Antipathy will combine with apathy to keep the voters at home
BRUCE ANDERSON
This election is unlike any other one that I have observed. On previous occasions, one obviously encountered electors who had decided not to vote. But they usually kept quiet about it; they were prepared to give a tacit acknowledgment to the moral superiority of the electoral process, even if they had no intention of taking part in it. Not any more. This time, people are happy to admit that they will not be voting, and I do not believe that many of them will be persuaded to change their minds. This reaction is a blend of apathy and antipathy: a settled conviction that politics is an irrelevance tinged with dishonesty.
There has been another new development. In previous elections almost all of those who replied 'we're still thinking about it' when a candidate inquired how they would be voting were merely finding a polite way of saying: 'Not for you'. This time, I think that a lot of them mean it. There will be a large number of late decisions as to how to vote, or whether to vote at all.
I have spent the first few days of this campaign away from London, and that produces a different perspective on events. In previous elections, my day began with the morning press conferences and then moved on to the news broadcasts: all of them, One also spent a lot of time talking to political professionals who were putting in 18-hour days at party headquarters. By week two of the campaign, one had to keep reminding oneself that the entire population was not hanging on every bulletin. scrutinising every nuance of the politicians' performances, and switching its allegiance accordingly.
I knew intellectually that all the party HQs were like artillerymen firing blind at distant positions in the hope that some tiny proportion of their shells would hit their targets. But now that I have been out among those targets, I realise just how true this is, and that the artillery's task is becoming steadily more difficult. Social changes have made it harder for the parties to identify their targets. Tribalism is not what it was, and the old-fashioned working class, Labour's former hard core, has largely disappeared. Part of it has fallen into the underclass.
I have spent some time in the sort of housing estates where six-year-old boys wear earrings. Mum is a haggard slattern of 25 going on 45 — though she does keep some sort of a household afloat: she might have been a decent girl if she had been given the chance — and Dad was a biological accident in a pub car park. Oddly enough, the inhabitants of those estates know that they are not Tories, but this does not mean that they are Labour. They have simply dropped off the political ladder. As far as they are concerned, all the politicians might as well be talking about life on another and distant planet. They cannot conceive that any politician could ever do them any good (why are they wrong?).
Many of the rest of the former working class are now self-employed or working in small businesses. Such people spend a lot of time thinking about mortgages and savings. They understand that national economic conditions will have a crucial effect on their living standards; their politico-economic consciousness owes nothing to trade unionism.
In different political circumstances, that could — and will — be good news for the Tories. But it is of no help in dealing with a Labour government which has rewritten economic history, so that it takes all the credit for everything which has gone right and can go into an election with an enhanced reputation for financial competence. Moreover, the Tories have tribal troubles of their own.
Until recently, turning Tory was part of the initiation rites for new members of the middle class. They could not be expected to go on voting for a party calling itself labour'; that would threaten them with instant re-proletarianisation. This is no longer the case, and not only because Labour has rebranded itself as New Labour. The word 'labour' is losing its negative connotations. The term 'labour exchange has died out, and 'labourer' is rapidly following it into archaism. Ask 100 people what the word 'labour' means to them, and 1 suspect that only about 10 per cent will reply 'six days shalt thou labour'. The rest will say 'a political party'. The moment may rapidly be approaching when Labour will have almost as few associations with heavy manual work as Tory' does with 17th-century Papist Irish bandits.
So Labour can no longer rely on the working class while the Tories can no longer count on the middle class. All this has profound consequences; it means that we are living in a world of permanent political uncertainty. Not many elections ago, the psephol°gists were still able to assure us that political behaviour would follow a uniform pattern across the nation. If there were a 4 per cent swing in Billericay, there would also be a 4 per cent swing in Bradford, and it would be unlikely that there would be many swings higher than 4 per cent anywhere.
Last time, all those rules were broken, and even if the swings will be lower this time, there will be pronounced regional variations. Barely more than half the population still has a settled political loyalty: an especially rare phenomenon among young voters. Nor is there any reason to believe that this will change dramatically as those youngsters grow older. Demographic tribalism will become less and less important as a tool for analysing British politics.
In the short run, this is good news for Tony Blair. The decline in tribalism goes hand in hand with a declining interest in politics. In current circumstances, this lack of interest will benefit the incumbent government. Not enough people see any pressing reason to turn it out; that most powerful of political slogans 'time for a change' has little potency on the doorsteps of this election.
Mr Blair has another achievement to his credit. He has managed to diminish public expectations in him and his government without arousing anger. There is a lot of cynicism about Mr Blair and his ministers, but it is an amused, gentle cynicism, which is of little threat to his continued occupancy of No. 10. Nor is it easy to believe that William Hague can find any way of changing that mood over the next two weeks.
The Tories still hope that General Apathy and Marshal Abstention will come to their aid, but the British political climate is a lot milder than the Russian winter. Outside the sink estates, most people are feeling moderately prosperous, and in the sink estates they have given up any hope of prosperity, apart from occasional spasms of fantasy when they buy their Lottery tickets.
Mr Blair is storing up problems for the future. At the next election, he will not be able to blame all Britain's difficulties on the previous government. By then, the volatility which swept New Labour to power in 1997 may he ready to sweep it out. It could be a shrewd move to place a bet now on the Tories to win the 2005/6 election. In the meantime, however, the voters' attitude to Tony Blair is best expressed by my favourite Irishism: 'Well, this pig doesn't weigh as much as I thought it did, but then again, I never thought it would.' It is not a high-minded basis for re-election — but there is nothing high-minded about our Prime Minister.
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