Blues’ “Mid Term Blues”

 There’s recently been quite a lot of wriggling, particularly by the Tories, but also by the media as they desperately try to show ‘balance’. This wriggling has mostly taken the form of pointing out that Governments seldom do that well in mid-term local elections, and pointing out that even the mighty Blair Government lost over a thousand seats two years into their landslide 1997 term.

The problem for them, and for people who believe Ed is nothing but Labour’s answer to William Hague, is that although it’s true that Labour struggled in 1999 there is one crucial difference.

They still, technically, won it.

The 1999 share of the vote was this: Con 34%, Lab 36%, Lib 25% - that’s very similar to the national election of 2005. The Tories will probably be forced to admit they lost that one.

[this doesn’t stop Adam Lent, whom I like, saying “incredibly Hague wiped the floor with Labour in 1999” – losing by 2% doesn’t sound all that floor-wipey to me. Iain Dale is fixated on the number of council seats won, but the number of seats contested this year was only 36% of the number contested in 1999. As an adjusted figure (reducing seats won by the percentage difference in those up for grabs), Ed’s team did 57% better than Hague did in 1999, while Cameron did 63% worse than Blair. Clearly, I have no data on the type of seats in play in each year – but it shows the danger of basing an analysis purely on seats won.]

The 2000 election (comparable to next year’s vote, one would say) is lot more helpful to the Tory argument – they won it convincingly in the year of Labour’s first crises, such the fuel protests and blockades (though these were yet to happen). But again, the problem is there’s more going on. The ICM historical polls are helpfully published online, and they tell us that in 2000 the national polling only gave the Tories one lead, of 4%, right slap bang in the middle of the fuel crisis. 4%. And that glimmer is the only, the only poll-lead the Tories scored in ICM national voting intention between 1997 and 2005.

Conversely, since the coalition ‘win’ the ICM polling has metronomed back and forth between the two major parties, and the most recent poll, just before the local elections, puts Labour on an 8% lead. The April poll in 2000, before that doubtless encouraging Tory local triumph?

National Voting Intention April 2000:

Con32%           Lab 45%           Lib 15%

For the Conservatives, the bad news is not that they lost the 2012 local elections, but that the results closely mirrored polling of the British people’s national voting intentions. Either the polls are back in pre-1992 error mode  (and there’s lots of comment arguing based on the precedent of Kinnock!), or there’s something very different at work here. For me, Ed has already proved that he’s not William Hague.