After Leyton, What? (1965)

From the March 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Leyton by-election has passed into political history, and for a long time to come will be one of the psephologists’ favourite test-tubes.

It was also the psephologists’ nightmare, disproving all their predictions and setting the opinion polls to searching for what went wrong. This is all strongly reminiscent of the Truman victory in the United States in 1948. None of the pollsters cared to recall, after Leyton, that in 1948 they said they had found a hidden defect in their systems, that they had eliminated it and that such mistakes would not happen again.

In fact, there were signs before the votes were cast that things were not going too well for Mr. Gordon Walker. The Wilson government had not produced the promised rabbits out of the expected hats. The pensioners were annoyed about having to wait for their rise, the mortgagees were furious that their rise—in the interest rates—came upon them so quickly. On 20th. January, The Guardian’s reporter noticed “… a remarkably consistent switch away from Labour. It would not be sufficient to upset the Foreign Secretary’s anticipated election . . . but (it) would reduce his majority considerably.”

As it turned out, that was an understatement. Leyton confirmed a trend which has been developing for some time now —the trend towards an electoral mood more volatile than that which, for years after the war, stolidly returned “no change” verdicts in by-election after by-election. Orpington Man, now old and well established, has been followed by the perhaps more menacing figure of Leyton Man.

Along with the psephologists, the Labour Party are also looking for what went wrong. In a letter to The Observer, Lord Sorensen made it clear that he thought the defeat was caused by what he called “unworthy abstentions.” Having been kicked upstairs so that Mr. Gordon Walker could lose his seat, Lord Sorensen obviously feels the defeat especially strongly. But during the election, the Labour Party were content to accept what they presumed would be a favourable result: “I will consider the result a verdict on the Government and on the Opposition’s performance to date.” (Mr. Gordon Walker, at Leyton, 14th. January.) Well, the verdict is plain; even the verdict of those who voted by staying away from the polling booths. The Labour government has not been able to inspire its supporters to turn out to vote for it, which says very little for their talk, during the general election, of action and progress and urgency.

Lord Sorensen did not confine his strictures to abstainers: “. . . the deliberate denigration of Gordon Walker . . . demonstrates how far we have to go to ensure that electors vote on principles and policies rather than being swayed by extraneous secondary matters.”

Two things are apparent from this statement. The first is that Lord Sorensen is complaining about votes which lost his party a seat; if the election had gone the other way, he would have been full of praise for the voters’ sanity and principles. The second point, which follows from the first, is that what Lord Sorensen means by “voting on principles” is, in fact, voting blindly for the Labour Party, whatever their record, whatever hardships they impose upon the working class and however many promises they break.

It will be interesting to ask, now, what the Labour Party does to realise Sorensen’s dream of people voting on principles and policies. The first step in this should be, of course, for the Labour Party themselves to have some principles for the electors to vote on. But a look at the programmes which they have offered shows that principles are the last things the Labour Party has, or indeed wants.

What has happened, for example, to the “principle” of the nationalisation of land? To the “principle” of abolition of the House of Lords? (Lord Sorensen himself should be able to answer that one.) What has happened to the “principles” put forward by the Labour Party at the more recent elections —nationalisation of “sections of the chemical and machine tools industries” (1955) and the renationalisation of road haulage (1959)?

There was no mention of either of these in Labour’s 1964 programme, which means that any elector who was anxious to vote for them, innocently thinking them to be part of Labour’s principles, was disappointed.

Even more to the point, what has happened to the Labour Party’s opposition to the Commonwealth Immigration Act? When the Conservative government introduced the measure, Labour fought bitterly against it, and perhaps convinced some voters that they did so on grounds of principle. But since then their “principles” have, apparently, changed; the tears of defeat were hardly dry on Gordon Walker’s face when Labour’s Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice was telling the House of Commons that, far from abolishing the restrictions on immigrants, the government intends to ” … make stricter use of the existing powers of control . . .” This must have been very confusing to anyone at Leyton who wanted to vote, as Lord Sorensen advises, on the principle of the thing.

This confusion is cleared up only by realising that the Labour Party has no principle other than their basic support of capitalism. Within that, they will support any policy, temporary or otherwise, which seems expedient. To get into power, they will promise all sorts of things—Gaitskell’s tax cuts in 1959, George Brown’s three per cent mortgage last October—which they think will attract votes. They do not particularly care who joins their ranks, recruiting freely anyone who will pay their dues. (Some prominent men they have actually invited to join.) Labour’s preoccupation with collecting votes means that they do not bother about the intention and knowledge behind the votes. They anxiously solicit the support of people who are politically ignorant. The very last thing they intend to do is to encourage the electors to vote on principles, because that would be the death of them and of the parties like them.

This is not to say that the Labour Party does not offer a substitute for principles. Their leaders are constantly making what seem to be brave statements of conviction and intent, which probably impress people who do not care to look behind the empty phrase. Wilson, for example, told the T.U.C. last September that this is “… a time for choice, for action, for decision, for exciting change …” Gordon Walker told the voters at Leyton that he stood for “… the abolition of all weapons, both nuclear and conventional, except those needed for internal security and international peacekeeping,” which is the same as saying, that he stands for the abolition of all weapons except those that he wants to keep. It is this sort of mishmash of nonsense that the Labour Party offer as their principles, and which Lord Sorensen wants us to vote on.

The inevitable result of this is that the vote which elects a Labour MP is unstable. It is not a vote for any political principle, let alone a vote for Socialism, with all that implies. Sometimes it is a vote for a set of capitalist reforms like the National Health Service or an alteration in the Pensions Scheme. More often, it is a vote for a vague and ill-informed idea of what the Labour Party stands for—a vague idea that they stand for the interests of people who live on council estates, for closer relations with Russia and so on.

Perhaps it was this which caused Leyton to pass its scathing verdict on the Labour government before it had even had time to bring in the reforms which it had promised—an apt comment on the instability of a vote which is based on a lack of political consciousness. Perhaps it also brought about the defeat of Gordon Walker at Smethwick; the voters there apparently wanted immigration control yet they rejected a man who, as he himself pointed out, stood for just that.

But an unstable vote which switches from Labour to Tory in one election will as quickly change back to Labour again. It is reasonable to assume that anything which the Labour Party may have lost on the swings of electoral instability they have gained on the roundabouts. There are probably plenty of voters who support the Labour Party because they are convinced that they stand for higher wages, or that they would pursue a different policy from the Tories in disputes like those in Malaysia and Arabia. Now if the Labour Party was as interested in political principles as Lord Sorensen would have us believe, they would discourage such votes by pointing out, firmly and clearly, that on these issues their policy is as imperialist as that of the Tories. But this, of course, is something they never do.

No capitalist party can try to destroy the mutually supporting circle of ignorance and futility which keeps one or other of them in power. Any examination of the policies of these parties, in terms of principles and effectiveness, would compel the admission that practically every one of them was useless and that many of them were inspired by vote-catching expediency. It would compel the admission that, after all the speeches and the programmes and the promises, the problems which afflicted the working class when the Labour Party was born are still, in one way or another, troubling them today.

The Labour Party would have to admit something else besides. After nearly sixty years of their propaganda, after the position of great power which they have held and still hold, there are still enough workers who harbour racial prejudices to hound a Labour Minister from one Parliamentary seat to another. Racial theories cannot be separated from the rest of the false political ideas which the working class hold, and which the Labour Party have done nothing to dispel. If it is true that racism is among the more primitive and vicious of working class delusions, that is a bitter comment upon the confusion and ignorance which the Labour Party has helped to spread.

They can have no complaint if this confusion, which may help them at one time, harms them at another. From some aspects, elections are depressing affairs, because it is never very inspiring to witness the working class opting for another dose of capitalist suppression. But even more depressing the 1964 election saw the emergence of race as an issue, strongly in some constituencies, and underlying the campaign as a whole.

Douglas-Home has now indicated that the Conservatives intend to bring immigration more and more into the forefront of political controversy. It is not comforting to reflect upon the history of similar situations, and upon the possible outcome of this one. The alarming thing about racial theories is that, unlike most other working class delusions, they are so often asserted in the most extreme and relentless violence. Leyton at the moment is a psephologist’s test tube, but who dare say that one day it will not be remembered as the start of the experiment which blew up the laboratory?

Ivan

Polls apart? (2022)

Book Review from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Polling Unpacked. By Mark Pack. Reaktion Books. 2022.

This is written by the founder of PollBase and traces the history of opinion polls from various ‘straw polls’ in the nineteenth century that were conducted to test public opinion, to the development of what we now know as modern opinion polling. This was pioneered by the US Literary Digest in the early twentieth century, before the game-changing entrance of George Gallup into the sphere, who recognized that the total number of people polled was far less important than how representative these people were.

Opinion polls – as developed over recent decades – have a somewhat mixed reputation, though tend to be more accurate than people often think, at least when the margin for error (typically +/- 3 percent) is taken into account. And of course, sometimes voting systems – especially First Past The Post (FPTP) – throw up vagaries of their own. Trump won the US presidency in 2016 even though he lost the popular vote by a very similar margin to that predicted by the polls, as in 1951 and February 1974 the party with the most votes in the UK did not get the most seats and form the government, which means that even when voting intention polls are broadly right they can sometimes appear ‘wrong’.

But some polling does genuinely go awry, including when Cameron secured a narrow overall Tory majority in 2015 when the polls had predicted a dead heat with Labour and then with the underestimation of the Labour vote in 2017. There are a number of reasons for polling errors and they can be complex, including the wording of key questions, which can provide startlingly differing results based on the smallest nuances (polling on single issues rather than overall voting intention is notoriously problematic for this reason alone). Arguably the most common voting intention issue, however, is the difficulty of getting accurate, weighted national samples when the demographics of society are changing fast. There are also significant allied issues like some types of voters becoming more inclined to turn out (or not) than others, some being disproportionately reluctant to give their real voting intention to pollsters saying ‘don’t know’ or ‘won’t say’ instead, differential willingness among particular party supporters to even participate in polls in the first place, and people being sampled in polls who are not actually on the electoral register for various reasons. Significant polling errors are usually caused not by one factor like this, but by more than one of them working in concert to skew the result.

A new type of polling has recently arisen to address some of these issues for FPTP elections called Multi-level Regression with Poststratification (MRP). This aims to generate constituency-by-constituency predictions from a national poll sample that normally wouldn’t be considered large enough for these purposes. It is based on demographic information in particular seats being used as the basis for projecting a result informed by what the national sample has been indicating about certain types of voters and their probability of voting in particular ways (eg, white men over 65, having say, a 55 percent probability of voting Conservative). Its track record so far – both in 2017 and 2019 in the UK – has been pretty good, including YouGov’s detailed MRP prediction of parts of the Red Wall going Blue, but it is early days.

Pack is clearly an expert and does a good job at unpacking all this (pun intended). How useful polls are is another issue of course, and Pack looks at this too. Echo chambers can have a particular but limited use and many argue that polling is given far too much prominence. There can also be a commercial aspect and a distorting element to polling, especially in the United States where skewed ‘paid for’ polling by political parties and groups is more common. In some countries, polling is banned completely during election campaigns lest it be deemed to influence the result.

Will opinion polling have a use of sorts in socialism? Possibly, though direct democracy and decision-making is likely to feature much more heavily and so the need for polls may well lessen. And hopefully, to paraphrase the late Tony Benn, we will be busy creating signposts rather than following proverbial weather vanes.

Dave Perrin

The Influence of Television (1961)

Book Review from the May 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Television and the Political Image by Joseph Trenaman and Denis McQuail, Methuen, 30s.

During the last few years, a new word has crept into the English language. Psephology is the name given to the business of putting voters under the microscope and probing their innermost electoral reflexes. Where once people simply voted at election time, now every cross must be checked and analysed.

We might have expected that television would come into this. No self-respecting psephologist can ignore a communication medium which four-fifths of the population have access to. 1955 was the first television election, although at that time sound broadcasting was still dominant. 1959 was different; apart from the enormous increase in the number of T.V. sets, both channels broke with past practice by putting out such programmes as the B.B.C.s “Hustings" and Granada's “Election Marathon".

What were the effects of this? Did, for example, any votes change sides because of the parties' broadcasts on T.V? Did television affect attendance at political meetings, the number of party workers and so on? A Research Unit at Leeds University (working on a Granada grant) tried to find answers to these, and other, questions. They closely studied the campaign on television and at the same time sampled political opinion among the voters in the two Yorkshire constituencies of Pudsey and West Leeds. Television and the Political Image reports their findings.

The authors conclude that television had little effect on the outcome of the 1959 election. Partisan programmes were not as well received as those which hid their propaganda under an informative camouflage. The professional slickness of the Labour Party programmes, which so irked the newspaper reviewers, was not generally resented. Whatever knowledge the viewers had on the issues of the campaign tended to increase as a result of their watching television.

The specific validity of such conclusions may be open to argument. But the overall picture of the voter which emerges from them seems fairly accurate: somebody who is mostly bored with politics and who, when an election stirs him to vote, does so in accordance with his hitherto sleeping prejudices.

Television and the Political Image is not light reading, and it is loaded with statistical tables and graphs which demand close study. Doubtless, we shall see many more such works, for if the power-conscious parties can find out why the working class vote as they do, they are a long way towards winning an election. If Trenaman and McQuail are any guide, Labour's problem in 1959 was to convince everybody that their promises were not rash bribery. The Tories, it seems, must still work hard to persuade us that they really care about the aged and the needy.

This is a dirty game. And the psephologist, busily adding up his figures to discover the reasons for the working class preferring one type of capitalist subjection to another, does not make it any cleaner.

Ivan