Why both Kinnock and Cameron failed to win open-goal elections

Easter Monday and the 1992 General Election is treading on Twitter. This struck me as very odd. I soon discovered that the BBC was airing the footage of election night on their Parliament channel. Whilst I still don’t quite understand its festive significance it has certainly made for fascinating viewing, twenty years after John Major, against all odds and polls surged to a late majority to bring home a fourth consecutive election victory for the Conservatives.

A running theme in the coverage is the concern at the somewhat forgotten recession of the 1990s. The Tory victory undermined the election success Giant of “It’s the economy, stupid”. This alludes to the fact that the economy is the central issue going into an election. If the government get this right, then they get rewarded however if the economy goes pear-shaped under the governments watch, then they are punished by the public. Surely John Major’s government couldn’t have won yet they did. The question for politicians at the time was ‘”why?”. Understanding of this in 1992 is no less relevant today.

The truth is the Conservatives were there for the taking. The economy was in trouble, the party was much divided and was led by a man who had already governed unconvincingly for several years without a direct mandate or approval from the British public. This prima facie ought to have been enough to secure electoral humiliation and a Labour victory. This however proved no more than a pipe-dream for the Left.

Where Labour ultimately missed this open goal opportunity was ensured by their failure to secure economic credibility. Whilst Kinnock’s reforms to the party were noteworthy, he did however fail to shake off sufficiently the influence of the socialist left and the trade unions over Labour. Labour had not yet got to grips with the fundamental principles behind the country’s dramatic economic renewal. This was through enterprise, growth, prudent public spending and most significantly of all low taxation.

Labour need not have waited until 1997 to claim power from the demising Conservatives, had they accepted these principles then they could have won confidence. However what undermined Labour was their stubborn, constitutional dogmatic commitment to socialism, their willingness to encourage government dependency, their inability to adequately stand up to the trade unions and their determined subscription to unreasonable taxes. What this meant was the public could not trust them and this was translated electorally in what was one of the greatest election underachievements in our history.

This was all impressively addressed going into election in 1997 by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson with the birth of ‘New Labour’. This demonstrated that the Labour Party could be rid of the stigma of loony leftism and was capable of forming a credible alternative to the Conservatives.

Now let’s examine the greatest underachievement in election history. The Conservative failure to secure a majority in the 2010 contest. Gordon Brown was the most unpopular Prime Minister in a very long time, the party was hugely divided and riddled with scandal.

Cameron won the argument in respect to achieving public recognition that spending cuts were necessary. This was candidly achieved with lines such as “We are only asking to cut 1p in every pound”. Whilst this was true, in Chancellor Polls of Vince Cable, Alistair Darling and George Osborne, Osborne actually had the lowest public confidence whilst actually Vince Cable had the largest. This shows that in 2010 the public were more convinced that we needed to get Labour out of power than we were that the Tories were the right party for governance.

Where I believe Cameron and Osborne failed was in their failure to relate to the people. Where Kinnock went into election armed with many policies, albeit wrong ones, Cameron kept his cards very close to his chest. The centre piece of the opposition years was the Big Society agenda. This failed to really talk to people. What is meant by the ‘Big Society’ is still unclear today but this was even more the case back in 2010. Nobody knew what the ‘Big Society’ meant. Where Cameron could have won the election was to go further. Winning the debate on austerity was not enough. You can’t win an election without any policies, no matter how unpopular the government were.

What Cameron needed was commitments to lower taxes. Labours tax policy under Brown moved away from the fiscally prudent New Labour approach. ‘Big Society’ sounds great but was too airy fairy. It does not directly affect the individual lives of voters and their families. Commitments to lower taxes do. Bringing the lowest paid people out of income taxation, lowering the crippling tax burden on Middle England and an alternative to Labour’s unsustainable welfare policies ought to have been the clear and simple message that gets the public on board. This alongside their success in shaping the economic debate towards austerity would no doubt have won over the British people.

What the 1992 election shows is what we already really knew. The public flirted with socialism in 1992 in desperation in order to get the Tories out, but just about resisted and waited for Labour to return with a much more realistic proposition in 1997. Thatcher well and truly got the country on side in terms of moving the country away from the post-war consensus era. Ironically it was in the years following Thatcher's departure that arguably ensured the prospects of socialism had well and truly died.

Labour lost 1992 because the public couldn’t trust them and their economic policy. On a slight variation, Cameron failed to win outright in 2010 because his economic policy was not explicit enough, voters understandably did not want to take a lurch into the unknown. The lesson for Cameron was that what the public want from a government is a degree of certainty as to what they will get from a party if they win, not only that but even more crucially the voters have to like it. Perhaps this is something that Cameron and Osborne did not trust.