What I Am Reading: "The British General Election of 2001" by David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh

This book was a nice little surprise to come across in my favorite bookstore in Maine (Douglas N. Harding Books in Wells). It is an academic study of the 2001 British election, part of a series that a Professor and his partners and successors have done subsequent to every post-war British general election. This seems like an invaluable resource to anyone interested in these elections, especially the less famous ones. There isn't exactly a surfeit of books on the subject on this side of the Atlantic.

Unfortunately, I had the bad luck to stumble across the book on the single most boring of the post-war general elections. Don't get me wrong - the book is great poli sci. It has data and analysis of everything you could possibly want, from election results to media coverage to issue polling. I would definitely pursue the series further. The problem was that it was media coverage and exit polling of the 2001 election.

This was Tony Blair's first re-election as Prime Minister, after the Labour Party's landslide win in 1997 put them in power for the first time in 18 years. Blair brought an image and policy makeover to the party in the form of "New Labour," moving away from the traditional working-class, social democratic policies (and officeholders) that had brought three predictable defeats at the hands of Margaret Thatcher and one unpredictable one at the hands of John Major. This corresponds to how Bill Clinton moderated and middle-classified the Democratic Party in the same era, both reacting to a shift right in public sentiment.

In Labour's first term, they mostly kept to a series of slow reforms and improvements to the education system and to public services, and a steady growth of the economy. Somewhat more dramatic reforms came in the form of the Good Friday Agreement that stabilized Northern Ireland, and the devolution of some power to regional assemblies in Scotland and Wales. This government reform actually added to Labour's difficulty in meeting its promises on more health funding and smaller class sizes, as these functions were now controlled by the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. The party had the usual centrist vs. left-wing tension that comes in any left-of-center party, but mostly Blair kept a tight grip on things (too tight, some said). The party enjoyed polling advantages during its entire term in government, with the only disruptions coming as a result of a gasoline protest in rural areas.

The Conservative Party, meanwhile, had placed young William Hague in power. After running the country from 1979 to 1997, the party had been decisively rejected, and was now looking to move on to its next phase after Thatcherism. Unfortunately for Hague, he received far less public and press sympathy than Blair had in his intra-party reform efforts four years earlier. Hague did inaugurate the system of selecting the Conservative leader, with a winnowing by MPs for a final presentation of two candidates for party members to vote on, that survives to this day.

The party had little experience in opposition, with only a dozen or so MPs who had been in Parliament during the party's previous time in opposition. The party went through several different strategies as it sat through parliament, with focus on a moderate, cuddly image in its first years before ultimately deciding to pursue the "clear, blue water" to the right of the center and focusing on turning out its core voters with a conservative message in the latter years leading up to the election. They chose to ignore the economy and social services, subjects favoring the incumbent Labour government, in favor of a campaign on crime, taxes, and now-ominous Euroskepticism. There was a lot of fuss about a potential referendum on adopting the Euro that ultimately never came to pass. Unfortunately for the Tories, these issues did far less to capture the public imagination; and even those voters who agreed with the Conservative platform or were dismayed by Labour's slow record on service improvement did not trust the Tories to do any better on these issues. Hague was seen as callow and opportunistic, compared to Blair's steady hand. The Conservatives faced another headwind in the fact that, at the time, the electoral map was biased in favor of Labour; the Tories would have needed roughly a 7% win in popular vote in order to capture a majority of seats (because many of Labour's safe seats in industrial heartlands had a smaller population than the average Conservative safe seat).

The campaign itself was fairly uninteresting. Labour's campaign was heavily stage-managed, to the point that voters and the media became cynical about "spin" and the lack of authenticity that I myself still to this day associate with '90s politics. I was surprised to learn that they received heavy newspaper support or at least non-opposition, even in the more odious tabloids. Various figures of the political future appear in cameos, such as Ed Milliband or Boris Johnson; and the Conservatives of yesteryear also involve themselves; I recognized Michael Heseltine or Michael Portillo from old Wiki trawling. The main item of interest, the campaign's "only unscripted event," was when Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott punched out a protester who threw an egg at him. Agricultural issues had recently been at the forefront of public political consciousness, with the election's expected date actually delayed by the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in livestock. Prescott's puglism posted positive reviews, and didn't cause any dent in Labour's messaging strategy.

Another way that the campaign resembled the modern campaigns rather than the historic campaigns of yesteryear was in the use of computers and cell phones for voter contact, as well as websites where voters, candidates, and volunteers could acquire necessary information. These did not appear for the first time, but did become more widespread in their use. I was reminded of the days when downloading a screensaver was considered a fun goodie - I had a sick Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic screensaver on the family computer for many years. Interestingly, sending email spam was avoided, as it was considered an unseemly intrusion at the time, as was phonebanking to cell phones. Labour did however send out the first campaign text message, timed to hit prior to last call in the pub the weekend before the election:

"CLDNT GVE A XXXX 4 LST ORDRS? VTE LBR ON THRSDY 4 XTRA TIME" (sic) (p.231)

In the end, the election was another Labour landslide, with a net loss of only six seats. Only one of these seats was a gain by Conservatives, as the Liberal Democrats saw an improvement in their fortunes under their new leader, Charles Kennedy. Labour and the Lib Dems voted tactically to defeat the Conservatives. Labour popular vote performance fell by about 2%, actually a fairly large drop; and turnout cratered, though less so in marginal constituencies. The book has all that good stuff; I hope to read the version covering an actually interesting election someday.