What if labour has won in 1992

In the party won on recession. At the end of the day John Smith's budget probably frightened too many households, particularly in the south where Labour had to make big gains. Labour's defeat is not easily explained away. It had a big lead on the social issues and fought an election against a favourable background. The Conservatives were severely handicapped by recession, the poll tax and health.

It is difficult today to construct a convincing scenario for a Labour victory at the next election under the present electoral system. At the next election a redistribution of boundaries will be worth between 10 and 15 seats to the Conservatives.

Labour will need a swing greater than it achieved in There has been a qualified endorsement of two-party politics. In elections since the two main parties gained a combined average of 75 per cent of the vote Con 43 per cent, Lab 32 per cent. Until then the post-war average had been 87 per cent Con 43 per cent Lab 44 per cent. The substantial fragmentation of the vote since then has imposed a ceiling on the share of the total vote a party in government can expect to win.

Since neither Tory nor Labour governments have been able to break through the 43 per cent barrier. At a time of three-party politics, deadlocked parliaments are therefore more likely under the present system. Under the first past-the-post system, Labour has won only eight times and six of these , , , and February and October produced either short-lived minority governments or majorities insufficient to last for a full parliament. Remarkably, this fate has never overtaken the Conservatives this century.

It can now be seen that the electoral system has been a boon to the Conservatives and a disaster for Labour. The party could hardly have done worse under another system.

The election has failed to reverse the regional divide. The weakness of Labour in the south, apart from London, and the decline of the Conservatives in the north and the cities has been reinforced. No party now is representative of the nation. This is a long-term trend, dating back to Although parties in other European countries have regional strongholds, proportional representation, federalism and coalitions mean that regions feel less excluded from the system when they are not in government.

The pollsters and, largely as a result, almost everyone else were wrong. The last election when the polls failed to predict the result was in , an election which seems to have the most similarities with John Major won a surprise victory with an overall majority of 21 seats to keep the Conservatives in power. If the opinion polls failed to give us a steer, could history have given us a better idea of what to expect at the election?

There are some parallels with , but then a Conservative leader was facing his first election, although his party had won the last three contests with an overall majority. The Labour leader in , Neil Kinnock, was facing his second battle after losing his first, unlike Ed Miliband who was previously untested at the polls.

If we looked for examples of elections at the end of coalition governments, we would have few examples and contradictory evidence. At the end of the wartime coalition in , Labour, the junior coalition partner stormed to a landslide victory. Going back to the previous end-of-coalition election, the result was a victory for the larger coalition party, the Conservatives. We have to face the uncomfortable reality that virtually every poll was wrong in terms of predicting the outcome of the election and that history offers no exact parallels for us to draw on.

We have to accept that we cannot know the future. Perhaps the best approach is not to start at the top, worrying about the overall result, but to build up a picture from the component dynamics. Here, both history and the polls did have something constructive to offer. The polls did predict the SNP victory. Scotland has had a more volatile political history than the rest of the mainland — from being a Liberal stronghold in Victorian times, to having a Conservative majority in the s, to being a Labour heartland in the later 20 th century and now with the SNP leaving only one seat each for Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats and all those with majorities of under 3, This is not a promising outlook for the Labour Party.

At the following election in the SDP only won only one new seat. The Liberal Democrat collapse was more extreme even than the result, when the Liberals went down from MPs to just 40 at the end of the first Labour government. Liberal leader Asquith had stood aside and allowed Labour to form their first administration. Labour proved to be safe, competent and unadventurous in office and the Liberal Party looked redundant. The lesson in seemed to be to take power whenever possible.

The lesson from seemed to be the opposite. The consequences of prediction errors can be serious and the examples manifold. The polls gave a misleading picture of support for Scottish independence in , which resulted in panic offers of more devolution.

Here the polls suggest one thing and history another. The commentators predicted a hung parlia ment; the only question, it seemed, was whether Labour or the Tories would be the largest party.

Even the exit polls suggested a hung parliament. The result, when it came on 9 April, was one that nobody, not even the Tories, had expected. The Government had The Tories had lost only a fraction of the vote they recorded in Labour, admittedly, was well up on its vote; but its share was still lower than it recorded in 12 consecutive elections between and So did Labour blow its golden chance? And, if so, how? The British Election Study, part of a series that has been carried out for every election since , provides the most authoritative answer we are ever likely to get.

It is based on interviews with some 3, electors who were interviewed just after the election, and with another 1, who were first contacted in and then interviewed again both during and after the campaign. The analyses in our study were carried out by 25 leading political scientists many of whom are carrying out separate research into voting behaviour.

The press. We found no support for this theory. Among readers of pro-Tory tabloids, support for the Conservatives fell by three points during the election campaign, and it also fell by one point among readers of pro-Tory broadsheets. Just as perversely, support for the Tories rose slightly among readers of the pro-Labour Daily Mirror.

It also rose among people who did not read any newspaper. This may look like good news for Labour. But there is a sting in the tail. Since , much of the traditional Tory press has turned its fire on John Major's government.

Some Labour supporters have hailed this as a decisive change. If the press failed to help the Tories in , however, it must be equally unlikely to do much for Labour in or Kinnock and Major. Many commentators suggested that the voters took a personal dislike to Mr Kinnock, but warmed to Mr Major.

As the Sun put it, 'voters just did not believe Mr Kinnock was fit to run Britain'. Or, in the Daily Express's words, 'it was John Major the voters knew they could trust'. Throughout the election campaign, Mr Major's personal standing remained much higher than Mr Kinnock's. And the data from our interviews suggests that the Labour leader's standing deteriorated slightly between and Voters saw Mr Kinnock as more 'extreme' than Mr Major, less inclined to 'look after all classes' and less 'capable of being a strong leader'.

But do party leaders make a difference to people's votes? The findings showed that they do, but only a little. Some 54 per cent of 'Tory identifiers' - people who normally think of themselves as Tories regardless of how they vote in any election - rated Mr Major highest of the three party leaders, whereas only 36 per cent of 'Labour identifiers' similarly rated Mr Kinnock.

But the effects were not enough to make a decisive difference to the election result. Mr Major's appeal as leader, compared with Mr Kinnock's, was probably worth no more than one percentage point to the Tory share of the vote.

Fear of a Labour victory. The argument here is that people who intended to vote Liberal Democrat switched to the Tories at the last minute because they feared letting Labour in. But the surveys found no evidence of any net movement from Liberal Democrats to the Tories during the campaign. During the final week, only 5 per cent of intending Liberal Democrats thought that Labour would have enough MPs to form a government on its own.

And many of these would have preferred a Labour to a Tory government anyway. An alternative explanation is that Liberal Democrats intending to cast 'tactical' votes for Labour in constituencies where their own party had no chance may have taken fright.

Although there is some support for this theory, the effects are too small to have made any material difference. Labour taxes.

Labour's proposals for taxation and national insurance contributions - outlined in John Smith's 'alternative Budget' - were relentlessly attacked by the Conservatives. Faced with the prospect of a cut in their disposable income, the argument runs, voters had second thoughts about the wisdom of letting Labour in. But our surveys find little evidence to back this argument.