Happy Birthday? (1998)

Book Reviews from the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British General Election of 1997 by David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh (MacMillan, 1997) and Labour’s Landslide edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge (Manchester University Press, 1997).

One year on from 1 May last year, the hullabaloo has subsided and something more like boo-hoo has started. These two books, however, chronicle New Labour’s climax, not the messy post-coital depression we have been living with since. They are useful in that the demonstrate the fickleness of the British working class’s love affair with the Labour Party, and amply demonstrate its underlying worries about Labour’s suitability for the marital home.

Both expand on their findings that the main reason the working class decided to embark on an affair with Labour was the regular beatings it had been taking from its previous paramour. Labour was wanted primarily for what it wasn’t, not what it was. Most significantly, less than 31 percent of the electorate voted Labour into power last May, despite its “landslide” victory, this being largely because of the extremely low turnout. This, historically, is a low winning share of the vote and actually lower than that managed by the Conservatives under John Major in 1992.

Butler and Kavanagh’s study—Butler has been producing such analyses of General Elections for decades—is typically rigorous and thorough, well researched and with few mistakes. Possibly its most interesting chapter is the one on the press and how Labour managed to win over the affections of Wapping and Fleet Street (which helped avoid the press's anti-Labour excesses of the previous election). Another feature highlighted was the lack of success of those candidates who played the race card (such as Nicholas Budgen in Wolverhampton) and the relative lack of hostility to ethnic minority candidates generally.

Fascinatingly, some of the most bizarre constituency results last year were produced in fights between ethnic minority candidates themselves, such as in Bradford West and in Bethnal Green and Bow, the latter being where the local Bengali community put its traditional pro-Labour loyalties behind it to produce a six-percent swing to the Conservative Bengali candidate and against Labour’s Oona King, a “mixed-race” Afro-Caribbean Jew.

Where the white population has previously elevated the importance of “race” beyond considerations of class politics (or anything else), it is now the ethnic minority population that seems to be doing it. Though in some ways understandable, it is still no more justified for that. For if the 1997 election demonstrated anything it was that a confused and ideologically rootless working class is one that is most prone to the slick blandishments of handsome young spin doctors and their pet vultures.

Dave Perrin

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