THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 1966

Transcription

1 THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 1966

2 Other books in this series THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 1945 R. B. McCallum and Alison Readman THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 1950 H. G. Nicholas THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 1951 D. E. Butler THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 1955 D. E. Butler THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 1959 D. E. Butler and Richard Rose THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 1964 D. E. Butler and Anthony King

3 THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 1966 By D. E. BUTLER Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and ANTHONY KING Senior Lecturer in Government, University of Essex Palgrave Macmillan

4 Copyright D. E. Butler and Anthony King 1966 First Edition 1966 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED Little Essex Street London WC2 also Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbourne THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED 70 Bond Street Toronto 2 ST MARTIN'S PRESS INC I75 Fifth Avenue New York NY IOOIO Library of Congress Catalog card Number ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ALTHOUGH these election studies are the responsibility of the authors whose names appear on the title page, they could not be prepared without the co-operation of a very large number of people. The Warden and Fellows of Nuffield sponsored and personally encouraged the work; those who planned and fought the election gave freely of their time in person and by correspondence; the press provided an ample record from which we have drawn freely; and pollsters made available their findings. We must once more set down our debt of gratitude to all those who have provided us with so much of our raw material. It would be inappropriate to name personally the many people in the party organisations who have helped us so generously. But we must list some others who in diverse ways have made major contributions, in addition to those whose signed chapters represent only part of the help that they gave us: Ann Bishop Marilyn Butler Andrew Duncan-Jones Anne Duncan-Jones Marjorie King Nuffield College, Oxford July 1st, 1966 Vera King R. L. Leonard R. J. May Anita Neville Herbert Nicholas Mary Potter Peter Pulzer Richard Rose Donald Stokes Philip Williams DAVID BUTLER ANTHONY KING v

6 CONTENTS AcKNOWLEDGMENTs PREFACE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NoTE PAGE v 1X Xl CHAPTER I. THE SHORT parliament II. LABoUR: PoWER FOR HOW LONG?. III. CoNSERVATIVES: RE-FORMING UNDER FIRE IV. THE LIBERAL PREDICAMENT. v. ON THE EVE VI. THE CAMPAIGN. VII. TELEVISION AND RADIO, BY MARTIN HARRISON VIII. THE PRESs, BY CoLIN SEYMOUR-URE IX. OPINION PoLLS X. THE CAMPAIGN IN RETROSPECT XI. AsPECTS OF ELECTIONEERING XII. CANDIDATES XIII. CoNSTITUENCY CAMPAIGNS. BEXLEY, BY WILLIAM PLOWDEN BILLERICAY, BY MICHAEL PINTO-DUSCHINSKY BRIGHTON, KEMPTOWN, BY DANIEL SNOWMAN CAITHNEss AND SuTHERLAND, BY IAN GRIMBLE CHIPPENHAM, BY WILLIAM WALLACE. HUYTON, BY ROBERT TAYLOR PRESTON, BY RODERICK MARTIN RHONDDA WEST, BY KENNETH 0. MoRGAN AND PETER STEAD SMETHWICK, BY }AMES BYRNE BELFAST WEST, BY CoRNELIUS O'LEARY XIV. THE OuTCOME vii I

7 viii CONTENTS APPENDIX An Analysis of the Results, by Michael Steed 27I Statistical Tables- The National Results 296 The House of Commons 297 Regional Results 298 Constituency Results 3 I 3 By-elections 326 INDEX. 327 CARTOONS 'DoWN, DAMMIT, DOWN' 8 THE CONSERVATIVES' RHODESIAN TIGHTROPE 19 'HA-HA, OLD WILSON'S IN AN AWFUL DILEMMA!' 40 'OH GREAT ONE- DENY TOO THAT THERE WERE 13 WASTED YEARS' 70 MR. DU CANN's BRIEFING 93 'HA, MR. HEATH I You'RE JUST DE GAULLE's SPANIEL!' 112 'MARVELLOUS! MY POPULARITY AMONG THE PASSENGERS ISN'T SINKING!' 120 'TROUBLE ABOUT YOU, HEATH, IS YOU DON'T LOOK SINCERE.' I966. LABOUR SPOKESMEN CoNSERVATIVE SPOKESMEN MARCH I966 PHOTOGRAPHS following page I o8 I08 I DIAGRAMS LEADERS' POPULARITY IN THE GALLUP PoLL I964-I966 2 PARTY STRENGTHS IN THE GALLUP PoLL I964-I966 3 PARTY LEADS IN GALLUP AND NOP I964-I966. I7I DISTRIBUTION OF SWING I964-I LEADERS' CAMPAIGN SPEECHES TEN CONSTITUENCIES MAPS SEATS CHANGING HANDS I964-I966 SEATS WHERE LIBERALS WoN or CAME SEcoND SWING ABoVE AVERAGE. SwiNG BELow AVERAGE xo6 2I

8 PREFACE ON March 31st, 1966, postwar British politics came full circle. Labour's triumph of 1945 had given way to the Conservative hegemony of the 1950s. For a time, between 1959 and 1961, it seemed that the Labour party was about to disintegrate or else go into a long secular decline. Now in 1966 Labour's recovery was complete. The party had won in peacetime what it had won only once before, in wartime twenty-one years earlier: a full hold on governmental power. It is the purpose of this book to chronicle the post-1964 phase of Labour's recovery. If the book has a theme, it is that Labour's victory in 1966 was no more inevitable than its victory in however much the outcome may have been foreseen during the few weeks before polling day. At times during 1965 it seemed that the fall of the Labour government was only a matter of weeks away. As late as January 1966 much of the press predicted that Labour would lose the Hull North by-election and that the government would run into serious economic trouble and have great difficulty holding on till the autumn. More than any other election since 1945, the 1966 election is in danger of being misperceived in retrospect. Even the campaign, although it appeared to change few votes, is of great intrinsic interest. It found the two major parties simultaneously at a moment of transition. Labour was only slowly shedding the preoccupations of the forties and fifties; the Conservatives, fighting for the fourth consecutive time under a new leader, were attempting to reorient their policies and their whole approach to electoral politics. Neither process was near completion when the election intervened. The 1966 campaign also raised questions concerning the ability of parties to communicate policy during elections, the roles of journalists and broadcasters, and the functions, if any, of constituency organisations. 'Elections should be fun,' said Quintin Hogg. The 1966 campaign may not have been as much fun as some others, but it was none the less important for that. This book follows in the tradition of the six earlier Nuffield studies. Its authors were conscious of an obligation to provide ix

9 X PREFACE information comparable to that contained in earlier volumes. The following chapters thus include accounts of what the parties, the press, the broadcasters and the polls did centrally during the election; they also attempt to deal with some of the minutiae of electioneering as seen at the local level. Chapter I consists of an outline of the main political events between October 1964 and February 1966 and can probably be omitted by any reader already familiar with the period. But in addition this volume follows the 1964 study by examining in some detail the strategic and other problems that confronted each of the parties in the period before the campaign began. As in 1964 our account draws heavily on the press - whose coverage of British politics grows more thorough as each year passes - and on interviews with members of parliament and officials in all three parties. Our interviews began early in 1965, and almost every page that follows bears their imprint. Unfortunately the basis on which we gathered our information means that there can be no footnotes to our interviews, nor even any names in our list of acknowledgments. We trust that those who gave so freely of their time are already conscious of our gratitude. One final point must be made. The Nuffi.eld studies have never attempted to produce detailed explanations of why the electorate behaved as it did on particular occasions~ Such explanations can only be based on meticulous and elaborate survey research of a type well outside the scope of the series. There is, however, a detailed survey study of the British electorate now in train. In the summer of 1963 and again in October 1964 David Butler and Professor Donald E. Stokes of the University of Michigan commissioned interviews with a sample of 2,ooo electors in eighty constituencies. Many of the same voters were re-interviewed shortly after the 1966 election together with an additional sample. The results of this study, which is sponsored by Nuffield College, will be published late in It is hoped that it will yield new insights into how the British people perceived politics and politicians in the 196os. The most that the present volume can do in the meantime is to draw on the available opinion poll data and to provide a full analysis of the published voting figures. If our conclusions are tentative it is because, for the moment, only tentative conclusions are possible.

10 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE THE following list consists of a selection of books and articles on British elections and party politics published since the general election of I 964. A few books now in the press have also been included. Abrams, Mark, 'Social Class and Politics', Twentieth Century, vol. CL:XXIII, I965, no. I025, pp Bagley, C. R., 'Does Candidates' Position on the Ballot Paper Influence Voters' Choice?- A Study of the I959 and I964 British General Elections', Parliamentary Affairs, vol. XIX, I966, no. 2, pp. I62--'74 Bealey, F., Blondel, J., and McCann, W. P., Constituency Politics: a study of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Faber, I965. Beer, Samuel H., Modern British Politics, Faber, I965. Blondel, J., 'Towards a General Theory of Change in Voting Behaviour', Political Studies, vol. XIII, I965, no. I, pp Blumler, J. G., and McQuail, D., Election Television in the I96os, Faber, forthcoming. Budge, Ian, 'Electors' Attitudes towards Local Government: A Survey of a Glasgow Constituency', Political Studies, vol. XIII, I965, no. 3, pp Butler, D. E., 'A Comment [on swing]', Parliamentary Affairs, vol. XVIII, I965, no. 4, pp '7 Christoph, J. B., 'Consensus and Cleavage in British Political Ideology', American Political Science Review, vol. LIX, I965, no. 3, pp Deakin, Nicholas, ed., Colour and the British Electorate I964, Pall Mall, I965. Epstein, Leon D., 'The Nuclear Deterrent and the British Election of I964', Journal of British Studies, vol. V, I966, no. 2, pp. I Gallup Analysis of Election '66, published the Daily Telegraph, I966. Kahan, Michael, Butler, David, and Stokes, Donald, 'On the Analytical Division of Social Class', British Journal of Sociology, vol. XVII, I966, no. 2, pp. I22-32 Kaufman, Gerald, ed., The Left, Anthony Blond, I966. King, Anthony, 'Britain: the Search for Leadership', European Politics I, ed. by William G. Andrews, Van Nostrand, I965. King, Anthony, ed., British Politics, Hammond and D. C. Heath, I966. Lees, J.D., 'Aspects of third-party campaigning in the I964 General Election', Parliamentary Affairs, vol. XIX, I965-I966, no. I, pp. 83-go. Leonard, R. L., Elections in Britain, Van Nostrand, I967. McKenzie, Robert, 'Between Two Elections', Encounter, vol. XXVI, I966, no. I, pp , and no. 2, pp. 2I-9. Mitchell, B., and Boehm, K.,British Parliamentary Elections, Cambridge University Press, I966. Paterson, Peter, The Selectorate, MacGibbon and Kee, I967. Ranney, Austin, Pathways to Parliament, Macmillan and University of Wisconsin, I965. Rasmussen, J. S., The Liberal Party: A Study of Retrenchment and Revival, Constable, I965. Rasmussen, J. S., 'The Disutility of the Swing Concept in British Psephology', Parliamentary Affairs, vol. XVIII, 1965, no. 4, pp Rose, Richard, Politics in England, Faber, I965. Rose, Richard, ed., Studies in British Politics, Macmillan, Rose, Richard, Influencing Voters: A Study of Campaign Rationality, Faber, The Times House of Commons I966, published by The Times, I966. Watkins, A., The Liberal Dilemma, MacGibbon and Kee, I966. Windlesham, Lord, Communication and olitical Power, Jonathan Cape, xi