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.