Vol. 19 No. 13 · 3 July 1997
pages 3-7 | 4973 words
Why the Tories Lost
Ross McKibbin
The Conservative defeat in this year’s general election is probably the worst suffered by any party since 1931. (The comparison with 1832 is meaningless. The only reliable comparisons are those with elections held under universal suffrage, of which the first was 1929.) Labour, it is true, had a lower proportion of the votes in 1983 and 1987 but on both occasions won significantly more seats. In 1935 Labour won in proportion only a few more seats but had a much larger percentage of the poll. This year the difference between the two parties’ performances was extraordinary. Three hundred and thirteen Labour MPs were elected with more than 50 per cent of the votes cast in their constituencies, 44 (including Tony Blair and John Prescott) were elected with over 70 per cent, and two with over 80 per cent. By contrast, only 14 Conservatives won more than 50 per cent of the votes cast. The most successful Conservative, John Major in Huntingdon, received 55.3 per cent of the vote: the most successful Labour candidate, Mr Benton in Bootle, 82.8 per cent. What is striking is how few MPs from the Conservative heartlands in the suburbanised county constituencies of the South and East Anglia were able to win 50 per cent of the vote.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 15 · 31 July 1997
From Lawrence Irvine Iles
Ross McKibbin, in comparing the landslide Labour victories of 1997 and 1945 (LRB, 3 July), claims that the 1945 Liberal vote was not anti-Conservative in the way that the votes which produced the Liberal Democrats’ 46 seats of 1997 were. He forgets that, while the Liberals did indeed suffer a reduction to a dozen or so seats in the election after the war, their share of the vote went into the millions for the first time since 1929, and many boasted, like Terence Rattigan, that they had voted Liberal because it was the furthest left they could bring themselves to go. In his maiden speech in the Labour Government, the National Liberal leader, Clement Davies, made it clear that his party’s job was to encourage the Government in its social reforms, not to hold it back.
McKibbin rightly points out that the Blair-Mandelson controllers of New Labour are in danger of underestimating popular attachment to the welfare state and the sheer hatred of the Tories, as evident in 1997 as it was in 1945 and 1966. Take Brighton and Hove: none of the seats in the area was won by Labour, or even by Liberals, in 1906 or 1945: they went to Labour in 1997.
What McKibbin fails to question is Peter Mandelson’s capacity to understand class history in any sense of the term. I have only heard him once, at a 1995 Labour Conference fringe meeting. He was all in favour of privatising hospitals, and kept trade union delegates at the back behind the Newsnight cameras.
Lawrence Irvine Iles
Kirksville, Missouri
