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.