Looked at on its own, Labour’s election victory is one that would please any Prime Minister. As I write, 625 of the 628 seats outside of Northern Ireland (where the major parties have a negligible presence) have been called, and the Labourites have won 354, versus 197 Conservative, 62 Liberal Democrat, 6 Scottish Nationalist, 3 Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist) and 3 independents (including, alas, the loathsome George Galloway, who, based on the Casement precedent, ought to be hanged for treason). Overall, Labour will enjoy more than a 60-seat overall margin in the next Parliament, which is very solid by historical standards.
All of the commentary will focus not on what Labour got but on what it didn’t get: the same landslide majority as in 2001. It has lost about 47 seats, leading to an instant consensus that Tony Blair suffered a defeat. The big questions for rumination are the defeat’s dimensions and cause. On the answers depends the length of Mr. Blair’s third term in office. Everybody “knows” that he will step down at some point, to be succeeded by the unspeakable Gordon Brown. If the pundits decide that Labour did well, that transition will take place three or four years hence; that it failed, within one or two. Since the majority of the pundits dislike Mr. Blair and dote on his anointed successor, their conclusion is preordained; it’s just a matter of judicious selection of supporting facts.
Hence, large effects will hang on guesses about the reasons for a minute movement of voters. Omitting Northern Ireland, Labour won 41.7 percent of the vote in 2001, 36.2 percent (according to the latest Sky News tally this time. The Conservatives rose from 32.4 to 33.2 percent, the LibDems from 18.7 to 22.5. Those numbers suggest that electoral opinion hasn’t shifted much in the past four years. The simplest way to look at it is that about 13 percent of the 2001 Labour vote switched this time, with 70 percent of those moving left (to the Liberal Democrats) and 30 percent right (to the Conservatives, who then gave up some of their own right flank to the UKIP and the British National Party). Some of that loss can be attributed to the war in Iraq, some to the Blair government’s abridgement of traditional civil liberties, much to regression to the mean: Labour’s 2001 vote share was an historical peak; one would expect some of those who voted Labour for the first time not to repeat.
My own, inexpert view is that voters’ opinions changed little because they were offered a choice of three status quo parties. The policy differences separating Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy were, let us say, nuanced. A Prime Minister Howard wouldn’t have cut taxes and public spending 30 percent, nor a Prime Minister Kennedy have renounced Britain’s alliance with America. If the Tories had four years ago started getting ready to run on neo-Thatcherite principles, it would have been a very different election – perhaps a disaster for the Right, but victory would have been possible. Instead, with a timid platform and opportunistic lunging after the anti-war vote, the Conservatives were essentially fighting to keep what they had and make marginal gains by picking up handfuls of votes in marginal constituencies. That goal they attained, but it wasn’t much of a goal.
The stasis of the outgoing Parliament’s term seems to me unlikely to persist. The forthcoming change in Conservative Party leadership won’t make a difference, of course; Michael Howard was probably bolder than any foreseeable successor. What will unsettle the voters is the drive for adoption of the European Union’s constitution, coupled with the predictable impacts of the gradual but steady increases in taxes, spending, crime, officially sponsored libertinism and police intrusiveness. Five years from now, Britain will either be a province of New Europe, with a post-democratic administration, hedonistic citizenry and entrenched criminal underclass, or it will be in the midst of a revolt against those tendencies. I suppose that smart money would bet on the former. Still, hope is not yet extinguished.
Addendum: Daniel Johnson summarizes all that was wrong with Michael Howard as a party leader:
It is a myth that Howard relaunched the Tories with new policies that were attractive to the electorate. What he did was to strip out any policies that might have appealed to the kind of liberal middle class voters who defected to Tony Blair in 1997. As a result, by the time those voters were ready to look again at the alternatives to Blairite “New Labour” in 2005, Howard had ensured that the Tories had nothing to offer
them. . . .
[H]e promised to match Labour’s spending plans and was reluctant to commit himself to lower taxes. He refused to talk about Europe at all, and sacked any of his colleagues who dared to hint at a smaller state. His big themes were supposed to be crime and immigration. But few voters believed that the Tories would do better at crime than Labour, and the anti-immigration policies alienated as many voters as they attracted.
But Howard’s biggest mistake was to suppose that he could destroy Tony Blair’s position by questioning his integrity. Even worse, Howard retreated from the staunchly pro-American and pro-war foreign policy to which Duncan Smith had
adhered . . . .
If he cannot now be king (by the next election he will be nearly 70), he has set his heart on being the kingmaker. And because he knows that the “Notting Hill Tories” (a liberal, privileged coterie whom he has sedulously promoted) are unlikely to be chosen by the party members, he wants to restore the exclusive right to elect the leader to the parliamentary party. This was the system that overthrew Margaret Thatcher in 1990, an act of matricide from which the party has never quite recovered.
In another post, Mr. Johnson depressingly observes that the Conservatives still have a smaller presence in Parliament than Labour did when it was at its Thatcher Era low in 1983.
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