Following the issue raised in yesterday’s article, Getting the governments we vote for?, For Argyll has been doing some analysis on the Scottish General Election voting patterns over the Thatcher and Blair years.
After the ‘Winter of Discontent’ over 1978-79, under Labour PM, Jim Callaghan – with serial Trades Union strikes, rampant inflation, austerity measures and the IMF coming down hard on the UK, – the General Election of 1979 showed a 2% rise in the overall turnout – to 76.84% [those were the days], indicating that more people were interested in getting to grips with the mess we were in.
The Thatcher hammer
In that election – which was the first of the three won by the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher, both the Labour and Conservative party votes in Scotland went up – by substantially more than the rise in turnout. The Labour vote here went up from the October 1974 General Election [there were two in that single year] by over 5.3% to 41.6%. The Conservative vote here went up more, by 6.7% to 31.4%.
After the Thatcher first term, in the General Election of 1983, the Scottish turnout had fallen by 4.1%; with the Labour vote down by 6.5% to 35.1%, more than the percentage fall in turnout; and with the Conservative fall at 3% to 28.4%, less than the turnout downturn. This suggests that even Labour voters were, at that stage, more accepting of the benefits of the improvement in the UK’s financial stability with reducing inflation.
This election saw the closest gap in Scotland between the Labour and Conservative votes – 6.7%: 35.1% to 28.4%.
By the election in 1987, which gave Thatcher her third term, the growing megalomania to which all successful politicians are prone, was obvious and negative. Turnout in Scotland was up again by 2.8%, to 75.5%. The Labour vote was up by well over that rise on turnout – by 7.3% to 42.4%; the Conservative vote fell by 4.4%, against the rise in turnout, to 24.09%.
Then over 1989-1990 came the Thatcher trialing of the controversial Poll Tax in Scotland, introduced here on 1st April 1989, attended by solid resistance [a million Scots had refused to pay it by the end of 1990] and violent protest in Edinburgh and, markedly in Glasgow.
The 1992 General Election [John Major's 'validation' election as PM] saw Scotland’s turnout up again by 0.4% to 75.5%; but with a fall in the Labour vote and a rise in the Conservative one. The Labour vote fell by 3.2% to 39%, against the 0.4% increase in turnout. The Conservative vote rose by 1.6% to 25.6%, with the 0.4% increase in turnout.
With the wretchedly directionless Major administration losing confidence fast, accelerated by public frustration at its refusal to intervene in the Bosnian War following the break up of Yugoslavia.
This was the conflict – where the dreadful term, ‘ethnic cleansing’ made its first appearance, offered as a palliative, would you believe, by the Serbs, to redefine what was the genocide they were conducting against Bosnian Muslims and Croats. It was a phrase parrotted without comment by a UK media shockingly devoid of awareness of the genocide of the Jews in the Holocaust, not so long before.
The UK press were carrying photographs of concentration camps where Muslim and Croatian men behind the wires were gaunt and emaciated, sharply reminiscent of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany that this country thought would never be seen again. Yet Major’s government did nothing, against rising public concern and anger; and the term. ‘ethnic cleansing’ unbelievably gained traction amongst the ignorant.
The Blair betrayals
Major’s second General Election- in May 1997, saw the arrival on the scene of Tony Blair and New Labour – against a marked fall in turnout of 4.3% to 71.3%. This was the beginning of the voter apathy driven by the ironclad Thatcherite resistance even to well informed contrary views.
In that election, in Scotland, the Labour vote rose 1.3% above the rise in turnout, by 5.6% to 45.6%. The Conservative vote fell against that 4.3% rise in turnout by 8.1% to 17.5%, the start of a bottoming out for the party in Scotland with future General Election performances returning between 15.6% and 16.7% [2010].
The 1st May 1997 was, for the country as a whole, the seeming beginning of a the Brave New World. This was immediately underlined by the one positive Blair contribution to civic decency – persuading President Clinton to have the USA join with the UK in intervention in the Kosovan War, the continuation of the murderous and genocidal morass of the Bosnian War. The UK could stand tall again. But then, only six months into his first administration came the successful ‘bung’ to New Labour of £1 million from F1 supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, which saw F1 exempt from the ban on tobacco advertising, as he had wished.
From then on the serial corruptions exposed in the inner echelons of the Blair administrations, leading to the indefensible intervention in Iraq, saw the end of any notions of Brave New Worlds in politics – and a documented increasing disengagement from electoral participation by the general public.
The standout figure in this entire analysis is the turnout in the second Blair General Election, in 2001. In Scotland, it fell by 13.1% to 58.2%. This pronounced retirement from participation in elections was the clear consequence of the continuum of the Thatcher and Blair administrations – both essentially presidential [or dictatorial] in operation, neither given to listening to the contrary view, however loudly expressed. A position disastrously reinforced by the later illegal incursion into Iraq in 2003.
In that shape-changer of an election in 2001, with turnout on a cliff drop to 58.2%, the Labour vote in Scotland held up well, falling – but only by 2.3% against that whopping fall in turnout. The Conservative vote fell to its lowest ever point, by 1.9% to 15.6%.
Thatcher and Blair, these two right wing political monoliths, taught the people that opposition and protest of any kind was pointless. It was – at best – ignored – and later actively punished under the introduction of new laws to stifle it – as with the notorious Blair/Blunkett Police and Serious Orgaanised Crime Act of 2005. This saw people wearing anti-Blair T-shirts at a Labour Conference on the south coast arrested and carted off for questioning by local police. It also saw Maya Evans convicted for simply reading aloud within 1km of Westminster the names of British soldiers killed in the conflict in Iraq.
The popular response to the impermeability to democracy of Thatcher and Blair was the pragmatic one. OK. Why bother?
The third Blair General Election, in 2005, saw the turnout in Scotland rise modestly – in a clear if muted protest vote – by 2.4% to 60.6%. The ‘protest vote’ contribution to that brief rise is evident from the 3.8% fall in the Labour vote – to 39.5%, against that 2.4% rise in turnout, which steepens the fall. The Conservative vote recovered marginally by 0.2%, which against the 2.4% rise in turnout is a fall in real terms. The Liberal Democrats were the winner here, on the back of Charles Kennedy’s principled and impassioned opposition to the Iraq War – their vote rising by 6.3%, with the 2.4% rise in turnout.
The Brown blink
And in 2010, the Gordon Brown ‘[in]validation’ election – with another modest rise in turnout by 3.2% to 63.8% – and hope for better in Scotland with the end of Blair, the Labour vote here rose by 2.5%, below the rise in turnout. The Conservative vote recovered marginally by 0.9% to 16.7%; and the Lib Dems fell back by 3.7% to 18.9%.
A major driver in this election was the collapse of the financial institutions in 2008, a direct consequence of Gordon Brown’s ‘regulation with a light touch’. That this then helped to do for Brown may be seen as appropriate – but the irony here is that ‘regulation with a light touch’ is more likely to have been dictated by Blair and promulgated through Brown. A ‘light touch’ of any kind is not characteristic of Brown – and particularly in matters regulatory where micro-management would be be more his style.
And the Scotland issue?
Even in Labour’s best performance in General Elections in Scotland over the period from 1974 to today, it did not manage to get a majority of the turnout, never mind of the electorate. It came closest in its result in the 1997 Blair bonanza of hopes to be dashed – with 45.6% of the Scottish turnout, already down by 4.2% to 71.3%.
No government can be said to represent the government ‘voted for by Scotland‘ unless it can, at the very least, take over 50% of the turnout. The brutal fact is that until that magic 50% is superceded, more people have not voted to see a particular party in power.