British Labor Divided

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IN itself the Labor Party's defeat at the general election of 1959 was not catastrophic. Only about one percent of the electorate changed sides and only 23 seats in the House of Commons changed hands. And the current Conservative parliamentary majority of 100, while substantial, has been exceeded in seven out of the fifteen parliaments of this century. For Labor the seriousness lay not in the size of the defeat but in its position as one of a series. It was the fourth successive election at which the Labor Party had lost support and the third successive election at which the Conservatives had won a majority. No previous British party had performed this feat of winning three wellspaced general elections in a row since the beginning of modern politics in 1832.

There were two other features which gave an additional seriousness to the Labor defeat. The first was the absence of any obvious extenuating circumstances. The party was well led, and peculiarly free from internal quarrels. The Conservatives, on the other hand, faced the electorate at the end of a Parliament during which the collapse of Sir Anthony Eden and of his Suez policy had temporarily reduced their public prestige to what seemed the point of no recovery. The second feature arises from the categories of people who are thought to have made up the swing away from Labor. Most evidence suggests that they came from the younger half of the adult population; from the better paid wage-earners; and, above all, from those who, in addition to fulfilling these two qualifications, had also achieved better housing conditions (often as a result of a public project) away from the centers of crowded industrial cities. This analysis adds seriousness to the Labor defeat because by the time of the next election the number of people in all three of these categories is likely to be greater rather than less. There will obviously be a new crop of young voters (and a further depletion by death of Labor's older supporters). Unless a severe slump is postulated, wage levels will continue to rise. And population will continue to move to new ambitious housing estates. Other things being equal, therefore, it certainly cannot be assumed that October 1959 was rock bottom for the Labor Party...