Labour's Path To Power: An Introduction

Media commentators and centrists often seek to highlight the electoral success of Tony Blair as a model for how the Labour Party can regain power in the 2020’s. However, the simple narrative of Blair's "electability" tends to ignore some important facts about his election wins, while also serving to obscure the broader lessons to be learned from Labour's electoral record since 1945.

The seismic shifts in the political landscape since 1997 have also made a majority Labour government much harder to achieve, as Blair's successors (each from very different wings of the party) have all discovered.

Did the success of the Blair years cause more fundamental electoral damage to Labour in the long term?

This five-part analysis seeks to outline the changes in the political scene that have brought us to where we are today in order to highlight some of the challenges that the Labour Party currently faces to regain power.

Part One: Blair's squandered millions

Blair won 13.5 million votes in 1997 and achieved a historic landslide victory after 18 years of uninterrupted Tory rule. However, between 1997 and 2001, Labour's popular vote collapsed by 2.8 million votes. It fell by another 1.2 million in 2005. It was by no means inevitable that a Labour government should suffer such a dramatic fall in support.

In 1950, Clement Attlee was re-elected by adding more than 1.2 million extra votes after 5 years in office, with a total vote of 13.2 million. Even in his third election in 1951, Attlee’s total increased again to 13.9 million, boosting his vote share by 2.7%. In that election, Labour gained more votes than the Conservatives, but still won fewer seats due to our First Past The Post electoral system.

The monumental achievements of Attlee's government completely re-shaped the political landscape and moved politics decisively to the left, and although the Conservatives resisted many of the reforms at the time, subsequent Tory governments preserved all Labour's major accomplishments. A new post-war consensus had emerged on how the economy and society should be run.

When Harold Wilson was re-elected in 1966, he also increased Labour's popular vote by 800,000 and increased vote share from 44% to 48%, winning 13 million votes. So how was Blair re-elected in 2001 and 2005 with such a low popular vote? The answer is partly due to a collapse in overall turnout and also the continuing unpopularity of the Conservatives after their period in government prior to 1997.

In the 2005 election, the turnout was just 27.1 million, down from 31.2 million in 1997. Blair got only 9.5 million votes in 2005 with a 35.2% vote share, a record-low for a winning party. This shows the level of disillusionment with both major parties. Corbyn's popular vote of just under 12.9 million in 2017 would have gained him a 47.4% vote share in 2005.

Corbyn won 2.1 million votes more than Blair in 2001 and 3.3 million more than Blair in 2005. (Population growth cannot be used to explain away this comparison, because prior to 2001, no party had been elected with less than 13 million votes since 1974, yet between 2001 and 2015 Labour's vote averaged around 9.6 million. 

Blair did not win in 2001 and 2005 because he was overwhelmingly popular.  He won because the turnout was extremely low and the Tories were even more unpopular with the voting public. 

In Part Two we look at some of the factors that led to Blair's landslide victory in 1997.

Part Two: 1997 - An open goal for Labour?

In 1997 Blair enjoyed an impressive 43.2% of the popular vote, Labour's highest vote share since 1966. Looking at the context in which Blair came to power in 1997, a closer political analysis shows that in many respects, Labour faced a much less formidable challenge in the 90's than it does today.

Labour's victory in 1997 came after 18 years of uninterrupted Tory rule, culminating in a widely discredited, highly unpopular and divided government under John Major. Neil Kinnock's attempts to move the party to the right had failed to deliver a Labour government in 1987 and 1992, but by 1997, Major was seen as a weak leader, he suffered a disloyal and divided party and cabinet and no longer had the unwavering support of the right-wing media.

It's also crucial to look at the overall electoral landscape in the 1990's. At that time, Labour did not face significant cross-cutting competition from third parties like the SNP, UKIP, Brexit Party or the Green Party. By 1992, Labour was the largest or second largest party in the vast majority of seats across the UK, competing almost always against the Conservatives. Most importantly, the LibDems were mainly facing off against the Tories, they did not pose a significant threat to Labour seats as much as they did by the 2000s. This can be most clearly seen in the fall of previously safe Tory seats to the LibDems in multiple by-elections between 1990 and 1997.

In 1992, no seats had changed hands between Labour and the LibDems, all the seats the LibDems gained or lost were with the Conservatives. In 1997, tactical voting from Labour voters allowed the LibDems to gain multiple seats from the Tories, and almost all their battleground seats were head-to-head contests with the Tories:

Source: James Crouch/Opinium

Blair's success in 1997 should also be seen in the context that he had promised to copy the Tories' tax and spending plans, which played a part in persuading many Tory voters to vote Labour. But there were some other very significant factors that proved highly favourable to Labour and highly damaging for the Tories in the 1990s:

• In Sept 1992, Black Wednesday had seriously damaged the Major government's reputation for economic competence
• Labour was consistently leading the opinion polls by the end of 1992 (by as much as 23 points) and increasing that lead from 1992 onwards
• The Liberal Democrats were making big gains at the expense of the Tories in local elections and by-elections
• There had been a series of scandals involving Conservative MPs, eagerly reported by the tabloid press, and divisions over Europe were generating bad headlines and leading to a perception that Major was weak
• When Blair became leader, his nearest rival, John Prescott, who was seen as being on the Left of the party, became a loyal and supportive deputy leader and helped to rally some on the left of the party behind Blair's agenda 
• Blair faced no serious challenge from within the Parliamentary Labour Party over his leadership and had received approval for abandoning policies like nationalisation in many parts of the media
• Blair had the support of Rupert Murdoch, whose newspaper, The Sun, had the biggest circulation of any paper, had previously delivered unwavering support for the Tories and was widely believed to have helped win the 1992 election for Major (Murdoch came to have a significant influence on government decisions, including the UK’s involvement in the Iraq War)
• 5 months before the election, Major had lost his parliamentary majority, which added to the sense of an administration in the process of collapse
• By 1997, the Conservatives had been in power for 18 years, meaning there was a general feeling that administration had run its course. People also voted Labour in the hope that the a new government would deliver real change.

Looking at Blair's challenge when he assumed the leadership in 1994, here is the vote share from the previous election:

Data Source:Wikipedia

In 1994, Blair inherited a party that was facing a negligible challenge from third parties like the SNP, while the LibDems were primarily inhibiting the Tory vote.The Conservative government was extremely unpopular and as predicted in the opinion polls since 1992, their vote collapsed in the election of 1997. Apart from copying the Tories' economic programme, Blair also emulated Conservative tough rhetoric on crime and had abandoned socialist policies. This almost certainly convinced some Tory voters to switch sides in this election, though the subsequent collapse in the core Labour vote in the parties' heartlands four years later showed the price of this.

Even though Blair had won a landslide majority of Labour MPs in 1997, in an extraordinary move he actually approached the LibDems to form a coalition, to reduce and dilute the influence of his own party over his government. Only a potential cabinet revolt stopped this plan.

In Part Three we look at how the electoral landscape changed during the Blair years.

Part 3: Blair's toxic electoral legacy

In a 2017 blog, Blairite Labour activist Luke Akehurst claimed Blair's election wins were all the more impressive as they were won under a 3-party system.

The underlying assumption was that the UK has transitioned from 3-party politics (Labour/LibDem/Tory) to a fundamentally 2-party system, owing to the sharp electoral decline of the LibDems since their coalition with the Conservatives in 2010.

However, despite the LibDem vote collapsing in 2015, Ed Miliband still only got 30.4% vote share and a disappointing 9.3 million votes. What can explain this failure?

First of all, it is misleading to say we have moved from what used to be a 3-party system to a genuinely 2 party system. In the 1990s, the Tories were struggling from the combined threat of Labour and the LibDems, but Labour was still largely locked in a 2-horse race with the Tories in most constituencies. Today's politics is more accurately characterised as a complex and volatile multi-party system. This evolution between 1997 and 2010 can be seen by comparing the proportion of top two parties in a constituency by region in these 4 charts:

Source:LSE/Jack Blumenau/ Simon Hix

The blue sections of the graphs represent the seats where Labour and the Tories were the main competitors. In 1997, we see that Labour and the Conservatives were the main parties competing against each other in most regions. The vast majority of seats were simple contests between Labour and Tory and this had been the case for decades. For Labour, the focus was all on turning Tory seats into Labour seats and there was no serious rival challenge to Labour's role as the official party of opposition, as the government in waiting. Nor did they need to worry about their regional heartlands which were dominated by rock-solid safe Labour seats and very few resources were targeted towards these. Blair gambled that if there was a swing away from the Tories after 18 years, Labour needed only to focus on the rhetoric of change while reassuring Tory voters who were reluctant to vote Labour. What better way to capture Tory votes than to re-brand the party "New Labour", repudiate socialism and promise to copy the Tory tax and spending plans?

However, as shown by the growth of the red and orange sections that represent the expanding regional presence of the LibDems by 2010, Blair's decision to tack to the Right held unforeseen consequences that would change the political landscape of the UK forever.

Under Blair, the LibDems began to become challengers in Labour territory, growing considerably in strength, depriving the party of multiple seats and splitting the anti-Tory vote in others. The LibDem vote inexorably increased from 17% to a peak of 23% by 2010, the year when Labour lost power. Under leader Charles Kennedy, The LibDems had repositioned themselves to the left of Labour on issues like tuition fees, civil liberties and opposition to the Iraq War. This was their response to Labour adopting right-wing policy positions, for instance:

• Extending privatisation and outsourcing of services
• Aggressive foreign policy/involvement in foreign wars
• Ending student grants and introducing tuition fees
• Introducing more harsh and sometimes draconian criminal justice measures like ASBOs
• Support for stronger law enforcement powers
• Proposing ID cards to crack down on benefit fraud and illegal foreign workers
• Placing a large focus on mass surveillance as a means to address terrorism etc.

By 2010 the LibDems were only 6 percentage points behind Labour nationally. Their rise was fuelled by widespread disillusionment with Labour, as well as the continuing unpopularity of the Conservative brand. On a different front, Scottish dissatisfaction with Westminster politics grew so severe that that by 2015, the SNP had wiped out all but one of Labour's Scottish seats. Offering a more left-wing ideological platform than Labour and riding a wave of enthusiasm for independence, they had become the preferred party to oppose the Tories north of the border. The overall UK-wide Labour vote had been shrinking dramatically since 1997 and the slight bounce under Miliband couldn't translate into a much bigger vote share (Brown got 29% in 2010, Miliband 30.4% in 2015).

Let's compare the vote share for Labour's rival opposition parties in 1997 and 2015:

Data Source:Wikipedia

(Note: the anti-EU Referendum Party at 2.6% were understood to have hurt the Conservatives in their seats much more than Labour in 1997). The SNP and the Greens had low levels of vote share and their support was spread thinly, meaning they could not translate their support into winning significant numbers of seats in parliament, nor pose any serious challenge to Labour.)

Data Source: Wikipedia

Although the LibDems' vote collapsed in 2015 after the Lib-Con coalition, we see their total combined with the vote of other parties like the SNP and UKIP was much higher than anything Labour had to face in the 1990s (the total vote share of parties other than Tory and Labour was an unprecedented 30.5%, excluding the 2.3% that went to parties in Northern Ireland)

The Tories were the main beneficiaries of the LibDem losses, and Labour's overall vote share had increased by a disappointing 1.4% under Miliband. UKIP had become a serious challenge with 12.7% (meaning that Euroscepticism in Labour's heartlands could further damage the party if it appeared out-of-step on this issue) while the SNP had just wiped out Scottish Labour (4.7%) and the Greens were at their highest point (3.8%). All these parties had steadily built their support during the Blair/Brown years and were now either drawing voters away from Labour, splitting the vote and allowing the Tories to win, or actually taking once-safe Labour seats themselves.

By the time of Corbyn’s election as Leader of the Opposition in September 2015, Labour was competing across multiple conflicting political divides with the Tories, The LibDems, the SNP, UKIP and the Greens, and there was no sign of any real revival, as the party had been flat-lining at around 30% since 2010.

However, just two years later, Corbyn had managed a record-breaking boost in the Labour vote share from 30.4% to 40.3% and robbed the Tories of their majority, coming within a 1% swing of winning a parliamentary majority himself. The fact that Corbyn still fell short of achieving a majority in parliament, despite this astonishing result, has a lot to do with the way the votes were distributed and the effect of other opposition parties that were still splitting the anti-Tory vote.

Writing on the 2017 election result in the same blog, even Akehurst acknowledged : "We are now in the odd situation that this year’s result was 4.8 per cent higher than our win in 2005 but delivered 93 fewer seats … showing that in first past the post elections the capriciousness of the electoral system means it’s not just how many votes you get that matters, but in which seats and how the opposition vote splits up."
  
Corbyn's achievement was all the more remarkbale considering the circumstances of the 2017 election, as we'll see in Part 4.  

Part 4: 2017 - The biggest upset in UK political history

In the 2017 General Election, Corbyn had managed a record boost in the Labour vote share from 30.4% to 40.3% and added an impressive 3.5 million voters to Labour's vote total. The election resulted in a hung parliament. A few hundred votes in just a handful of marginal constituencies would have put Corbyn in Downing Street.

Data Source: Wikipedia

Blair increased Labour's vote share by 8.8% in 1997, but after just 21 months as Leader of the Opposition, Corbyn increased it by a massive 9.6%. This was the biggest increase in vote share in any election since 1945. Corbyn won just under 12.9 million votes, which was 2.1 million more votes than Blair in 2001 and 3.3 million more than Blair in 2005. As previously explained, population growth cannot be used to explain away this comparison, because prior to 2001, no party had been elected with less than 13 million votes since 1974; yet between 2001 and 2015, Labour's vote averaged around 9.6 million.

This was the first time Labour actually increased its number seats in an election since 1997. 2017 was the biggest upset in UK political history (a fact even acknowledged by the right-wing Daily Express), not least because opinion polls had consistently predicted a massive Tory landslide and Labour wipeout, with an expected Tory majority of between 100 and 200 seats. Theresa May was supposedly leading by 21 points at the start of the campaign. The inaccurate predictions persisted to the final week of the campaign when most polls still predicted a big Tory majority of up to 126.

In practice, Labour's extraordinary surge destroyed the Tories' majority. Theresa May was forced to do a £1 billion deal with the DUP to stay in power, but she was a lame duck Prime Minister and suffered defeat after defeat in the House of Commons. Knowing they could not pass legislation, the Tories cancelled their entire manifesto programme to focus on Brexit. However, they were blocked at every stage and forced to postpone the Brexit date twice, after which Theresa May was removed from office.

Labour's Brexit position seemed to work in its favour in 2017. Both the Tories and Labour neutralised the Brexit issue by agreeing to honour the referendum result. The UKIP vote collapsed from 12.6% in 2015 to just 1.8% in 2017.

Labour's result was all the more remarkable considering several factors:

• It was called less than 2 years into Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader and he inherited a severely divided and electorally weak party
• In the post-Referendum era, there was a new dividing line in UK politics over Brexit - a third of Labour voters had voted to leave the EU and now the Tories were offering to implement the policy which had gained a mandate of 17.4 million votes the previous year
• It was a snap election called at a point when the Conservatives were high in the opinion polls
• Conservative MPs had avoided a divisive leadership election in 2016 when Theresa May was elected unopposed
• Corbyn was characterised in the media as being extremely unpopular with voters
• His own parliamentary colleagues had launched a coup against him less than one year beforehand (and less than one year into his tenure), with his shadow cabinet resigning one by one in a coordinated attempt to shame him in the media and force him to step down
• 9 months before the election, he had faced a leadership challenge from Owen Smith, with Labour MPs overwhelmingly supporting Smith, then subsequently Smith and other MPs declined to help unify the party by refusing to return to the shadow cabinet
• The conventional wisdom is that divided parties are punished by the electorate - as exemplified by the scale of John Major’s defeat in 1997 

Apart from the persistent problem of rival opposition parties splitting the vote and an unhelpful distribution of Labour votes between constituencies, the main factor that stopped a landslide Corbyn win in 2017 was the fact that the Tories' vote also increased. The Tories also benefited from overwhelming media support and apparent bias in the coverage of her opponent. By harnessing nationalistic sentiment over Brexit and neutralising the UKIP vote, Theresa May managed to cling onto power, but she found herself unable to execute Brexit or carry through any major policies.

In Part 5 we'll look at why Corbyn was unable to turn the impressive momentum of 2017 into a general election victory in 2019.

Part 5: Why did Labour do so much worse in 2019 than 2017?

The first thing to look at is the effect of the Brexit Party.

Historically, the UK electoral system has generally worked to the advantage of Labour and the Conservatives. Small parties the Brexit Party, UKIP, and the Greens find that even if they gain a healthy vote share across the UK, they end up with virtually no representation in parliament, because of the way their vote is often thinly spread out. However, this does not mean that they do not have a very significant effect on politics - because if they draw enough votes away from Labour or split the vote in crucial marginal constituencies, they can enable the Conservatives to win. But in 2019, the Brexit party did much more than that - it decided to selectively help sitting Conservative MPs while targeting Labour in constituencies across the UK. By standing in Labour marginals (and key Labour target seats) but not standing in Conservative-held seats, Nigel Farage encouraged Leave voters to vote Conservative where it would hurt Labour, while simultaneously taking Labour votes in seats the party desperately needed to keep or win. This chart shows the correlation between the Brexit Party's vote share in seats where they stood candidates, and the resultant swing to the Tories in those seats.


Source: LSE/Pippa Norris

This allowed the Tories to win Labour seats across the North, the Midlands and Wales which had been Labour-held for decades. Even though the Conservatives vote share increased by just over 1.2% since 2017, the distribution of their votes and the damage done to the Labour vote in crucial seats meant that the Conservatives won a big majority in Parliament.

In 2019, Labour had to deal with defectors from the right of the party who had left the party to stand against it, either as an independent, ChangeUK or LibDem candidate. None of them were elected, but defectors from both Labour and Tories greatly harmed Labour by splitting the vote in a key Labour marginal or target seat, helping the Conservatives take or keep the seat:

               Source: Wikipedia                                                 Source: Wikipedia

                                                      Source: Wikipedia                                       
The Tories failed to show up to TV debates, which meant they avoided negative scrutiny. Additionally, although the BBC initially planned to subject all the party leaders to an Andrew Neil interview "grilling" and the other party leaders went ahead on this basis, after some prevarication, Boris Johnson refused to do his interview. The Tories also utilised dirty tricks on social media, with 88% of their Facebook ads were deemed misleading by FullFact - like the deceptive editing of a social media post to make it seem as though then Shadow Brexit Secretary, Keir Starmer, could not explain Labour’s Brexit policy (which he had championed). Unlike previous elections, the Conservatives promised huge (but uncosted) levels of public spending, for instance, building 40 "new" hospitals. Although these pledges often unravelled under close scrutiny, they may have nevertheless resonated with voters.

The 2019 election was once again called entirely on the Tories' terms and was scheduled in order to provide them with maximum political advantage (the LibDems and SNP gave crucial support to the Tories over the precise timing of the election as they believed it would benefit them too). Boris Johnson was able to frame the election around a single issue, finalising Brexit, an approach which the media seemed happy to endorse (for instance, Sky News carried rolling daily coverage under the headline "The Brexit Election"). It was timed when new leader Boris Johnson was still enjoying a bounce in the polls from his recent overwhelming success in the Tory leadership election. He sought to project a nationalistic message to Leave voters in anticipation of a bright future after Brexit, while portraying Labour and the LibDems as blocking "the will of the people" and castigating parliament for its paralysis. In doing so, he played almost a Trumpian card, appearing to distance himself from the record of his own political party and casting himself as an anti-politician who was fighting the elite. His messaging tapped into a widely-held sense of exhaustion with the whole divisive issue of Brexit, a desire to see it resolved at long last. Johnson blocked the release of a government report into Russian interference in UK elections, meanwhile the Tories accepted millions in donations from Russian donors linked to Putin, some of whom were believed to be mentioned in the suppressed report. The Tories' budget on online advertising and elsewhere dwarfed anything the other parties could deploy.

Opinion polls showed individual Labour policies were very popular with voters. But after four years of relentless negative media coverage, from the right-wing press but also from outlets like The Guardian, Corbyn continued to have highly unfavourable ratings across opinion polls, partly because of the negative coverage around the issue of antisemitism in the party. However a breakdown of the reasons for his unfavourability indicate that the main factor driving people away was actually Brexit:

 
Sources :YouGov (Corbyn)   YouGov (Labour's Economic Policies)

The party leadership was regarded as having the wrong policy on Brexit and for displaying indecisiveness on the main issue of the day. Labour lost votes to the Conservatives/Brexit party AND to the LibDems on either side of the Brexit divide. The party's policy to "appeal to both sides" with a 2nd Referendum appeared to please no-one, as the LibDems (who gained 4.2%) and other opposition parties were able to outflank Labour by being more overtly Remain, while Leave voters felt that Labour was trying to overturn the referendum result. Because Labour Remain voters were more highly concentrated in cities where Labour could withstand losses, it was the desertion of Leave voters (in the "left-behind" towns of the North, Midlands and Wales) which caused the decisive collapse in the number of seats.

Although Labour's vote share in 2019 was better than 2015 or 2010 (and the party got more votes than it did in 2005), it was where Labour lost votes which mattered. Concentrated numbers of votes were lost in Leave-voting areas, which hit Labour hard due to the way the electoral system works. Of the 54 seats the party lost in England and Wales, 52 were in Leave-voting areas. Adopting a simplistic but strong Brexit message ("Get Brexit Done") the Tories saw a surge in support, while Labour were cast as ditherers and out-of-touch.

Labour's Path To Power: Conclusion

In these five articles we've explored how UK party politics has been fundamentally transformed since the mid-1990's. Unlike in 1997, when most seats were simple contests between Labour and Conservative (and the LibDem vote acted to inhibit the Tories), today's multi-party politics is much more divided by region and features cross-cutting competing contests between several different parties across the political spectrum, plus across the Leave/Remain divide. Labour faces ongoing challenges from rival opposition parties, including a more regionally widespread threat from the LibDems who have shown previously that they are prepared to reposition themselves to the left of Labour if Labour attempts to move to the right. Disillusionment with traditional party politics and an increasingly polarised and volatile electorate exacerbates the problem.

Labour's inexorable decline from 1997, plus its poor vote share and comparatively popular vote totals in 2001, 2005, 2010 and 2015 do not reflect well on the politics of centrism. Copying the Conservative tax and spending plans in 1997 was a controversial approach and it may have temporarily convinced some Conservative voters to switch to Labour. However, there was a much higher long-term cost in terms of loss of vote share. Competitor parties gained a foothold in areas where Labour used to be unchallenged, making Labour's route to an outright majority much more difficult in any subsequent election.

Disillusionment with Labour caused the party to flatline up to the 2017 election, when the party changed approach and enjoyed a significant and rapid boost in electoral support. The unique circumstances of the 2019 "Brexit election", combined with the fact that the Brexit party worked tactically to boost the Conservatives and hurt Labour, plus the "baggage" of Corbyn's media portrayal must all be taken into consideration before jettisoning the party's socialist manifesto.

Labour must seek to combine popular policy pledges with an effective communication strategy and an electoral strategy that takes into account the diverse political landscape of the whole UK. The nature of this challenge, plus the complex realities of the electoral system (and the very different context of politics today versus the mid 1990s) make it unwise to make knee-jerk assumptions about the relatively electability of socialism versus centrism.

The continuing popularity of socialist policies (and the overlapping threats posed by rival opposition parties that took hold under Blair/Brown/Miliband) indicates that simply emulating Tory rhetoric and copying Tory policies as Blair once did is not a guaranteed path to power - still less a way of building a solid, long-term base of support for Labour among the electorate.