Blair's Bloody Nose

Britain’s General Election And The Power Of The Anti-War Vote

Milan Rai

INTRODUCTION

One week after the British General Election, the dust is settling, and it is clear that the war on Iraq was a major factor in the Labour Party’s humbling loss of seats and votes.

BYERS AND THE WAY OUT

The significance of the war was underlined by an intervention by Stephen Byers, a former Cabinet Minister still seen as deeply loyal to Tony Blair.

In The Times on 11 May, Byers supported Blair’s stand on the war, but wrote,

‘The issue that hung over the election campaign was that of Iraq - not just the conflict itself but also the legality of the action taken and the manner in which inaccurate intelligence was presented to the public. Both these issues then fed into the question of trust.’

His solution? A ‘review of the operation of the royal prerogative’.

At the moment, war is waged in the name of the Queen, and the view of Parliament (or the British people) is irrelevant to her constitutional ‘right’ to order Britain’s armed forces into action.

Byers suggests that Parliament should be given the Attorney General’s legal advice on pending conflicts, should be given access to secret intelligence (via the Intelligence and Security Committee) and should have the final say on whether to authorise military action. Power and information would move from the ruler (in fact the Prime Minister), to Parliament.

Such reforms ‘would be welcomed by many and demonstrate that the Prime Minister has really been listening and learning’, Byers suggested.

Anyone who recalls the long and bitter struggle to secure a Parliamentary debate and vote on the war on Iraq, and the even longer struggle to gain access to the Attorney General’s secret legal advice, will realize how powerful the Iraq issue must be in order to prompt such unpalatable advice from a supporter of the Prime Minister.

There are parallels here between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, as it was in November 1973 that the United States Congress passed the War Powers Act requiring congressional authorisation for US military action.

Such a reform, while welcome, does nothing to diminish the scale of the crime committed in March 2003, or the disastrous effects of the ongoing occupation of Iraq. The anti-war movement will not be bought off with constitutional changes, however sensible. The occupation, and the threat of future wars, are our central concerns.

THE ELECTION AND THE MOVEMENT

For all its diversity, the British anti-war movement had one major common goal in this election. The worst-case scenario for us would have been yet another Labour landslide returning a parliamentary majority for Tony Blair of over 100 seats in the House of Commons.

This would have been seen as a vindication of his leadership in general, and of his decision to invade Iraq in particular. It would have made another Bush war more likely.

Instead, the Prime Minister has been dealt what is widely being described as a ‘bloody nose’ by the electorate, which has left him severely weakened.

Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist who urged anti-war voters to support Labour (with pegs on their noses), observed, ‘Those who wanted to give Tony Blair a bloody nose over Iraq may feel satisfaction at getting the much reduced Labour majority they thought he deserved.’

The Independent remarked as the election results came in: ‘The early results showed that many people who voted Labour in 1997 and 2001 had deserted the party to give Mr Blair a <bloody nose> over the Iraq war, which became the dominant issue in the second half of the election campaign.’

For example, ‘Labour suffered a spectacular defeat in Hornsey and Wood Green, north London, where the war was a big issue, at the hands of the Liberal Democrats, who achieved a huge 14.6 per cent swing.’

‘In a clear sign of an "Iraq effect", Labour performed much worse in the capital than other regions. It lost Enfield Southgate, Putney, Hammersmith, Ilford North and Wimbledon to the Conservatives.’ (Andrew Grice, 6 May)

Robert Shrimsley, a perceptive columnist with the Financial Times, came to much the same conclusion: ‘So the British public finally got its say on the Iraq war. Tony Blair has been badly bloodied but he is nonetheless back in power. He will certainly pause before rushing into George W. Bush’s next little project.’ (7 May, p. 19)

The Government suffered a significant political cost linked to the war. This has helped to constrain Tony Blair in the immediate future, and to deter future governments from launching such wars.

PART I

SEATS, VOTES AND LEGITIMACY

LOSING MY MAJORITY

Tony Blair’s first Governments had massive Parliamentary majorities (see table). In 1997 it had 176 more seats than all the other parties put together (note - one seat is held by the neutral Speaker of the House). In 2005, this has been more than halved to a more normal 67 seats.

(Note: there were boundary changes eliminating 13 seats between 2001 and 2005.)

This means the Government is vulnerable to the 50 or so Labour rebels who have been re-elected. It would only take 33 of them voting with the Opposition to defeat a Government bill.

289 Opposition MPs + 34 Labour rebels = 323 votes against the bill.

356 Labour MPs – 34 Labour rebels = 322 votes in favour.

Tony Blair is going to have to be more of a ‘consensual’ Prime Minister than he has been, negotiating with his own party and with the opposition parties in order to get legislation passed.

Apparently, ‘Labour strategists had hoped to be able to keep the party's majority above 80 - and avoid headlines saying it had been halved.’ (Telegraph, 6 May)

‘Mr Blair’s allies have been admitting privately for several weeks that he would almost certainly have to resign if the Labour majority fell below 60. In the view of many Blairites, 60 to 70 was a grey area which would leave the party leader severely weakened. (Telegraph 6 May)

The Prime Minister is now in ‘the grey area’ – largely because of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

FROM VOTES TO SEATS

It is a peculiarity of the British ‘first past the post’ system of elections that the Labour Party received only 3 per cent more of the vote than the runner-up in the election, the Conservatives (35.2 to 32.3 per cent), but received nearly twice as many seats as them (355 to 197).

The Liberal Democrats, generally perceived as an ‘anti-war’ party, gained 22.1 per cent of the votes across the UK, but received only 62 seats in the House of Commons. This was an increase in the number of Lib Dem seats in Parliament from 52 to 62 (due to boundary changes in Scotland, this increase actually required a net gain of 11 new seats).

2005 Election Results (UK)

Seats per share of vote

Labour: 35.2 per cent of the vote: 356 seats (10 seats for every 1% of the vote)

Conservative: 32.3 per cent : 197 seats (6 seats per percentage point)

Liberal Democrat: 22 per cent : 62 seats (3 seats per percentage point)

How Many Votes Each Party Needed To Get An MP

Labour: 26,900 votes on average per Labour MP.

Conservatives: 44,500 votes on average per Tory MP.

Liberal Democrats: 96,500 votes on average per Lib Dem MP.

The Ratio Of Share Of Power To Share Of Votes

Labour: 55 % of the seats for 36% of the vote 1.5 : 1

Conservatives: 30% of the seats for 33% of the vote 0.9 : 1

Liberal Democrats: 10% of the seats for 22% of the vote 0.5 : 1)

THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE: A HUNG PARLIAMENT

If we had a fairer voting system, then (on the votes cast) Labour would not have had a majority at all. They would have had 227 seats out of 646, the Conservatives would have got around 209 seats, and the Liberal Democrats would have got around 142 seats.

(Admittedly, if the voting system was fairer, people would have cast their votes differently.)

The Labour Party gained a smaller number of votes in 2005 (9.5 million) than it got in any other post-war election except 1983 (8.5m). (In 1983, it was hit by the Falklands Effect, the SDP defection and the self-deregistration of large numbers of voters because of the poll tax.) Labour had more votes when it was trounced by Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

Labour had a higher *share* of the vote when it was beaten by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 (36.9 per cent), by Edward Heath in 1970 (43 per cent), by Anthony Eden in 1955 (46.4 per cent), or by Churchill in 1951 (48.8 per cent), than it did in winning the 2005 election (35.2 per cent).

Labour’s share of the vote (36 per cent) was the smallest share of the vote of any winning party in any British General Election. One interpretation would be that it was the least legitimate winner of any British election.

So when Labour officials, and the Prime Minister, say that ‘the country wanted Labour returned to Government with a smaller majority’, that is not what the figures say. When he says he will pursue an ‘unremittingly’ New Labour agenda, that is not what the figures say the electorate asked for.

Labour had more of a mandate for its manifesto when it was defeated in 1979 and in 1992.

The expressed view of the country, if transmitted through a fair election system, would have resulted in a hung parliament with the Liberal Democrats having a decisive if not determining influence on policy.

PART II

THE IRAQ FACTOR

WAS IT THE WAR WOT LOST SEATS?

There are two main questions for the anti-war movement: how did the war in Iraq affect the election, and how does the political establishment perceive the effect of the war?

On both scores, we’ve heard from the horse’s mouth. Tony Blair himself acknowledged immediately after being re-elected that ‘Iraq has been a deeply divisive issue in this country.’ ‘That has been very, very clear,’ he said.

BOTTOM OF THE PRIORITIES?

However, during the election campaign, commentators (and Labour politicians) asserted constantly that the war on Iraq was a fringe issue with little significance for the election.

One of the main reasons for this was the opinion poll evidence. Pollsters asked potential voters what the most important issues were in their voting decision.Iraq invariably ranked near the bottom of the expressed priorities, with only 3 per cent of respondents saying it was the most important issue for them.

For example, the Telegraph, on 24 April, found Iraq last in a list of nine possible concerns ranging from ‘health services’ (20 per cent) to law and order (13) to education (13) to asylum and immigration (9) to Europe (4). Only 3 per cent of people asked said Iraq was the most important issue in their decision on how to vote.

These kinds of results were endlessly trumpeted.

On the other hand, there were other polls which did not receive the same attention. A Times/ITV News poll carried out at the same time found that of voters certain to vote, half of the women asked, and 37 per cent of men said that the war in Iraq would be ‘a significant factor’.

61 per cent of women and 49 per cent of men said the war was ‘a mistake even if it has produced some benefits for the Iraqi people’.

(The only other option was to say that it had ‘done more good than harm even though it involved some serious sacrifices’ - 31 per cent of women agreed, and 48 per cent of men).

The poll found that more than half of Liberal Democrat voters (54 per cent) said that Iraq would be significant in deciding their votes, compared to 35 per cent of Labour supporters. 61 per cent of Lib Dems believed the war was a mistake (the only option), compared with 52 per cent of Labour voters.

DON’T MENTION THE WAR

The issue of the war was ‘everywhere and nowhere’, as one columnist observed.

A Times editorial at the half-way mark in the campaign noted that, ‘This has been described as the <don’t mention the war> election’. ‘Tell that to candidates, especially Labour ones in about 50 parliamentary constituencies (university towns or places with large Muslim communities)’: ‘Iraq is the subject of debate in these seats, with those who opposed military action making the noise.’ (23 April, p. 23)

A cartoon by Banx showed a voter deterring a Labour canvasser with the words, ‘Go away or I’ll mention Iraq’.

WAR AND DISTRUST

One of the last polls conducted by the BBC before the election found that hostility to the war was a truly significant issue. (This was after the final barrage of damaging leaks, and the publication of the Attorney General’s legal advice to the Government had driven Iraq to the front pages.)

‘The poll found 23% of people surveyed cited opposition to the war as a reason for being reluctant to vote Labour, while 21% said they did not trust Mr Blair.’ (21% cited insufficient control of immigration as their reason for being reluctant to vote Labour.)

‘The war’ was not necessarily a distinct issue from ‘trust’: ‘A government minister said the Iraq war and the issue of trust in Mr Blair had tended to blur into one another.’ (Guardian, 6 May)

On this reading, somewhere in the region of 40 per cent of voters were reluctant to vote Labour because of the war, and because of the stream of lies told by the Prime Minister to justify the war.

Even Robin Cook, the only senior Government minister who resigned over the war before it took place, had problems with the Iraq effect.

He memorably remarked after being re-elected, ‘Even in Livingston [his constituency] I have had a number of people saying to me that they can't vote for me because they were against the war in Iraq. Heaven knows what more I could have done to convince them that I also was opposed to the war.’

However, ‘as the results poured in, Labour MPs claimed Labour high command was trying to protect Mr Blair from the reverses by blaming immigration rather than Iraq.’ (Guardian, 6 May)

THE IRAQ ELECTION

‘Tony Blair tried to persuade himself that the Iraq war was a chattering class obsession, but it was everywhere, even among those who usually pay scant attention to foreign policy.’

Polly Toynbee observes that, ‘It became the symbol and the icon for any disappointment or grievance with the government over the last eight years. It all came down on Tony Blair's head.’

‘At door after door, the voters said: <No, not Tony Blair>. Those who never followed the minute details of <who said what when> came to believe the war was wrong, the country was cheated and had been wrongly dragged against its will to fight George Bush's war on a false prospectus.’

Her conclusion: ‘This was a khaki election.’

This is also the conclusion of her editors: ‘Iraq was not the only reason why these voters deserted Labour - immigration, tuition fees and a host of other dissatisfactions also played strong parts in one of the most heterogeneous elections in memory - but there is little doubt that historians will look back on the 2005 election as the Iraq election.’ (Guardian, 6 May)

The Independent, which took a consistent anti-war line throughout the conflict, believes that voters ‘punished the Prime Minister for Iraq’ - ‘The message was clear: no Prime Minister can treat Parliament and the public with such contempt over an issue as serious as waging war.’ (7 May)

In a pro-war newspaper, in The Times, columnist Gerard Baker conceded that it was clear ‘what the voters were voting against – the Prime Minister’s character, *the war*, Michael Howard’s leadership and, perhaps, through another large abstention, the whole slippery political class that runs the country.’ (7 May, p. 45, emphasis added)

The FT editorial was more cautious, suggesting that, ‘The Labour vote plummeted in seats with high concentrations of students opposed to student tuition fees and Muslim voters angry over Tony Blair’s support for the US-led invasion of Iraq.’ (7 May, p. 18)

This editorial may have been based on the analysis of Pippa Norris, a Harvard academic, who observed in the FT that the most common reason for the anti-Labour swing was disillusionment with Labour’s performance in office:

‘It remains to be seen whether the source of dissatisfaction represented a specific backlash over the Iraqi war, or a more diffuse sense of ennui after eight years of Labour government, or even a deeper disenchantment with Blair’s leadership and record.’ (FT, 7 May, p. 8)

Lynne Jones, an anti-war Labour MP, remarked after the election, ‘Iraq has come to symbolise the disaffection felt by a large section of our core vote, usually middle-class people with a social conscience… people misjudge the situation if they think Iraq is the only issue that disappoints people.’ She mentions anti-terror legislation as another source of disappointment. (Guardian, 7 May)

It seems to be accepted widely that the invasion of Iraq was a significant factor in Labour’s loss of votes and seats. There is doubt as to whether it was the single most decisive factor on the night.

On ‘the left’, there are wider issues that affected people’s reluctance to vote Labour, and on ‘the right’ there were fears over immigration and a harsh, racist, right-wing agenda was used to attract voters away from Tony Blair’s somewhat less harsh, somewhat less racist, right-wing agenda.

Nevertheless, the BBC poll cited above demonstrates that a quarter of those asked why they were reluctant to vote Labour mentioned the invasion of Iraq, and a further 21 per cent mentioned the issue of ‘trust’, which centres on the war.

The war seems to have acted as a lightning rod for wider disaffection, and may have tipped many discontented Labour and Lib Dem voters into refusing to vote for Labour, thereby contributing to the humbling of Tony Blair.

PART III

WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE MOVEMENT

TWO CRITERIA

Before the election, I suggested that there were two main criteria by which the Establishment might judge the effect of the war.

One indicator would be the number of seats Labour lost in the election.

Another would be the share of votes going to ‘anti-war’ parties.

I put ‘anti-war’ in quotation marks because what matters, from the Establishment point of view, is how the parties are perceived. By this criterion, the Liberal Democrats are an ‘anti-war’ party, despite their inconsistency on the issue of Iraq.

On the first measure, Labour lost 47 seats, a substantial reduction, though far from a fatal blow to either the party or its leader. On this measure, Labour was punished, though not severely, by the electorate – but perhaps not merely over Iraq.

THE ANTI-WAR VOTE

What about the second measure, the proportion of votes going to anti-war parties? In what follows, we will leave out the Northern Ireland elections, which have an entirely separate identity and dynamic, to concentrate on the results in Wales, Scotland and England.

Comparing the votes won by the ‘anti-war’ parties in 2005 with their equivalents in the 2001 elections, we find that the number of votes won by these parties increased by about 1.2 million, and their share of the votes increased (in Scotland, Wales and England) from about 23 per cent to over 26 per cent of the vote.

So, the number of votes won in the 2001 election by the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, the Greens, and parties such as the Socialist Alliance seems to have been around 5,800,000.

This constellation of parties (plus the independent anti-war candidates) won around 7 million votes in 2005, an increase of 20 per cent, or roughly 1.2m more votes.

(2005 figures generally from the BBC. For anti-war candidates’ figures, I am relying on the Socialist Unity election tracker. All 2001 figures from the House of Commons Library.)

As a proportion of the total 2005 vote in Wales, Scotland and England, the increase in votes is about 4.4 per cent of the turnout. (Turnout, predicted to be lower, was actually higher in 2005, by about 800,000 votes.)

The ‘anti-war’ share of the vote in Scotland, Wales and England, including the Liberal Democrats, was 26.6 per cent of the vote, up from 22.9 per cent in 2001.

So the ‘anti-war’ vote increased significantly, by about 3.7 per cent, as the Labour share of the vote decreased.

CHANNELLING THROUGH THE LIB DEMS

The increase in the anti-war vote was not uniform. In Scotland and Wales, there seems to have been a swing from the nationalist parties to the Liberal Democrats and, on a lesser scale, to the Greens.

One way of looking at this is to say that the Lib Dems increased their vote by 1.16m more votes, which is almost exactly the increase in the anti-war vote. The net gain in votes achieved by the other ‘anti-war’ parties is virtually zero, despite significant gains by the Greens and by Respect.

The Greens almost doubled their votes in Britain as a whole, from 166,500 to 283,000 (if we include the Scottish Greens). Respect made an impressive showing in a small number of constituencies, and managed the astonishing feat of taking Bethnal Green, accumulating 68,000 votes in total nationwide.

But the strongly anti-war Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties shrank drastically, losing 73,000 votes! (This was mostly the SNP, but the party still managed to gain two more seats even with a reduced number of votes.)

Looking at the Scottish scene, the Liberal Democrat vote in Scotland increased by 150,000, and the Scottish Greens got five times as many votes (25,800) as the Greens did in Scotland in 2001 (4,500). But the other Scottish anti-war parties lost votes.

In a parallel phenomenon in Wales, the Lib Dems there increased their vote by 67,000, while Plaid Cymru lost 21,000 votes.

This table shows the share of the vote in this election, and the gain or loss since 2001, ordered by percentage change:

Share of vote in 2005 and gain or loss since 2001, ranked by percentage change

Pippa Norris, a politics lecturer at Harvard University, has suggested that the ‘underlying pattern’ of the election was that, ‘voters switched to whichever party was best placed to give Labour a bloody nose in their local constituency.’ (FT, 7 May, p. 8) This seems to have benefited the Liberal Democrats.

Overall, the share of votes going to anti-war parties and candidates increased significantly but not dramatically.

Given the unfair nature of the electoral system, the scale of the anti-war vote was not reflected in Parliament.

PART IV

CONCLUSION

THE DANGER OF PERSONALIZATION

Earlier, we noted that Mr Blair's allies were admitting privately before the election that he would almost certainly have to resign if the Labour majority fell below 60, and that, in the view of many Blairites, ‘60 to 70 was a grey area which would leave the party leader severely weakened’. The same sources suggested that there had been a change in the Prime Minister's mood during a difficult campaign: ‘I think he'll go in about 18 months,’ said one loyal minister earlier in the week. ‘Whatever the outcome of the election, he's been badly damaged by the campaign.’

Another Labour strategist admitted that Mr Blair's morale had been badly affected by the criticisms he had received from voters on the stump, saying, ‘Tony has been shocked by the level of hostility to him personally in the run-up to polling day. No one can know what effect that will have.’

Polly Toynbee, who regrets the drop in Labour support in the election, concludes that, in the end, ‘the answer lies on the terrible road to Baghdad and the hubris of a man who thought he could persuade anyone of anything.’

‘At door after door, the voters said: <No, not Tony Blair>.’

There is a danger here for the anti-war movement. It is possible that the war on Iraq war will be totally identified - by the mass media, by the political establishment and by the general public -with a single person, and that when that scapegoat leaves the stage, the Government and the state will be absolved from blame.

This is something we must avoid. The invasion and occupation of Iraq flow out of and are entirely consistent with British foreign policy over decades, and centuries. The so-called ‘war on terror’ flows out of and is entirely consistent with the nature of the British state, and those institutions which hold power in this country.

It is vitally important for the anti-war movement to explain these facts in a persuasive and compelling fashion.

The anti-war movement increased the vote and the share of the vote going to parties seen as ‘anti-war’. The anti-war movement helped to prevent another Labour landslide, and helped to sharply reduce the Labour majority. The political establishment seems to accept that ‘Iraq’ was a major factor in Labour’s loss of votes and seats.

If the electoral system had been fair, the (weakly) ‘anti-war’ Liberal Democrats would have had a commanding position within the House of Commons, able to block future wars of aggression.

Questions remain, not the least of which is that posed by Gabriel Carlyle of Voices in the Wilderness UK: in what tense does the electorate see the ‘Iraq’ issue? Is it an event that occurred in the past (in March 2003), or is it an ongoing war of occupation? Much hangs on this judgement. If this was ‘the Iraq election’, was it simply a one-off punishment of an unpopular Prime Minister, or was it a marker that from now on the British people have determined to resist wars of aggression on a scale never before seen?

The question is not an academic one, and the answer lies very much in the hands of the anti-war movement.

This page last updated 26 May 2005