POLITICS
Lies, damned lies and predictions of a Labour majority
NOEL MALCOLM
The old saying ' that you can prove anything with statistics is, of course, an exaggeration. Statistics only indicate 'or suggest; and where human intentions are concerned you can never really prove anything. Nevertheless, the feeling at Wal- worth Road is that the pattern of opinion poll results Ow proves (or shows, or strongly indicates) that Labour can win the next election.
Some bits of the evidence are indeed striking. The GuardianlICM poll published last week proclaimed three distinct break- throughs for the Labour Party: a lead, for the first time, of 15 per cent; support from more than 50 per cent of those questioned; and a preference for Mr Kinnock (by 37 per cent to Mrs Thatcher's 34) as the person best fitted to be Prime Minister. Labour has come top in the ICM polls for 9 Months now, and for the last six months its lead has never fallen below 9 per cent. This is a more consistent lead, and a higher one, than in either of Mrs Thatcher's previous mid-term crises.
Even in Labour's best six months of the 1980-1 recession, its lead fluctuated in the Gallup polls from a maximum of 13 per Cent to a minimum of 3 per cent. And the contrast with Mrs Thatcher's second term is even more striking. In January 1985, with the miners' strike still biting hard, with a sterling crisis pushing the pound down towards $1.10, and with interest rates at 14 per cent (higher in real terms than they are today), the Tories actually led in the Gallup polls by 6 per cent. By the first quarter of 1986 the Westland affair had done the Government even more damage; this time the Labour lead was roughly one per cent on average.
To find a stretch of consistent Labour triumph in the polls comparable to their present one, you have to go back a lot further. You could try mid-1971, when the Labour advantage oscillated wildly be- tween 4 and 22 per cent. Or — and this is where the adrenalin begins to flow at the Labour Party headquarters — you could go back further than that. For the period Which most closely matches the last half- year in purely statistical terms is the six months from September 1962 to February 1963, when Labour's lead varied from 9 to 16 per cent. The Tories never once re- gained the lead in the remainder of that Parliament, and in October 1964 Harold Wilson achieved the seemingly impossible task of overturning a Conservative par- liamentary majority of nearly '100.
Can Mr Kinnock repeat the trick? He has no Christine Keeler to help him this time, and I very much 'doubt whether Mr Colin Wallace 'will furnish a Convincing substitute. But he does have inflation, high mortgages, some unpopular priVatisaticins; the alienation of various professions (teachers, doctors, barristers), the gefieral dissatisfaction with the state Of public services, and, last but certainly not least, the poll tax. , , Political instincts and psychology make one feel that all those self-inflicted Tory wounds could be enough to let Labour win. It's a tempting • hypothesis. The disproof, however (sorry, dis-suggestion) comes from boring old statistics and arithinetic. Partly because the number of constituen- cies in 1964 was smaller than it is today, Harold Wilson was able to achieve his victory with a gain of 59 seats. Today Mr Kinnock needs 'to gain 96. If you define marginal seats as those where the majority is less than 10 per cent of the vote, there are only 75 Conservative marginals. Of these, Labour came second in only 52. In 22 seats the former Alliance parties came second; and in the majority of those 22 Labour came a very poor third or fourth (gaining fewer than 10,000 votes in 17 cases). Take a fairly typical Tory/Alliance marginal — Bath, for example, where the Conservative (Chris, Patten) won 23,515 votes, the SDP candidate 22,103 and the Labour one 5,507 — and you will find it hard to imagine a Labour victory there. What will probably happen in such a 'Honey, I'm homeless.' constituency is a shift along the spectrum, with disillusioned Tory voters voting SDP — in which case Mr Patten might conceivably scrape home once more.
The role of the minor parties can be crucial. The key MOM which enabled Mr Wilson to win in 1964, for example, was not the rise in Labour support (it rose by 043 per cent of the vote) but the success of the Liberals, who rose froth 6 per cent to 11, 'drawing away Tory voters. The situa- tion now is the reverse, with a decline of the centre parties. But under our electoral system such a decline is less significant in terms of constituencies changing hands than it may seem if you look only at percentages. The constituencies with sit- ting centre-party MPs, or prominent near- miss candidates, will lose support less severely than the ones where the centre- party candidate is an obvious no-hoper. And much of Labour's proud percentage in the opinion polls at the moment is due, surely, to centre-party yoters, rolling around in the ship of state like ballast that has come loose. In the 1CM poll last August, Labour had 44 per cent and the Greens and SLDs together had 14. Now Labour has 51 and the Greens and SLDs have 8. The SDP and Tory Party are exactly where they were. (So much, then, for precipitous Tory decline.)
But of course the Conservatives are in trouble, and they know it. They could conceivably lose 60 seats at the next election, and Mrs Thatcher would not like to preside over the largest drop in Tory strength in the Commons since 1945. As I reported in this column last summer, the reply of one of her ex-ministers when I asked how she would react to the upset of the European elections was: 'U-turn as much as she can.' So far we have had four complete U-turns, on nuclear power sta- tions, war widows, haemophiliacs and foot- ball identity cards. We have also had additions to public spending' plans amount- ing to £5.5 billion.The £1 billion which has been pledged to help pay for the transition- al 'safety net' for the poll tax is hardly a U-turn — more an expensive and seemingly ineffectual touch on the brakes. I cannot honestly predict a U-turn on the poll tax between now and the next general elec- tion. But with even a partial transfer of education costs to central government funding, she might just shed enough of her load to throw off her pursuers.
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