Not a social democratic moment.
| Author | Crewe, Ivor |
| Position | ROUNDTABLE: After Miliband |
As the good political scientist that I hope I am, I should stress that we still don't really know very much about exactly what happened on 7 May, and in the campaign leading up to it, and we won't know more until the analysis of the British Election Study is complete. We have more difficulty than usual in working out what happened on this occasion because the pattern of constituency results is much more difficult to decipher.
There were five parties competing in most constituencies, six in Scotland. And the results displayed more contradictory swings, in other words a larger number of swings that contradicted the national swing, than in any modern election.
That of course won't stop commentators from offering a fairly instant narrative, based on impressions, insight, hearsay, insider accounts and so on. Every election generates myths. There's the myth that Labour lost in 1970 because of late bad balance of payment figures. There is the myth that Kinnock lost to Major in 1992 because of his triumphalism at the Sheffield rally. But there's no evidence of this whatsoever. There's also the myth that the Conservatives won a landslide in 1983 because of the Falklands. The Falklands, in fact, had quite a small impact on the result; it was the economic recovery that really mattered.
Some myths are forming right now about this election. One is that Labour lost because it was anti-business. The second is that Labour lost because it had moved too far to the left. And the third is that Labour lost because of the fear of a Labour/ SNP coalition. We don't have evidence yet any for those three propositions, and quite a lot of evidence, certainly, against the first two.
Ross McKibbin, in the London Review of Books, described Labour's defeat as 'disappointing, but not catastrophic' (McKibbin, 2015). And one can make that case: there was, after all, a small swing from Conservatives to Labour; Labour's share of the vote did increase in England by 3.5 per cent. It did particularly well in London, incidentally. In other words, Labour's vote rose furthest, by over 5 per cent, in the most affluent and economically dynamic part of the United Kingdom. There are possibly some lessons to be learned from that. And it's very easy to exaggerate the scale of the Conservative victory, simply because it was so unexpected. It's worth remembering they got only 37 per cent of the vote. Thatcher and Major were getting between 42 per cent and 44 per cent of the vote. And although the Conservatives have a majority, it's a slim and vulnerable majority of 16, which is less than John Major had in 1992, and that was the majority that he effectively lost in the course of the Parliament.
However, on the spectrum that ranges from disappointing at one end to catastrophic at the other, I still think the election was closer to the catastrophic end. It produced Labour's third lowest share of the vote since 1922; the only other two elections in which Labour has done as badly or even worse were in 2010 and the 1983 Thatcher landslide. In other words, the two elections of...
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