of Labour’s 1992 election defeat gives some surprising pointers – and deals a blow at the accepted wisdom of the Labour leadership.

The beliefs about which sort of leader or which policies will clinch an election victory are based on a number of assumptions about why Labour lost the last general election. These have been well rehearsed in the media: Labour’s tax plans frightened off potential voters, tactical voting or electoral pacts would have improved the party’s chances, Labour was still seen as too extreme to be trusted with office, and the party’s traditional voting base had been eroded by the decline of the manual working class.

This study shows them up to be little more than myths. It should be required reading for any future Labour leader. It shows that policies are more important than who the leader is. The electorate was far more sceptical about the ability of Labour to carry out promised policies than it was unhappy about Labour’s tax plans. Indeed it appears that those tax plans might even have gained the party votes.

In a study of those people who said they were going to vote Labour and then in the end did not, it was found that it was not that people were scared of high taxation but rather they had little faith in Labour’s ability to deliver improvements in services like health and education. This would explain why a majority of voters – 53 percent – still chose to vote for Labour or the Liberal Democrats despite the fact that both talked about increasing taxes.

So if Labour lost votes not because of its tax policies but because of a lack of confidence or trust, then this must lie at the heart of its inability to beat a deeply unpopular government in the general election.

All the opinion polls in the run up to the 1992 election had Labour well in the lead. A myth has since developed that voters must have switched away from Labour at the last moment because of events during the campaign.

This idea of a ‘late swing’ away from Labour was most famously blamed on the flamboyant rally in Sheffield where the ‘future cabinet’ was introduced with all the razzamatazz of an American election campaign rally.

Yet when the researchers looked at voting intentions throughout the campaign they did not find any significant shift in allegiances. It seems that the pollsters were wrong about the Labour lead from the start and that the negative effect of the rally was more a product of media imagination than anything else.

Many Labour supporters blame the media in general for biased coverage during the campaign, citing the fact that the Daily Mirror was the only tabloid to support Labour while all others called for a Tory vote. The Sun was keen to take the credit for the Tory victory with its headline ‘It’s the Sun Wot Won It’.

It may be tempting to blame the media. Many working class people feel quite rightly that their concerns and interests are rarely given a voice by the mainstream press. However the Sun’s arrogance and socialists’ natural suspicions are in this case misplaced.

Firstly, though still predominantly conservative, the press was actually less pro-Tory in 1992 than in either 1987 or 1983.

Partly this was because the single most important news subject was the opinion polls – accounting for about 22 percent of all front page coverage – which, as Labour was in the lead, reflected badly on the Tory campaign.

But it was also because as the incumbent party the Tories were constantly under criticism for their poor performance, with much negative coverage concentrating on their handling of the economy.

The idea that people swallow everything they read in the papers and vote accordingly is disproved by the fact that of the readership of the Sun, the most rabidly pro-Tory paper, only 38 percent voted Tory.

Nor is it the case that once a Sun reader always a Sun reader. For instance, only two in three of those who reported reading a pro-Tory tabloid in 1987 were reading one (or a pro-Tory broadsheet) in 1992 while over half of Daily Mirror/Record readers in 1987 were still doing so in 1994.

The Daily Mirror proved to be twice as effective in influencing its readers’ vote as the Tory tabloids and so, even though its readership is half that of comparable Tory papers, the net result was about even.

But this means Labour supporters cannot now just sit back and take comfort from the latest enthusiastic slating the government is receiving at the hands of its normally supportive papers. There are clearly other factors at work in deciding who wins elections. If the papers were ineffective in influencing opinion for their own preferred party they cannot be relied upon to bring in the vote for Labour in the future.

Another popular analysis of the 1992 election was that tactical voting should have been encouraged more in seats where Labour was in third place, and that an electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats would have helped beat the Tories. The implication from supporters of such pacts is that Labour couldn’t do it on their own.

But the arithmetic is faulty. However much the political pundits have given up on Labour ever winning an election outright, Labour voters obviously haven’t. The recent local and European election results clearly show that even in places where Labour voters might have been expected to vote tactically for the liberal Democrats to keep the Tories out, the Labour vote held up unexpectedly well.

Would tactical voting and pacts actually help Labour in any case? A brief look at the voting preferences of Liberal voters should put paid to this particular myth.

Tactical voting is more often used to stop Labour from winning a seat than to help it. As many as 45 percent of liberal Democrat voters in England in 1993 said they would give their second vote to the Tories, while only 38 percent backed Labour.

What seems incredible now is not that so many Liberals prefer the Tories to Labour – after all, its most dominant image is of a pale Tory imitation – but that the idea of a pact with such a party could have gained any consideration, let alone the widespread support it did in the run up to the election.

According to these figures, if Liberal Democrats had stood down in seats where Labour was in second place, more former Liberal voters would vote Tory than Labour. This would lead in many cases to a bigger Tory majority than if Labour had stood alone. If such a pact had been in place in 1992 it would have led to the Tories winning 332 seats!

It is the Liberal Democrats who will suffer if there isn’t a pact. Any swing to the Liberals from the Tories will tend to lead to more seats for Labour, as it is second to the Tories in many more seats than the Liberals. Labour therefore has most to gain from any shift away from the Tories even if it isn’t directly to the Labour Party.

It is clear from all these examples that the myths of the 1992 election put about especially by the right wing inside the Labour Party lead to exactly the wrong conclusions. Labour is trying to redress problems which do not really exist or are at least greatly exaggerated.

However, the study presents one very serious problem for Labour. The vote in 1992 reflects a longer term shrinkage in Labour’s electoral base, for since the early 1980s there has been a decline in the number of people identifying themselves as Labour voters. Up until 1974 the proportion of people who identified themselves as Labour voters regularly exceeded the proportion of Tory ‘identifiers’. By 1983 Labour’s share had dropped by a fifth. Although this had risen again by 1992, the party failed to win back a significant portion of its electorate.

The lack of people identifying with Labour is of course connected with scepticism about its ability to deliver on its promises. One reason why the turn toward Thatcher took place in the late 1970s was that Labour governments, in office for the majority of the previous two decades, had not brought the kinds of improvements workers were looking for.

The manifesto of 1983 was blamed by many in the Labour Party for the defeat that year because it was thought too left wing. It has since been demonstrated that proportionally it included only 4 percent more socialist and egalitarian values than did the Alliance manifesto! Then when Kinnock carried out his vicious witch hunt against the left from 1983, the party was seen as divided with internal disputes.

The policy review initiated in 1987 was carried out in order to drop any remaining left policies and so present the party as ‘moderate’ and electable. Although it is now true that a majority of the electorate describes the Labour Party as ‘moderate’ (while the Tories are seen as ‘extreme’) this ‘moderation’ has been bought at a very high price.

The protracted arguments over issues such as unilateral disarmament did long term damage to both Kinnock’s credibility as a principled leader and to the image of the party which now looked opportunistic. Kinnock amongst others had been seen as a solid anti-nuclear campaigner.

There is some evidence of a small increase in Labour’s support after the policy review but, as the authors point out, it is difficult to separate out reasons for the shift. For example, it could more likely reflect the increase in unemployment which usually leads to a shifting of support from the government.

The irony about all the agonising contortions the leadership has put the party through to make it more attractive is that the tide of opinion has turned. Thatcher’s free market popular capitalism of the 1980s is now out of favour with many turning against privatisation, public spending cuts and nuclear weapons. Further privatisation plans are more of an electoral liability than an advantage as reaction to the privatisation of the Post Office and British Rail show.

Unfortunately as Labour has worked so hard to distance itself from the ideas of public ownership it has failed to capitalise on this leftward shift.

One significant statistic shows the effect of Labour’s attempted transformation during the 1980s: while in 1987 the proportion of the electorate who thought there was a great deal of difference between the Conservative and Labour parties was 84 percent, by 1992 this had dropped to 55 percent.

The conclusion from all this research is that Labour has little to gain from increasing the trend towards attracting the ever shifting middle ground.

At a time when the Tories seem incapable of walking down the road without enraging one section or another of their former supporters, for Labour to continue to try and ape their policies seems not only unprincipled but also a recipe for electoral suicide.

One recurring argument in the report is quite clearly wrong. The authors identify one of Labour’s problems as the ‘decline in the working class’. But the majority of the growing white collar sector are clearly workers by any definition. The report implicitly admits this with reference to Scotland. A higher proportion of people there identify themselves as working class despite evidence that the working class is supposedly shrinking there too. The real problem in some parts of the country is that Labour has done little to win white collar workers.

It seems unfortunate that just when Labour has produced some of its best results in the polls for many years and that concerns over the health service and the welfare state have put Labour once again at the top of the opinion polls, it should be incapable of learning those lessons.

Now it is the Tory Party that is riven with splits, more extreme than ever in the eyes of the electorate, and unable to do anything to solve the problems of British capitalism, the prospects for Labour should be better than ever.

But, as 1992 showed, none of this will be automatic. The weakening of grassroots organisation of the Labour Party means that its ability to carry arguments and build support amongst ordinary workers in the estates, factories, hospitals and schools across the country is also weakened.

When Labour leadership contenders refuse to utter any words of support for the rail strikes, it is clear that the Labour leadership is still trapped in its pursuit of moderation. Its timidity over John Major’s recent assault on beggars also demonstrates how the anger can be thrown away by Labour imitating the Tories.

The best way to ensure the Tories’ days are numbered is to build the everyday struggles against the government which Labour is intent on ignoring. To wait till 1996 and another general election is to risk once again letting the Tories off the hook.

• Labour’s Last Chance? The 1992 Election and Beyond is published by Dartmouth and costs £17.95

 
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