What do last week’s elections tell us about the prospects for the next general election?
If you had a quid for every word written on this subject since the polls closed, you would now be well up the Sunday Times rich list. So here for one more pound is the answer in one word: zilch. For two pounds: nearly nothing and for three: sweet FA.
We are not even halfway through this Parliament yet. We know a momentous political event is about to take place, namely the replacement of Tony Blair as prime minister by Gordon Brown. By the time voters decide their next government, Britain could be out of Iraq, or it could be in recession or oil prices could have doubled or halved. It makes no sense to offer confident predictions in the face of such uncertainty.
There has been a cycle in mid-term elections since 1945. The post-war Attlee government did not lose a by-election. Voting then was largely a class phenomenon, with the great majority of voters either Tory class or Labour, and therefore hard to shift. The 1950s and 1960s, however, saw the beginnings of the decline in class and its counterpart, the revival of the Liberal party as the repository for protest. Torrington, Orpington — these by-elections were heralded as portents of disaster for the government of the day. And so it continued with the Wilson, Heath, Wilson, Thatcher and Major governments, each in turn suffering mid-term poll setbacks of apparently terminal proportions.
It was by then a cliché of political commentary that governments suffered the mid-term blues. Today’s voter, a creature apparently motivated primarily by the question: ‘What’s in it for me?’ would vote mid-term to send a message to government: ‘Not enough’.
Just as this truth was established, it briefly became invalid. The mid-term phenomenon ended with Blair’s first government and was muted even in his second. The cause this time was not class solidarity but Tory unelectability. There was no alternative to New Labour.
But there was not the least likelihood that that phenomenon would last. Just as Labour decided to stop being unelectable after three defeats at Thatcher’s hands, so the Tories decided to stop being unelectable after choosing three duff leaders in opposition. And so the mid-term model reasserted itself.
The basic mode of today’s electorate, mid-term, is to complain. Complaining can take different forms in different forums: a nationalist form in Scotland and to a lesser extent in Wales, and a throw-the-rascals-out form in local government. It is a phenomenon as much psychological as psephological and tells us as much about modern human nature as about politics.
Mid-term unpopularity then has come and gone, though it comes more often than it goes. Though it has important implications for local government and, now, for the government of the British nations, it has virtually no implications for the next general election.
There have been governments that did not suffer mid-term but nevertheless lost power. Attlee’s was one, suffering a long gradual decline until it lost office in 1951. There have been governments that suffered mid-term but nevertheless kept power. Mrs Thatcher was hated in 1980 and 1981 but won easily in 1983.
Even in cases where mid-term blues have been followed by election defeat, the latter did not necessarily follow from the former. The Wilson-Callaghan Labour government of 1974 to 1979 was hugely unpopular in mid-term and was routed in 1979. But had Jim Callaghan called the election in the autumn of 1978, instead of hanging on for 1979, the result would have been too close to call.
This conclusion should be both comforting and challenging for Brown: comforting because, whatever Tory commentators might claim, he is not done for — plenty of parties have recovered to win from positions as bad or worse than Labour found itself in last Thursday; challenging because such recoveries do not happen by accident or as a result of some natural cycle among voters — they require governments to earn their keep.
I can quite easily imagine a scenario that gives Labour a fourth term. It would involve a clean break with the bits of Blair that haven’t worked, combined with a clear adherence to the bits that have worked. It would do no harm if the global economic environment got rougher, since voters might then prefer to entrust their future to a prime minister with Brown’s record as chancellor than to take a step into the unknown.
Equally, there are plausible scenarios that lead to Labour disaster. Getting divided about not very much would be a particularly effective way of ensuring this happened. It’s Labour’s (and Gordon’s) to win; and Gordon’s (and Labour’s) to lose. Only one thing can be predicted with reasonable certainty: British politics, from now until the general election, will be more interesting than it has been for years.
