It’s not a contest yet

The problems with a Labour defeat
Even though the opinion polls are much closer during this opinion campaign than they were during the 2001 one, no one, your correspondent least of all, really believes them. We point to the seat bonus Labour gains, and we wonder whether Labour have become like the Tories were — namely the party most people are going to vote for, but won’t necessarily admit that fact to pollsters? There are other reasons to be suspicious of the ‘closeness’ of the contest this time, not least that if you want to pick n’ mix, you can find plenty of opinion polls that support the theory that another large Labour win is going to happen, and, anyway, the polls haven’t wholly successfully called a general election result for the better part of two decades. All that said, should Labour not be doing worse than they are? Given all the problems this government has had in the 2001-2005 parliament, should the race, far from being tight, not be a desperate one for Mr Blair to recover lost ground? Given that it patently isn’t, can anything make 5th May a bad result for Labour? At the moment the signs aren’t good.

The Five Ways of a Labour defeat, or, the faint chance of an acceptable result for the Tories
There are five basic ways the general election result might yet be a surprising one and I’ll list them below, but before I do, I should admit that I don’t think any of them are likely. Not the least of the assurance we can have that we’re not going to be surprised is the self-confidence of the government: Labour don’t expect to lose. And whether through their superior track record of electoral professionalism, or, because of the fact that the governments do tend to know when the skids are under them (historically governments ministers have always tended to excessive pessimism about their chances rather than too gross optimism), Labour’s self-confidence has to be taken seriously. But here then are the five main ways Labour might have an unhappy election.

I: The Tory campaign hits home
Already the Conservatives have ratcheted up their personal attacks on the Prime Minister, with Michael Howard calling him a liar, and Michael Ancram invoking the tragic, barely remembered name of Dr David Kelly. The point in all of this is to stress the sheer badness of Mr Blair, and to try and remind voters what sort of wretch they’ll be keeping in Downing St if they vote Labour. The problem with this course, and the reason why, nothing else evidently having worked, it’s been reached for now, rather than being the drumbeat of the campaign since last year, is that, the two Michaels are close to being the two politicians least able in Britain to make charges over Iraq stick on Tony Blair. His sins are their sins, with the added problem of ignorance, opportunism and incompetence also staining the Tory record on the Iraq war. Far more important, however, is the nature of the charge: and no matter how many times in the last three years journalists forgot this, it remains now as was always the case that, Iraq never mattered as a vote-changing issue. The war was certainly ‘an issue’, of almost cartoonish clarity for many voters, but it never offered scope for either ‘traction’ (i.e. by campaigning on it, opposition parties could transform Labour voters into Lib Dem, or still more implausibly, Tory voters), or for ‘displacement’. Displacement being what would have happened if Labour had actually split on Iraq, “because it was the issue of our age”, rather than merely presenting an onanistic opportunity for anti-Blairite Labour MPs to work off their fury about his domestic agenda on the safe, because electorally irrelevant, grounds of distinctly limited opposition to Iraq.

By far and away the most glaring problem for the Tory party — and it explains all of Lynton Crosby’s problems — is that it is lumbered with Michael not John Howard as leader. Whereas the latter trades successfully on his dour, grey, ordinary image, the former has consistently managed one of the most negative personae in modern British politics (being still far less well regarded than the supposedly hated Prime Minister for example). It’s not simply that the man responsible for sundry little delights like the Derek Lewes affair just isn’t seen as being a Hammer of Deceit, it’s that whatever policies Mr Howard has presided over, most notably his entirely populist agenda at the Home Office, none of it has managed to place him on the same side as public opinion. Understanding that the public are unreasoning is a hard thing for anyone who’s droning about politics to do, but failing to recognise that one of the British public’s long standing little quirks is a pronounced and apparently irreducible dislike of Michael Howard was a grave mistake made by the Tory party in late 2003.

So what’s been tried thus far, by the official opposition, hasn’t worked, in large part because, what they have had to try it with is so deeply flawed. Which leaves us with . . .

II: The Old Might Vote
Well the old will vote, but then they did last time too. Here Tory optimism has to rest on everyone else pretty much agreeing not to, and even then Tory dominance amidst the inheritance squandering ranks of the over 55s is hardly what it was. But the problem for the Tories remains that differential turn-out. For Labour voters not to come out and vote, they have to be acutely disillusioned by their own party, whilst not sufficiently offended by the opposition as to come out and vote so as to spite them. Nothing yet inspires confidence that the current Tory campaign has achieved this happy state of affairs. Hence with no good news from the predictable factors, we have to turn to the unexpected . . .

III: Scandal! (Labour, not Tory)
If something scandalous or discreditable happens during a general election to the governing party, it’s that bit harder to shake off, as there simply isn’t time for fire fighting, or for new news to act as a balm. Thus were a senior cabinet minister to be embroiled in a sex scandal that somehow could be tweaked to raise ethical rather than personal psychological issues, or if systematic money corruption could be established, or should, presumably less than fully competent death squads be exposed, then these would all be unfortunate things to happen to Labour. They haven’t yet, and barring some such disaster, we may as well dispense with this line of fantasy. Which leaves us with . . .

IV: A 1970-style surprise
This is the argument that, just as ‘the public’ had decided in 1970 that, whatever polls and pundits were saying, they’d had enough of the Wilson gang, so too has contemporary Britain tired of Blair, and without any great fanfare, will act decisively to get rid of an irredeemably tarnished government. By far the greatest problem with this piece of wishful thinking is that Tony Blair’s government bares no serious comparison with Harold Wilson’s first. Then Labour had failed, to the left as far as many of their insatiable supporters were concerned, but also to the right, in that they hadn’t delivered the things wavering Con/Lab floaters like and want. The principal thing that Mr Blair’s government has not done is to fail to the right, for it’s delivered economic stability, and thus hasn’t aroused the ire of people who have either lent them ‘right wing votes’, or are content to remain apathetic and therefore won’t bother, come election time, to turn out for the Tories in order to turf Blair out. With history not offering much of a guide, we finally consider whether we live in ‘new times’ . . .

V: Could anti-Labour tactical voting happen?
No. Not just because there’s no significant reason to disbelieve the lead Charles Kennedy has given to his supporters (which, plainly, is that he favours a ‘progressive’ Liberal/Labour government over any notion that he would share power with the Tories), but also because the Tories remain so toxically unpopular. Where they ought to have benefited, by simple swing of the pendulum politics, in the last four years they haven’t. And when the chance was there to lead opinion, most notably over Iraq, they’ve displayed a more profound inability to represent popular opinion than perhaps even the Labour party of Michael Foot, Eric Heffer and Tony Benn. Absent any evidence of a serious desire among Tories to ‘get Labour out at any cost’ (which would of course have to mean, voting Lib Dem in certain circumstances), still less, any preference, if it comes down to that, for the Tories over Labour among bedrock Lib Dem supporters, the situation remains terminally bleak for those opposed to the government. Should Labour lose — and such is their dominance, by that I even mean, have a majority no more than 50 strong — it’s not merely going to be a surprise, it’s going to be the most surprising surprise ever to have happened in British politics, 1945 notwithstanding.

For the duration of the campaign, the Social Affairs Unit will be publishing regular commentaries on the progress of the UK election. These commentaries represent the views of the anonymous commentator, not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees, Advisors or Director.