The Professor Will See You Now: Must Labour Lose?
3 min read
In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: must Labour lose?
Shortly after Labour lost three consecutive elections in the 1950s came the publication of Must Labour Lose? The book’s authors, Richard Rose and Mark Abrams, were sensible enough to include the question mark in the title, but that didn’t mask the fact that their book was essentially all about Labour’s electoral woes. It detailed multiple challenges the party faced as British society changed and working-class ties with the party diminished. Yet it was the Conservatives who went on to lose four of the following five general elections.
Decades later, after Labour suffered its fourth consecutive general election defeat in 1992, there was a series of articles and books arguing that Britain had become a de facto one-party state with perpetual Conservative rule.
Within months came exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, an event from which John Major’s Conservative government never recovered. The next election inaugurated Labour’s most electorally dominant period since its formation.
More recently, it was the Conservative Party which was said to be doomed. You may have read books with titles like The Strange Death of Tory England (published without even the saving grace of a question mark), which came out in early 2005, just before the Conservatives crashed to their third consecutive defeat. When David Cameron became party leader, the Conservatives held fewer than 200 seats; five years later he was in No 10.
Perhaps you remember the discussion from a decade or so ago about how it was now next to impossible for British political parties to win majorities any more, about how minority governments had become the new normal and we were all had to get used to coalitions. Only for 2015, 2019 and 2024 all to produce majority governments, the last a landslide of Blairite proportions. Or maybe you can’t remember any of that, but your memory is just about good enough to recall much of the discussion following the 2019 election, a mere five years ago. Labour was finished. They’d lose Scotland for good. Brexit had created an irreversible split between Labour and many of its northern constituencies. And yet here we are.
Lest anyone think I’m being uncharitable to any of my colleagues and their work, I am happy to admit that the only reason I have not included any of my own erroneous predictions is because there would just be too many of them to list. “Prediction is very difficult,” said the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, “especially about the future.”
We are in an era where Labour can lose Sedgefield in 2019 and the Conservatives Witney, Maidenhead, Uxbridge and South Ruislip, and South West Norfolk in 2024.
The last parliament saw the largest swing in the opinion polls during the course of a single parliament since polling began in Britain.
In Scotland in just 14 years, the SNP have gone from six MPs in 2010 to almost total dominance and then back down to nine MPs.
At one point, in the darkest days of the 2017 election, the head of the Liberal Democrat campaign found himself thinking that he might well be the last person ever to hold that role. Seven years on, Ed Davey finds himself with the largest number of Lib Dem MPs ever and the largest for any of their predecessor parties for a century.
This is not to say we shouldn’t read detailed analysis of the factors driving people’s votes. Even 60 years on, Must Labour Lose? remains a fascinating read, albeit now very much of its time. But they are often excellent at telling you what happened and much less good at predicting what’s coming.
Further reading: M Abrams and R Rose, Must Labour Lose? (1960)
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