Parties struggle to spin victory
By CNN's European Political Editor Robin Oakley
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British Prime Minister Tony Blair is putting the finishing touches to his post-election reshuffle. ITN's Lauren Taylor reports (May 8)
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ROBIN OAKLEY'S ELECTION BLOG | |
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- Politicians wouldn't be politicians unless they could see a silver lining in every cloud.
As one vanquished U.S. governor once said to his followers: "We all know there's no such thing as an unmitigated disaster, so to get out there and mitigate." But in the end Britain's 2005 contest was a sour election which gave nobody what they wanted.
Yes, Tony Blair secured a record third election victory for the Labour Party, the first time it had ever been done. But he suffered a massive loss of authority, evident in his fumbling Cabinet reshuffle after the election. No government since the 1832 Reform Act has come to power with such a small share of the national vote as Labour's 36 percent.
For the first time in 20 years, Labour has suffered a significant loss of seats. And most of Blair's MPs believe that if he had not run the campaign as a dual leadership with Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, Labour's results would have been even worse. MPs were soon calling for Blair to stand down within months in favor of Brown.
Michael Howard's disciplined leadership enabled the Conservatives to start on the road back, gaining 33 seats. But they are still in the wilderness. Their total did not even reach 200 seats, when the minimum benchmark set was the 209 seats achieved for Labour in 1983 by Michael Foot, a weak left-wing leader whose manifesto was described at the time as "the longest suicide note in history."
Howard lifted the Tories' share of the vote by just 0.5 percent. Labour's drop of 6 percent was largely thanks to the Liberal Democrats. In terms of their share of the national vote the Conservatives are still flatlining and Blair will soon be facing his fifth Conservative leader.
Howard's declaration on the day after the polls that he was too old to fight the next election and that he would stand down as soon as his party had had the chance to revise its leadership election rules threw the party into turmoil and ensured that it would be looking inward once again just when it had the chance to capitalize on Labour's difficulties.
The Tories have to decide how they are to engage with modern Britain. They have to find a coherent package. And they have to resolve finally whether they want to go on living in the shadow of Margaret Thatcher or seek to wrest back the center ground from the Blairites. It could be a long struggle.
Already the camps are lining up with Damian Green insisting for the modernizers that the Tories need both new policies and a new tone: "At the heart of our policies needs to be a generosity of spirit that we have too often failed to show and a willingness to prove that we enjoy living in modern Britain." From the right there was David Heathcoat-Amory insisting "We have got to produce a small state solution and part of that is tax cuts."
Once again, the Conservatives have only one seat in Scotland, but they do now have three seats in Wales and in England they actually secured more votes overall than Labour, though not more seats.
For the third party, the Liberal Democrats led by Charles Kennedy, there was at least the consolation of an advance in the share of the vote from 18 to 23 per cent. In a proportional system that would have seen the Lib Dems rise to 140 seats. But under Britain's first past the post system it brought them only 62 seats, an advance of 10 and still the party's best performance since 1929. They now stand in second place in 180 constituencies across Britain, compared with 111, but may in future have problems of positioning now that they have begun breaking through in the Labour heartlands. To the left of Labour or to the right to advance further?
Kennedy insisted that three party politics had come to Britain, but the Lib Dems, who were the only party to oppose the war in Iraq, may never have as good a chance again.
They claimed to be "The Real Alternative" but did not succeed in marginalizing the Tories. In fact they lost seats to the Conservatives and failed to capture the seats of leading Tories as they had planned with their "decapitation strategy." Nearly all their gains were from Labour. But one significant success was in Scotland, where a share in government has proved no handicap to the Lib Dems. They have overtaken the Scottish National Party now in their share of the vote and are in a clear second place north of the Border.
In all three parties there will now be much agonizing as they interpret the results. Did Labour have its majority trimmed purely because of Iraq and the mistrust of Tony Blair over the way he made the case for war or is it something deeper?
Did the Conservatives fail to make much progress because they didn't promise to cut taxes enough, or because their harsh line on immigration alienated many mainstream voters? Were they not right wing enough or too "nasty," in the words of a former party chairman, to attract floating voters?
Did they in fact merely profit from the swing from Labour to the Liberal Democrats? In that case was Tony Blair, who tends to see the Lib Dems as part of the social democratic family, too slow to perceive and act on the threat they posed?
Blair now has to grapple with such issues as the renewal of Britain's nuclear deterrent, the decision whether to commission new nuclear power stations, the reform of pensions, the re-vamping of local government taxation and the promised reintroduction of a bill to bring in ID cards. And with some 50 potential Labour rebels on some issues, he does not have much room for maneuver.
Ministers are arguing with some justice that rebellions may be fewer now that there is not the cushion of a large majority to allow people the luxury of parading their consciences without risking a Government defeat.
But as former foreign secretary Robin Cook puts it, Blair will have to modify the way of working he employed during those big majorities. "That will mean overcoming his habit of demonstrating leadership by flamboyant initiatives such as tuition fees and then challenging Labour MPs to swallow their principles and back his convictions," he said.
Labour too has its philosophical/tactical arguments to renew. Now the Tories have begun climbing back, will haring off to the left be the best way of wresting back votes from them or should they in fact -- just as Blair himself is running out of time -- become more Blairite to hang on to the middle classes?
One other element was obvious in the election aftermath. Voters are becoming ever less tribal, ever readier to support minor parties and independents. Although the United Kingdom Independence Party flopped with Europe scarcely raised as an issue in the election, losing their deposit in more than 450 constituencies, the Greens won a record 3.4 per cent of the vote and the right-wing British National Party took an average 4.3 per cent where it stood.
Spectacularly Peter Law, a Labour independent standing against Labour's imposition of all-women shortlists, captured Blaenau Gwent, one of the party's safest seats in Wales.
The anti-Iraq war George Galloway, standing for his Respect party, took Bethnal Green and Bow, a seat with a 39 percent Muslim vote, from the Blairite Oona King and Dr. Richard Taylor, a 2001 victor standing against the closure of his local hospital in Kidderminster, triumphed again. The far-left Respect averaged 6.9 per cent where it stood. The two major parties between them took the lowest share of the vote since 1923.
Given the 5/5/5 results it will be interesting to see now how much complaint there is about the electoral system itself, a system which allowed Labour on just a three-point margin over the Tories to gain nearly twice as many seats. On average it took 26,872 votes to elect a Labour MP, 44,434 votes to elect a Conservative MP and 96,405 votes to elect a Liberal Democrat MP.
