Voting and the Electorate

Abstract

Has the 1997 election, with its stunning Labour victory, long foretold in record Labour opinion poll leads, produced a genuine realignment of British electoral politics? Does it foreshadow a decisive alteration in the Conservative hegemony in British politics over the last two decades, and stretching back in a weaker way before that to the 1950s? Or is the third outright Labour majority government to be seen as no more than the periodic swing of a weighted pendulum always predisposed to swing back to Conservative predominance for another long period if the Labour government runs into difficulties? Is New Labour a qualitatively different electoral force from old Labour, or just an amorphous coalition temporarily assembled by the combination of Tony Blair’s novel leadership qualities and the Conservatives’ exhaustion and disarray in government? And do the ironies of John Major’s electoral fortunes — re-elected in the teeth of economic recession in 1992, but ignominiously turfed out of Downing Street during the economic boom times in 1997 — signal a change in the conventional wisdom that ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ which decides UK general elections?