Plus pa change
Terry Pitt
Political Change in Britain David Butler and Richard Stokes (Macmillan £15.00) When David Butler and Richard Stokes produced in 1969 the first edition of Political Change in Britain it met with mixed reviews. "A seminal influence on the academic study of politics in Britain", enthused Robert McKenzie; ". . . the most scientifically based book on British political forces that has ever been published" said The Economist. But the late lain Macleod, soon to acceed for a tragically short period to the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, approached the work from the viewpoint of a practising politician. "It is of negligible interest except to its own private world . . . (the world of abstract political theory)" he wrote, and just to ram his point sarcastically remarked that "what is in fact a minor branch of sociology has become one of our major growth industries." And finally, using understatement as the most effective way to the jugular, Macleod quoted Abraham Lincoln's sentence that "people who like this sort of thing will find the sort of thing they like!"
To be fair to the practising politician, it is all too true that opinion poll data is frequently used out of context in political debate. To claim only 2 per cent accuracy in the proportion of electors intending to vote Labour or Tory is to claim scientific limits which in Britain's system can encompas any result from deadlock to a landslide. The pollsters are then ridiculed for what the sub-editors have done to their work, but it is the politician not the pollster who has to debate the instant conclusion. Small wonder then that most experienced players on the political field have nothing but contempt for the small number of self-styled scientific spectators who hold the season tickets. Time has shown that he who rules the turnstiles rules the world — and minority fair weather fans can go to hell. Yet one cannot but feel sorry for the Butlers, Stokes, et al of this world. They labour hard and long to prove that we flat-earthers are ill-informed, and they are more often right than wrong. They get little credit when they are correct, and a deluge of contemptuous com ment when they are wrong. Here lies the value of this book, for the authors are little concerned with the day to day shifts in attitude to Heath's dolphin or Wilson's pipe; instead they are engaged in studying data collected over a very long period indeed, 1963 to 1970, and then looking behind that to find the historical influences at work in the mental processes of their respondents.
In this way they are approaching what the practising politician really needs. Voter atti
tudes are one thing, voter motivation is quite another. Anyone working on the doorsteps will know that most electors have apparently strong views on numerous subjects, but these rarely affect their party allegiance. What we do not know is how their party allegiance came to be formed in the first place, and what makes a general allegiance become a determination to vote.
Class background and the politics of parents are clearly important; so is geography and, to a lesser extent, income and education. We have known, or guessed, this for a long time. Butler and Stokes have embarked on the painstaking task of attempting to quantify these factors and, at the same time, to explain political change in Britain over the last three genera tions. Surveys of 2,000 electors in eighty constituencies were taken in 1963, 1964 and 1966 in order to produce their first volume. The obvious criticism, that these were years of unusual Labour strength, was used as the main Conservative rebuttal of their conclusions — particularly regarding Labour's growth and formidable stability. The result of the 1970 election itself could have done little to help sales figures! But the indefatigable Butler and Stokes, with the invaluable help of their friendly computer, pressed on. Further surveys of their continuing panel of electors, plus new samples, were questioned in 1969 and 1970 — a period of undoubted Conservative ascendance. The new book therefore has two great virtues. First, it charts changing attitudes of the same group of electors over two very different periods of time; second, by exploiting the recollections of various respondents to their own and their parents' politics, it helps to chart things over a much longer period of time.
There is no simple set of conclusions, but the whole book is a serious attempt to lighten the darkness of our knowledge of political behaviour. Most political wordsmiths, for example, have cotTently linked the historic rise of the Labour Party with the demise of the Liberals. Yet it transpires that it was the Conservatives, and not Labour, who held the support of a majority of those in the electorate of the 'sixties whose parents and earliest allegiance had been Liberal. Second, most of us have long accepted that a slow but steady decline in class alignment is taking place — particularly among the younger generation. Few, however, have linked this directly with two other phenomena. In a series of .complicated diagrams and charts, Butler and Stokes show that peaks in participation in politics (i.e. turnout) coincide with peaks in class consciousness — during and immediately after the last war, for example. Moreover, the voters who fell outside the parameters of class-allegiance were precisely the ones whose electoral behaviour fuelled the fires of what became known as the new "volatility" of the electorate in the years following 1960.
Finally a further nugget of conventional wisdom — that the media tends to work against Labour — is far better explained here than anywhere else, and strikes me for one as being more accurate. Changes in the media since 1945 have not been confined to the rise of television; they have been combined with the death of Labour's old share of the printed word, and the eventual overwhelming monopoly of the screen as our first and main source of information. .Yet, in spite of protests to the contrary, we are not faced with a wildly slanted anti-Labour television service. Instead, but just as problematic and even more insidious, we have seen the replacement of the partisan printed word (with voters buying their own brand image) by a largely neutral screen. Instead of the Daily Herald reinforcing the values of the faithful, and rarely mentioning the other side, we have the eunuch box disseminating Tory speeches straight into a living room where thirty years ago only the immortal words of Attlee, Morrison and Sevin would have been allowed. The Tory side of this coin is almost as true, and the whole picture has contributed further to the breaking of old allegiances and a weaker preference in voting behaviour. At a time when interest in political change is so high, it is deplorable that this painstaking work will reach so few people.
Terry Pitt was until recently a government adviser to the Cabinet Office
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