Political Commentary
In The Margin
If you ask a leading Labour man, even off the record, whether he thinks the party is going to . win the next election, he will tell you that he thinks it is. Pressed hard by the remorseless, though far from conclusive, evidence of the public-opinion polls and the by-election results, he may con- fide his fears that the victory may be as narrow as 1950; further he will not go. And he justifies what seems to most of us a startling faith in necromancy by what looks on the face of it like good psephological sense. The pattern of British politics that has emerged since the war, we are told, is one of two roughly equal blocs of loyal blancmange topped by the whipped cream of the floating vote. Between 400 and 450 seats, it is alleged, are safe for either Labour or Tory candidates beyond any doubt save that of the landslide that might occur, under the threat of imminent war or invasion from outer space, and the battle will be fought in the remainder. (This, indeed, is what Mr. Phillips meant by his cautious prophylaxis; that the sort of thing which stampeded the voters into support- ing the National Government on the scale they did in 1931—the economic crisis and the elector- ate's bewilderment at the odd goings-on in the upper reaches of the Labour Party—would no longer be effective.) The turnover in seats at the 1951 election was only twenty-three; in 1955 it was forty-three. It is no longer really practical, so the argument runs, to reckon on movements substantially greater than this. This seems reason- able.
Even the larger of these two figures repre- sented a swing of well over a million votes, and it would require something a good deal more spectacular than any issue at present before the electorate or likely to be placed there to shift a larger number than that. It may be objected that the enormous 1945 Labour majority in seats was produced with a majority in votes of only two million, but this is to ignore the vital fact that the conditions of 1945 were precisely the kind of un- repeatable 'landslide' circumstances I have men- tioned.
The vital seats are the mysterious and much-discussed `marginals.' Now the essence of the Wilson Report, apart from its severe and—as far as one could judge—justified criticism of the Labour Party machine was that the Labour Party should concentrate its fight on these seats, and leave the new-found political inertia
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