The party was perfectly prepared. It spent eight years in self-examination. It had abandoned nuclear disarmament, forgotten everything it ever said about public ownership of the means of production and exchange, embraced the European Community with the drooling zeal of the convert. Its leader, Neil Kinnock, had purged the poison from within: the Trotskyite cells, the unrepresentative labor-union bossism, the blind sentimentality. Labor’s political machine was as professional as any in Europe.
The objective circumstances, moreover, could not have been more favorable. Britain was in the middle of a recession more than a year long. The sheer length of the Tory incumbency, coupled with the manifest failure of its last three years, made Labor’s slogan, “It’s time for a change,” a winning truism. And the people evidently agreed. Or at any rate the opinion polls did. Not a single poll in the last month showed the Tories winning.
If Labor cannot win with everything going for it, the conclusion must be that it never can. John Major did not fight an imposing campaign. He seemed caught in an unresolved identity crisis. Was he defending the legacy of his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, or was he breaking with Thatcherism? As the campaign progressed, ministers looked more and more wan, their efforts uncoordinated, their message blurred. By all the rules of polities, this, too, should have played into Labor’s hands. But the people were thinking differently, and weren’t telling the pollsters or the politicians. When they spoke, it was for continuity, not change, for the quiet man, not the fiery one.
Why did this happen? A charitable interpretation is that Labor’s evolution is not complete. Its history still dogs it, and old memories are still strong of its failures in government in the 1970s, when it presided over the near collapse of the economy and the near breakdown of civil society. Younger voters, it is argued, will have forgotten this by 1997. Moreover, Kinnock will have gone and the party will be led, perhaps, by a man who actually believes in capitalism, instead of someone whose swift conversion made him vulnerable to charges of insincerity, even of lying.
But this, I think, is optimistic-a figment of the incorrigible sentimentality which says that Labor can never die. It ignores the fact that, through the good times and bad of the last 20 years, Labor has always secured less than 40 percent of the popular vote, sometimes much less. This time it got 35 percent. It is plainly in long-term decline. The most conspicuous remnant of its socialism, an intensely egalitarian income-tax package, was a self-inflicted disaster. Its survival can lie only in forging a new relationship with its potential vote, and with the partners it has for so long dismissively spurned, the Liberal Democrats.
The Liberal Democrats are not a socialist party. Their economic stance is in some ways more market oriented even than the Tories’. But they are a party of the left, with a radical agenda of social, environmental and constitutional reform. A marriage with Labor has been often debated, as often reviled, and would be formidably hard to fashion. But the polities of the left in the coming years will be dominated by talk of it. Indeed, the talk began even before the election, among prescient Labor souls who understood that the winner-take-all voting system would have to be changed. A Lib-Lab compact on the basis of proportional representation will be at the heart of any realistic project to end the Tory ascendancy.
But there is a catch here. The system cannot be reformed until the Lib-Labs get to power. And the Tories, whom the system will have retained in power for 35 years between 1950 and 2000, have not the smallest interest in changing it. There is a further snag, which could be glimpsed the day after Major’s return to power, in the greetings that flooded in from his fellow leaders around the world but especially in Europe. Kohl of Germany, Mitterrand of France, Andreotti of Italy: all have recently experienced the humiliating impotence that a proportional-representation system of voting–which encourages the flowering of small, sometimes racist, parties–can impose on an established government. They must look upon Major, with his small but secure parliamentary majority and his disciplined party, with utmost envy.
In this respect, if in regrettably few others, Britain is set to be the Japan of the Western world. It is growing a political system in which only one party appears capable of securing power. The Tories have several decades to go before they match the one-party tenure in Tokyo. But they made this victory by emulating the Japanese factional style, only more definitively. It would never have happened but for the ousting of Margaret Thatcher in November 1990. On the day she went, the party renewed itself: a gesture of stunning panache, which set at nothing the laborious regeneration of its only serious rival.
