Before I get on to Scotland, here’s another way of looking at the figures in the last post.
Leader 1: +1,300,000, +670,000, -640,000
Leader 2: -1,090,000
Leader 3: -10,000 (W), +890,000 (W), -890,000, -560,000 (W), -190,000 (W)
Leader 4: +70,000
Leader 5: -3,070,000
Leader 6: +1,570,000, +1,530,000
Leader 7: n/a
Leader 8: +1,960,000 (W), -2,800,000 (W), -1,170,000 (W)
Leader 9: -940,000
Leader 10: +740,000
Or to look at it another way:
Leader 6: +3,100,000
Leader 10: +740,000
Leader 4: +70,000
Leader 1: -10,000
Leader 3: -760,000, 4 election wins
Leader 9: -940,000
Leader 2: -1,090,000
Leader 8: -2,010,000, 3 election wins
Leader 5: -3,070,000
Judged over their whole careers as leader, Labour’s three biggest vote-winners – in fact, their only vote-winners – are Neil Kinnock, Ed Miliband and James Callaghan, in descending order; the three biggest vote-losers are Hugh Gaitskell, Tony Blair and Michael Foot, whose stewardship of the party saw it lose one, two and three million votes respectively. (Honourable mention to Gordon Brown, in a close fourth place with a net loss of over 900,000 votes.) Tony Blair, like Harold Wilson before him, drove the party’s vote up and then drove it right down again. Wilson became leader after a 12.2 million-vote defeat and resigned after winning an election with 11.5 million votes (a post-war low), paving the way for the defeat of 1979; Blair took over after an 11.6 million-vote defeat and resigned after winning an election with 9.6 million votes (from a substantially larger electorate), making the defeat of 2010 all but inevitable. A lot of recent commentary has bracketed Ed Miliband with Michael Foot, as left-wing leaders who presided over humiliating defeats (never mind the fact that Foot’s defeat was brought about by leading members of his own party). But the answer to the quiz question “which Labour leader had the second largest loss of votes?” isn’t Ed Miliband.
You could say that this is beside the point; what matters is to win elections, and on that metric Harold Wilson (say) beats Ed Miliband 4-0, despite having lost Labour more votes than Miliband gained. In other words, we should praise Wilson – and praise Blair – for finding tactics that won the party elections, even if they also drove supporters away. The problem with this argument is threefold. Firstly and most obviously, it lets New Labour (and any remaining Wilson apologists) have their cake and eat it: attracting 1.9 million new votes in 1997 shows how popular Blairism was, but driving them all away (and then some) four years later doesn’t matter, since after all the election was won anyway. We can’t really have it both ways: if New Labour was popular, the figures say that its popularity very rapidly ebbed away. Secondly, however effective New Labour’s laser-like targeting of swing voters may have been, any strategy that alienates that many of the party’s own voters is by definition of very limited use. If the election in which Ed Miliband’s leadership gained Labour 700,000 votes did more damage to the party’s standing than Blair’s massive losses in 2001 and 2005, it’s because Blair had the luxury of being able to lose all those votes. Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, “do what wins elections (even if it loses votes)” isn’t a strategy that a party can actually use. As we saw in the last post, apart from increased votes, “what wins elections” is mostly outside the winning party’s control: Labour’s election victories were created, to a large extent, by the parties led by Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe and John Major. Of course, there are questions about making gains in the right places – better a narrow win over a Tory than a thumping majority in a safe seat. But, if we discount a pure swing-voter focus-group strategy – with its proven risk of alienating existing voters – what’s left is mostly technical questions of party organisation: any party, Left or Right, needs to target resources on winnable and vulnerable seats. (Of course, calling this a technical question isn’t to say that it’s insignificant. According to election post mortems several of the English seats Labour lost in 2015 could have been held with better organisation; if all seven had been held the Tories would have been three seats short of a majority. What might have been…)
Winning elections by hook or by crook is handy, but it makes more sense to judge success for a party – or party leader – in terms of numbers of votes; there are fewer factors involved, and a lot fewer factors outside the party’s control. And on that metric Ed Miliband really doesn’t look that bad – particularly if you bring Scotland in. Let’s suppose – as a lot of commentary does – that the SNP landslide was, in effect, just that: an unstoppable natural phenomenon, which couldn’t be predicted precisely but was bound to happen sooner or later. (I don’t think this is correct, but we’ll stick with it for the sake of argument.) Overall, the difference between Labour’s 2010 and 2015 performances (discounting by-elections) was a gain of 740,000 votes and a loss of 26 seats, but if we separate out the constituent nations of Great Britain the figures look a bit different.
Wales: +20,000 votes, 1 gain, 1 loss
Scotland: -330,000 votes, 40 losses
England: +1,050,000 votes, 21 gains, 7 losses
Labour put on over a million votes in England – in an election where the Green vote also increased by a million. (Some of the latter will have been former Lib Dems, but not all of them.) As you can see from the list above, this is a kind of increase in votes which Labour has only managed a handful of times since 1945 – once under Blair, once under Attlee and twice under Kinnock. Another interesting perspective shift is imagining what would have happened if somebody had kicked the crucial pebble ten years earlier, so that the landslide election was the one in 2005, not 2015. Take another 330,000 votes and 40 seats from Labour; suddenly Labour are nine seats short, and questions are being asked about Tony Blair’s ability to lose the party 1,500,000 votes, 87 seats and its majority.
That last part is a counter-factual – and, as it goes, I don’t think the SNP landslide was either inevitable or unpredictable, let alone that it could have happened as early as 2005. But the 2015 gain of a million votes in England is real. Doubtless much of this was a one-off gain from a minor-party squeeze – just as much of the vote loss in 1983 derived from a one-off minor-party surge – but the numbers do suggest that Ed Miliband’s leadership was doing something right, at least in England: something which should be built on rather than being repudiated. And there’s certainly nothing here to suggest that Blairism is a proven vote-winning strategy. If anything it’s a proven vote-losing strategy, which also wins elections – but only if the party’s support is already strong enough to absorb the loss of votes.
Next: the Scottish play (and surprise everyone).
Workers’ Playtime 