An Agenda for Britain. Frank Field
supporter. It is, however, far from the back of the mind of Labour activists. In order to talk up morale a political law of averages reigns in Labour Party thinking. No swing back on the last three occasions makes it more, not less, certain that the swing will occur next time. It is a belief of all gamblers that their chances improve the more they lose. This is not the case, neither in the casino nor in the election arena. Political memories are inevitably short. No member of the current House of Commons was elected to the 1945 Parliament, so that the pendulum years appear to most politicians as the natural rhythm of politics. But such a pattern does not fit the decades before 1945 when the Conservatives were rarely out of power. The dreadful thought which ought to be stalking the Left is that the close fought elections of the early 1950s and mid-1970s might prove to be the exceptions rather than the rule.
Fundamental changes have been taking place which make a regular sharing of power between the two main parties a less, rather than more, likely future turn of events. For one thing, the swings which do occur, and which would have swept the board for the Opposition party, now merely reduce the overall size of the Government’s majority in the House of Commons. The 2 per cent swing gained last time by Neil Kinnock would have been enough to land him in Downing Street if only the election had been held in the 1950s rather than in the 1990s. It is the size of the Government’s lead amongst voters on election day, combined with the disappearance of the traditional marginal seat, which is part of the stumbling block. The clear polarization into ever more safe seats presents a microcosm of what is happening across the country.
The nagging doubt of many Labour activists is that the change in British politics is more fundamental than this. Two forces are at work. The first is that the social groups from which Labour’s traditional support has come have shrunk, are shrinking and look set to shrink further. It is as though Labour is trying to advance on a downward moving escalator.
But why is Labour on a down escalator in the first place? Here lies the second and more deadly of the two forces working against the Party. A large number of people raised in Labour-voting homes have simply walked away from the Party. In fairness many of these people would argue that Labour has simultaneously been marching off in a different direction anyway. These voters compare their past loyalty to Labour to the bonds which they used to have with their school friends. At the time, few people could be more important. However, even in the most stable of circumstances people can grow apart. Britain, far from being stable, has seen not merely the collapse of its traditional manufacturing base but of new strains throughout its social fabric. Partly as a result of this, but also because of rising living standards, people are on the move. A third of all households moved during the last decade. Old ties and friendships are thus broken, commitments reduced to memories which are valuable as part of our past, but definitely no longer of present significance. As with the ties of friendship, so too with political parties.
It is as though the country has been shaken up in a gigantic political kaleidoscope. Many of us, with different aspirations, have settled down in different places and are relating to different areas and people. Class loyalties have been loosened and in many instances have simply disintegrated. The political kaleidoscope might well be shaken again; the Government could simply fall apart. Whilst it came close to doing so in the twelve months after winning the 1992 election, the Opposition cannot rely upon it doing so again. The Government may lack vision but it enjoys exercising power which it will not give up easily. The Government may be divided over Europe, but John Major is no Peel. His indentureship in Mrs Thatcher’s Whips Office should not be forgotten: if his apprenticeship there taught him anything it was how to hold a party together in the roughest of political hurricanes.
The shaking of the political kaleidoscope has changed many people’s perspective of the Labour Party. This is not simply because voters remember the rule of the bullies in the early 1980s. It is one thing to have one’s life run by a series of barely competent Governments. Incompetence is a widely shared human failing, we are all incompetent in different ways. It is quite a different ball game to think of electing a party that has cowered before political extremism in its own ranks. Those images of supposed Labour Party supporters ranting and screaming at Labour leaders have become too much part of the folk memory of all too many voters for an easy accord to be again struck between the ruled and those wishing to rule. And there are still examples – though fewer, thank goodness – of this behaviour at a local government level. But each time there is an exposure of such an instance the scar tissue which the national party has been so carefully growing is ripped off.
The importance of such memories in deciding how to vote are underplayed by the Party élite, many of whom have little day-to-day contact with voters. For example, most do not ride on buses, their main means of transport being their own private car. The private car, and the need for security, has had a profound impact on the direct link between senior politicians and voters. Some of my constituents remember seeing photographs of Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin hailing cabs at the corner of Downing Street and Whitehall. After some Cabinet meetings Attlee would adjourn to a bar on Liverpool Street Station. He would be accompanied there only by his Parliamentary Private Secretary (Roy Jenkins’s father) and they would travel by a Circle line underground train. Such mixing is impossible now and without it senior politicians are dangerously exposed to hearing only what they want to hear.
The Party’s negative image has been compounded by our painfully slow adjustment to Mrs Thatcher’s violent shake-up of the political kaleidoscope. Indeed in some areas the adjustment has still to take place. Many of her changes were to the public’s liking and good. For example, bringing the trade unions within the law, rather than setting a law by which the trade unions agreed to be bound. This Barbara Castle tried to implement and it should have been a Labour reform. Likewise, giving members control over their union ought to have been a Labour reform. However, far from being advocated by Labour, both reforms were bitterly opposed by the Party, and some members have still to accept the new accord. It is no use Labour’s breast swelling with pride now as it claims to be the party fighting vested interests here, there, and everywhere except in respect to the block vote’s operation in Labour Party affairs. Such posturing does not present the image of a party ready for government.
The list could be extended. But the message is clear. Not once since 1979 did Labour break free, leapfrog the Thatcher Government and start setting out its own stall with wares relevant to the new world. Changes were made but only after one, or sometimes two, election defeats. Had the Party embraced the ‘one person–one vote’ principle when it was first proposed this would have been part of Labour’s new stance, rather than a reform seen to be emanating from the SDP. Selling council houses similarly could have been to the Party’s advantage. In Labour’s hands the resources raised would have been used to replenish stock and prevent the rise of the sink estates which now pockmark so much of the country.
But, some will say, look at the opinion polls. Yet in past parliaments the polls predicted future Labour success. Now, with Labour’s enormous lead, the length of time the Conservative Government has been in office, its ability to make a mess of things, all point to a Labour success next time. This is as comfortable a reading of events as it is a misleading one.
However, in a country which appears to many voters to be a one-party state, by-elections and opinion polls have assumed a new role: they have partially replaced the Opposition’s function of harassing the Government. Most Government seats are now unsafe in a by-election. Whilst the electorate enjoys turning out a member of the ruling party at a by-election to express its anger at the latest piece of Government nonsense, this form of protest is limited and, above all, safe, as was evident at the last general election where every seat lost by the Government in the previous Parliament was won back handsomely.
Opinion polls, which now play a crucial part in our democratic process, serve a similar role of giving the Government a rough time. Voters trying to get government policy modified or changed willingly mislead the pollsters. The trouble is that politicians have yet to wake up to what is going on. The polls give voters a chance to double- and sometimes treble-bluff the Government. Clearly, the more they are used in this way the less accurate they are as a guide to how voters might behave two or three years hence at a general election. It would be foolish therefore for Labour, or any party, to read the polls as we might have done in the 1950s or 1960s.
The polls,