This morning Labour has its fewest number of MPs in Parliament since 1935. That election was one of progress, with Labour winning 102 seats and setting itself back on course for government. A more apt comparison is 1931, when the party was reduced to just 52 MPs.
The party lost 235 seats following the formation of the National Government and then, like today, it was the “Red Wall” that was decimated.
It was the loss of the heartland coalmining town of St Helens that ‘shattered’ a young Clement Attlee. He knew it “was clearly a landslide, so I decided to sleep on it” and in the end only clung on to his seat by 551 votes. Colleagues such as Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton also lost their seats.
Labour would fight their way back to power fourteen years later when Morrison, Dalton and Attlee led Labour to the historic 1945 victory. That government, however, would only last for six years before the party entered its “Wilderness Years.”
Under Hugh Gaitskell the party lost another election, triggering the perennial question of “Must Labour Lose?” Yet despite claims that the party was out of touch with the new ‘consumerist’ society it still held on to 258 seats and 43.8 per cent of the vote in the 1959 election.
By the 1980s however, the question was not whether Labour would lose but would it survive. In October 1978, it appeared to be in a strong position—having won four out of the last five elections—but failed to heed the calls for change which Margaret Thatcher offered.
Labour’s 1983 general election campaign—which, until the rise of Jeremy Corbyn seemed destined to represent the peak of the left’s influence on the party—shaped the political weather for a generation.
The lessons of 1983
Labour had expected defeat in 1983 but not total annihilation. The election of Michael Foot as the man to take on the juggernaut of Thatcherism was not one made with the wishes of the broader electorate in mind. Yet the rejection of more ‘presentable’ candidates such as Peter Shore (alienated on the right), Denis Healey (popular in the country but with few allies in the party), and Tony Benn (who refused to stand) ensured Foot was the ‘unity’ candidate.The manifesto, which came in at a lengthy 15,000 words, was called “a programme for radical transformation of the British economy” and subsequently “the longest suicide note in history” after the party’s defeat. It became the Conservatives’ primary tool for their campaign and thousands of copies were dispatched to their prospective candidates.
Of the seventeen leading national newspapers, only the Daily and Sunday Mirror supported Labour, and even they questioned Foot’s position as leader. In a sign of dwindling working-class support, the Daily Star (who had an 82 per cent working-class readership) said: “Sorry Michael, we can’t vote for you.” The Sun told its 13 million readers that Labour would reclaim their council houses in spite because “they are terrified that their power base will disappear forever.”
The Labour ‘brand’ counted for little. Thatcher, despite losing votes, was given the biggest electoral landslide since Attlee’s in 1945. Labour held on to just 209 seats across the country. In 119 seats, the party lost its deposit.
In the aftermath of the defeat, however, Foot refused to accept that the policies were wrong. He told a dwindled parliamentary Labour party that “there is a real fighting mood in the party, a fresh dedication to democratic socialist ideas.” He reassured them that “the manifesto will prove right.”
The left-wing faction Militant blamed the Labour right for not fighting properly for socialist policies. Tribune identified the ‘Guilty Men’ of Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey, Peter Shore and Roy Hattersley as responsible for the defeat. Tony Benn, meanwhile, lauded the result as “the spirit of Labour being reborn.”
Benn lost his seat but had been encouraged that 8.5 million people ‘supported an openly socialist policy’ and viewed it as the beginning of a bright new dawn for the left. Jeremy Corbyn, then a newly elected MP, was quick to support him.
In a meeting of the left in the aftermath, Corbyn claimed that the defeat happened “because everything had been fudged.” There had been “a great incompetence in the party machine: the leaflets put out were absolutely bland crap.”
Neil Kinnock was tasked with leading Labour out of another spell in the wilderness. He fell at the final hurdle in 1992 having shifted the party back to the centre-ground.
Ironically, in the aftermath of 1992, Seamus Milne—then a journalist —urged the party not to swing to the right.
Milne called for a “little humility” from Kinnock and predicted in Tribune that Labour “will not succeed by presenting itself as a better group of managers of capitalism.” Milne, of course, was proven wrong five years later when Tony Blair led Labour to the first of three successive electoral victories.
Perhaps this morning it is time for Milne and others within the party to show some humility.
