BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 8
fortune.
He certainly achieved that task. In 1997 Labour inflicted on the
Conservatives their worst-ever defeat. In a result that in some respects
uncannily resembled that of the 1994 European elections, the party won
44% of the nationwide vote, leaving it thirteen points ahead of the
Conservatives, a lead that proved sufficient to generate that record parliamentary majority of 179. The swing since 1992 of 10.3% from Labour to
Conservative was the biggest electoral turnaround in post-war British
history. Even so, Labour’s 44% share of the vote was still less than what
the party had achieved at any election between 1945 and 1966, including
the three it had lost between 1951 and 1959.
Meanwhile Blair managed to maintain his party’s popularity throughout its first term in office. Apart from one short period in September 2000
when the government was faced with a blockade of petrol depots by lorry
drivers unhappy at the increasing costs of running their businesses,
Labour continued to enjoy double-digit poll leads throughout. It avoided
the mid-term blues that had been suffered by every previous government
since the 1950s. Meanwhile, in 2001, the party almost managed to replicate its success four years earlier, with an overall majority of 167.
However, the party’s vote fell by as much as 2.4 percentage points, a
bigger drop than that suffered by the Conservatives at any time between
1979 and 1992, or by Clement Attlee in 1950, and matching the fall
suffered by Labour under Jim Callaghan in 1979. The only two previous
post-war administrations to have secured office with a lower share of the
vote were the two Labour governments that came to power after the elections of February and October 1974, both of which were only minority
administrations for at least part of their lives.
Even so, Blair’s second administration still managed to maintain a lead
in the opinion polls, albeit one that had begun to fall even before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But its performance at the ballot box was rather
more disturbing. In September 2003 it unexpectedly lost a parliamentary
by-election in Brent East to the Liberal Democrats. This was the first time
in post-war British politics that the party had lost a by-election to the
Liberal Democrats other than in a seat where there was a prior history of
local Liberal activity. A constituency with a substantial Muslim population, it was the first sign that the invasion of Iraq had cost Labour votes
amongst that community at least, a pattern that was to be repeated in a
number of other by-elections in the ensuing eighteen months.
Equally dramatic – and damaging – was the party’s performance
in local and European elections held on the same day in June 2004.
Labour won just 23% of the European election vote, easily its worst-ever
performance since such elections were first held in 1979. In the local elections, where the parties’ performances are regularly extrapolated into a
projected share of the national vote, the party was estimated to have
secured the equivalent of 26% of the vote – easily its worst-ever local election performance since such contests became predominantly party political affairs in the post-war era.
Nevertheless Blair still pulled off his record-breaking third electoral
victory in a row in 2005. While at sixty-six his overall parliamentary
majority was well below those secured in 1997 and 2001, it was still more
than enough for the party to enjoy another four or five years of secure
majority government. However, looked at in terms of votes, the performance was even less impressive than it had been in 2001. The party
secured just a 36% share, less than that won by any previous majority
government. That performance represented a drop of no fewer than eight
points in the party’s support since 1997, easily the biggest loss of support
suffered by any Labour government. The party was almost back to the
35% that had proved such a disappointment in 1992.
Blair’s remaining two years brought little better cheer. Towards the end
of April 2006 the party fell behind the Conservatives in the polls for the
first time (consistently) since Black Wednesday in September 1992. The
party’s performance in local elections in 2006 and 2007 was little better
than the record-breaking low suffered in 2004. Meanwhile just before
Blair announced his resignation in May 2007, Labour lost a Scottish
Parliament election to the Scottish National Party (SNP), the party’s first
defeat in a major election in Scotland for fifty years, while it was left in a
highly precarious position in the Welsh Assembly after winning less than
a third of the vote for the first time in the principality since 1918.
In short Blair’s electoral record combines record-breaking success with
dramatic decline. His ability to secure such success depended on two
crucial pieces of good fortune – a Conservative party in disarray and an
electoral system for the House of Commons that was unprecedentedly
biased in Labour’s favour. The first condition he inherited when he
became leader in 1994.2 The second was the product of circumstances for
which he can claim little credit – smaller electorates in Labour seats,
lower turnout in such seats, and the fact that when the Conservative vote
12 It was of course a fortune that was maintained when the Conservatives voted with the government in support of the invasion of Iraq, thereby making it difficult for the party to
profit from the public’s unease about that invasion. Although, as discussed further below,
the Liberal Democrats, who voted against the invasion, did secure the support of the invasion’s opponents, they were less able to turn votes gained from Labour into seats.
collapsed in 1997 it did so largely in those areas where the party had previously been strongest.3 Without those two pieces of good fortune Blair
would certainly never have secured his historic third victory in a row in
2005. Moreover by 2007 Tony Blair’s legacy to his successor, Gordon
Brown, looked more like the weak electoral position that Neil Kinnock
inherited in 1983 from his predecessor, Michael Foot, than the strong one
left for Blair by John Smith.
New Labour, new voters?
Still, however strong a position Blair inherited in 1994, and however weak
Labour looked by 2007, this does not necessarily mean that Blair did not
leave his mark on the character of Labour’s vote. The repositioning and
rebranding of the party that he instigated may well have changed people’s
image of the party and the kind of person who was willing to vote for it
even if did not necessarily deliver much long-term benefit in terms of the
party’s overall level of support.
The ‘New Labour’ project was founded on two key assumptions. The
first was that Labour’s traditional working-class base had become too
small to provide an adequate foundation for electoral success. The
decline of manufacturing and the rise of the service sector meant that
increasingly fewer people were employed in manual jobs, whil
e more
earned their living in white-collar middle-class occupations.4 The party
thus needed to strike a stance that made it more attractive to those who
worked in white-collar jobs. The second assumption was that what was
left of the working class had changed in character. Many now owned their
own homes and their own cars and hoped their children would rise up
the occupational ladder by securing white-collar employment. Many in
the working class were now individualistic, materialistic and aspirational
13 J. Curtice and M. Steed, ‘Appendix 2: The Results Analysed’, in D. Butler and D. Kavanagh,
The British General Election of 1997 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 295–325; J.
Curtice, ‘The Electoral System: Biased to Blair?’, Parliamentary Affairs, 54, 2001: 803–14; J.
Curtice, S. Fisher and M. Steed, ‘Appendix 2: The Results Analysed’, in D. Kavanagh and D.
Butler, The British General Election of 2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 235–59; R.
Johnston, C. Pattie, D. Dorling and D. Rossiter, From Votes to Seats: The Operation of the
UK Electoral System since 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Note
that if the overall levels of support for Labour and the Conservatives in 2005 had been
reversed, and the Conservatives had been three points ahead with 36% of the vote, the
party would not have secured an overall majority. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the
Conservatives would have even been the largest party.
14 A. Heath and S.-K. McDonald, ‘Social Change and the Future of the Left’, Political
Quarterly, 58, 1987: 364–77.
in their outlook rather than solidaristic and collectivist. Nowhere was this
more evident than in the south of England where so-called ‘Essex man’
had fallen for the attractions of Thatcherism in the 1980s. Unless Labour
could fashion a message that was more in tune with the philosophy of
‘Essex man’, the party would continue to suffer ‘southern discomfort’.5
So the party that was originally founded in 1900 to promote ‘the direct
interests of labour’ now attempted to shed its traditional working-class
image. As table 3.1 overleaf shows, it succeeded spectacularly. In 1987
nearly half the public thought that Labour looked after the interests of
working-class people ‘very closely’, while little more than one in twenty
reckoned it did the same for middle-class people. By 1997 the picture was
rather different. Only a third now thought Labour looked after the interests of working-class people very closely. True, still only one in ten
thought the same about the middle class, but the proportion who
thought that it did not look after middle-class interests very closely, or
even not at all, now stood at only 14% compared with 38% ten years
earlier. Certainly by the time Blair first became Prime Minister Labour
was no longer widely regarded as being antipathetic to the middle class.
But after four years of Blair in power Labour had lost its distinctive
class image entirely. By 2001 if anything slightly more people thought
that Labour looked very or fairly closely after the interests of middle-class
people than thought it did those of working-class people. The position
was little different in 2005. This transformation of the class image of the
Labour Party was one of the major achievements of the New Labour
project instigated by Blair. Labour was truly ‘rebranded’ under his leadership. However, we should note that much of the change in the party’s
image occurred after the party came to power rather than beforehand; it
was as much a consequence of the style of the Blair government as it was
a strategy that enabled the party to secure power in the first place.
What, however, of the repositioning of the party that Blair also promoted? Was this part of the party’s attempt to reach out to what came to
be dubbed ‘middle England’ also noticed by the public? To assess this we
can examine what people said when they were asked by the British
Election Study to indicate where they thought the Labour Party stood on
four scales, each of which described polar opposites. Thus, for example,
on a scale on taxes and spending, one end was labelled, ‘government
15 G. Radice, Southern Discomfort, Fabian Pamphlet 555 (London: Fabian Society, 1992);
G. Radice and S. Pollard, More Southern Discomfort: A Year On – Taxing and Spending,
Fabian Pamphlet 560 (London: Fabian Society, 1993).
Table 3.1. Class image of the Labour Party
1987
1997
2001
2005
Percentage saying Labour looks after interests
of working-class people
Very closely
46
33
11
10
Fairly closely
43
58
54
54
Not very closely
8
6
28
30
Not at all closely
1
1
7
7
Percentage saying Labour looks after
interests of middle-class people
Very closely
6
10
14
7
Fairly closely
52
71
60
56
Not very closely
35
13
20
28
Not at all closely
5
1
6
9
Notes:
(1) Columns do not add up to 100% because those saying ‘Don’t know’, etc. are
not shown.
(2) In 2001 and 2005 the question asked how ‘well’ Labour looked after the
interests of working-and middle-class people. For those years the table shows in
the ‘Very closely’ row the proportion saying. ‘Very well’, etc.6
should put up taxes a lot and spend much more on health and social
services’, while the other was headed, ‘government should cut taxes a lot
and spend much less on health and social services’. Respondents could
place Labour at one of these two ends or at any one of nine points in
between. The position they chose was then given a score between one and
eleven, such that the lower the score the more Labour was thought to be
in favour of more taxation and spending. Meanwhile, the three other
scales were:
Government should nationalise many more private companies
vs.
Government should sell off many more nationalised industries
16 This change of wording does not appear to have made a material difference to the pattern
of responses. An ICM poll that was conducted for the BBC immediately prior to the 2001
election, and which used the same wording as the 1987 and 1997 surveys, found 9% saying
that the Labour Party looked after the interests of working-class people ‘very closely’, 48%
fairly closely, 26% not very closely and 12% not at all closely. The equivalent figures for the
middle class were 12%, 56%, 16% and 9% respectively.
Getting people back to work should be the government’s top priority
vs.
Keeping prices down should be the government’s top priority
and
Government should make much greater efforts to make people’s incomes more
equal
vs.
Government should be much less concerned about how equal people’s
incomes are
The average position at which Labour was placed on these scales is
shown in table 3.2 overleaf. We can see that even before Tony Blair
became leader the repositioning of the party under Neil Kinnock had
already had some impact on public perceptions. By 1992 Labour was
thought to be somewhat less keen on nationalisation and more concerned to keep inflation down rather than cut unemployment than it had
been five years earlier. On the other hand, the party was thought to have
become yet keener on more taxation and more spending, an indication
no doubt of the impact of the Conservatives’ attacks on Labour on this
score during the 1992 election campaign.
This last trend was reversed under John Smith’s leadership as the party
recoiled from the policy stance that it thought had lost it the election.7
Otherwise it appears that Labour’s image stood still between 1992 and
1994. But by 1997, by which time Blair had persuaded his party to jettison
Clause 4, far fewer people thought that Labour was committed to nationalisation. Perceptions of the party also drifted somewhat further to the
right on the other scales, most notably on the degree to which the party
was thought to be concerned to produce greater equality.
But as in the case of the party’s class image, the experience of Labour in
office under Blair’s leadership did yet more to change people’s perceptions of the party. By 2005 equality was no longer widely thought to be as
central a feature of Labour’s agenda as it had been just a few years earlier.
People were now almost as likely to put the party to the right of centre on
nationalisation as they were to put it to the left of centre. Although two
years of keeping to the Conservatives’ overall tax and spending plans
between 1997 and 1999 had subsequently been followed by an emphasis
on improving public services (and increasing expenditure thereon),
Labour was still thought to have moved yet further away from wanting