An Agenda for Britain

By Frank Field

Originally published in 1993, An Agenda for Britain offers a radical vision for the future of Britain and the Labour Party.

Unemployment, Frank Field argues, must be the major issue on the political agenda; welfare should be taken ‘out of the ghetto’ and made part of the debate about Britain’s economic and industrial future; and employees should have much greater control over their own pension capital. The adoption of this reforming agenda is, he believes, essential if the Labour Party is to be elected to govern the country again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Jun 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9780008192044

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Reinventing the Traditional Party of Opposition

In The Importance of Being Earnest what Lady Bracknell said of Ernest’s loss of both his parents could also be said about the losing of elections. If the loss of one election is unfortunate, and two careless, then three is reckless, four criminal, and to lose five in succession might well prove fatal. This chapter looks at the reasons for Labour’s losing streak. It considers whether the Party is now so enfeebled that it will be unable to win again, unless it offers an electoral reform which will ensure that it is unlikely ever to form a one-party government again. The promise of electoral reform must be accompanied by the most fundamental changes in the Party’s constitution if Labour is to continue to be a serious political force.

Rationalizing defeat

Whatever the result of the 1992 election, records were bound to be broken. For Labour to have won would have required a larger swing than had ever occurred in any previous election. For the Tories to win meant a record of four election victories in a row, a feat never achieved by a modern political party. Both the major parties, therefore, went into the record books – Labour by doing worse than any other party had done previously by losing four consecutive elections; the Conservatives simply by doing the opposite.

Why did Labour lose so easily and by such a wide margin? The twenty-one-seat Tory majority over all other parties disguises the extent of Labour’s defeat. The Tory lead over Labour in the popular vote was a staggering 7.5 percentage points. Labour cannot this time make its usual cry of ‘we was robbed’ by the electoral system. The unfairness of the voting system is not working against Labour. Had Labour cornered merely half a percentage point more of the popular vote the Tories, still with a 7 percentage point lead, would have been denied an overall majority in the House of Commons. Tactical voting played its part in the final result. Despite the commonly held view that only the Liberal Democrats gain from tactical voting, Labour was a main beneficiary, almost halving Mr Major’s overall majority as a consequence.

What explanations have been put forward to account for Labour’s dismal record? Here I group the main arguments under four headings, starting first with the considered views of psephologists.

Psephologists

Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice explain Labour’s electoral failure not so much in terms of people switching sides, although that was what in part happened, as of the shrinking of the working-class base from which Labour has always drawn its main support. The size of the working-class population has fallen dramatically over the past two decades – by a sixth since 1971 – but even so this argument by itself is inadequate.

While the Heath thesis goes some way to explaining the long-term decline of Labour’s vote, it has nothing to say on the reasons why people from traditional Labour-voting families came to believe that Labour no longer adequately represented their aspirations. These families may not define themselves as working class any more, but their economic circumstances are not so different from those of other families who, also experiencing significant changes in their living standards, continue to vote Labour.

Closely allied to the Heath thesis is one centered on class conflict, the great exponents of which are psephologists David Butler and Donald Stokes. Their thesis is that, not surprisingly, a class-based appeal does well in times of clear class antagonism and vice versa.

It is hard not to recognize what Butler and Stokes write from conversations had on people’s doorsteps, where a fundamental feeling of ‘them and us’ helps to determine the votes of some households. It works both ways, of course, with Tory voters having a mirror image of the ‘them and us’ spectrum. But does the thesis adequately explain Labour’s long-term decline or does it point to other processes at work? The Butler/Stokes data highlight a decline in class antagonism and so one would expect, if they are right, to see Labour’s vote similarly fall. Yet in the late 1960s when, according to the authors, class antagonism peaked leading one to expect Labour to do particularly well, the Party was unexpectedly defeated by Edward Heath. Class antagonism appears to have been replaced by a more widely diffused political antagonism to the Labour Party by no less than 65 per cent of