Was it the Sun Wot Won It?
The perceived failures of Labour's 1992 campaign influenced New Labour's decisions in 1997, but did it correctly identify what went wrong?
“It’s the Sun Wot Won It”, screamed the Sun’s front page the morning after the 1992 general election. Britain’s then widest-circulating tabloid had run the election-day headline “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?”, which—along with its personal attacks on Labour leader Kinnock and the party’s economic platform—it credited with turning the electorate away from Labour and handing a majority back John Major’s Conservatives. But the view gives the Murdoch-owned media too much credit.
Sun owner Rupert Murdoch may have given the paper’s editor Kelvin MacKenzie “a hell of a bollocking” over the grandiose display of self-congratulation. But MacKenzie printed what many were thinking. Kinnock blamed the newspaper’s backing of John Major for his defeat in his resignation speech (April 13), lamenting: “the Conservative-supporting press has enabled the Conservative Party to win yet again.”
Labour had enjoyed a substantial polling lead over the Conservatives throughout the final months of Margaret Thatcher’s time in office and, although the gap had closed under Major, it maintained its edge throughout 1991. Leading up to polling day, almost every major polling outlet predicted either a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party, or a small Labour majority. How did Labour throw away a sizeable lead in the final throes of the campaign?
There was a diversity of views in the immediate aftermath
Even in the immediate aftermath, the party wasn’t unanimous in its belief that the right-wing tabloids had cost them the election. During the post-election morning slot on TV AM, Tony Blair suggested voters may not have been willing to change the government in the midst of a recession.
On the left of the party, the view was that Kinnock’s Labour hadn’t been sufficiently ambitious:
‘We should have had a commanding majority of over 100 seats but the whole party has moved too far to the right. Too frightened to challenge vested interests’ –Ken Livingstone
Or that Labour had drifted too far from its core focus on class politics:
‘Let’s get back to basics and let’s represent our class. Let’s talk about building houses; let’s talk about getting down the dole queues; let’s talk about taking on the bosses”—Dennis Skinner
Seumas Milne, who would become Jeremey Corbyn’s strategy and communications director in 2015, cited a blurring of boundaries between Conservative and Labour ideologies, caused by Labour’s veer to the right of party politics.
‘Everything was sacrificed to so-called electability’—Diane Abbot
To be sure, there were many in the party that shared Kinnock’s view that the Sun and other tabloids had catalysed a late Tory swing, however, a comprehensive post-election analysis carried out by the Centre for Research into Elections and Social Trends at Oxford University in 1994 found limited evidence for the claim.
Support for the Conservatives fell among readers of pro-Tory tabloids and broadsheets by around 3 percent and 1 percent respectively, and Tory support rose among readers of the pro-Labour Daily Mirror and voters who did not read a newspaper.
Similarly, the right-wing media’s last-minute appeals to Liberal Democrat voters to vote Tory to prevent a Labour victory were ineffective. In the final week of the election, only 5 percent of Lib Dem voters thought that Labour would secure a majority; many of these voters would have preferred a Labour government to a Tory government anyway.
Was it policy then?
Shadow Chancellor John Smith’s ‘alternative Budget’, unveiled in a piece of political theatre in front of journalists and businessmen in March, favoured higher taxes and national insurance contributions to fund public spending aims. The budget became a lightning rod in Labour’s post-election analysis and its memory weighed on Tony Blair and Gordon Brown five-years later, who sought to shed Labour’s tax and spend image. Did voters genuinely fear a cut in disposable income under Smith and Kinnock’s tax plans in 1992?
Labour’s economic messaging was not the election liability it was branded. Labour remained ahead in the polls following Smith’s release of the tax and national insurance proposals—although there is some debate on the accuracy of 1992 polling (more on that next time). Taxation was not listed as a high priority among voters that deserted Labour; in interviews, many more cited a lack of faith in Kinnock’s ability to make meaningful improvements in public services as a deterrent.
If anything, the country’s mainstream economic thinking had inched closer to Labour’s core principles. Public opinion had begun to favour public spending to tackle poverty and expand NHS coffers and fewer saw the merits of privatisation.
Labour suffered from a messaging problem
The Conservative Party had no shortage of concise and memorable political slogans that cut through their opponent’s economic platform, while promoting their own economic lens: “a share owning/homeowning democracy,” “popular capitalism”, and “enterprise culture.”
With no knowledge of the Conservatives’ policy proposals, a voter familiar with these slogans could go into the ballot box with a clear sense of what a vote for John Major represented. Beyond a familiarity with Labour’s historical support for fairer taxation and investment in health and social care, the voter got no sense from concise messaging coming out of the Labour campaign of where the political battlefields lay, where Labour ideology differed from Conservative, and what its vision for Britain looked like.
John Major also entered the 1992 general election in a strong position. Although he was the leader of an incumbent party that was facing questions over its handling of a recent recession, he had faced limited public exposure under Thatcher. As Chancellor, Major had presented just one budget and enjoyed a relatively uneventful term in office. As a result, he carried minimal political baggage from the Thatcher years. He could retain support among traditional Conservative voters and had the opportunity to bring those that had abandoned the party under Thatcher back into the fold.
The voter-party bonds had been frayed
The Oxford University researchers found evidence that Labour loyalties had been in decline between 1979 and 1983 and were only just beginning to return by 1992. The fierce internal disagreement over nuclear disarmament and the splintering of the party with the formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981 had corroded bonds with long-term Labour voters. The relationship was still being rehabilitated.
Even if it wasn’t the Sun Wot Won It, and more likely due to lingering scars from the 1980s, the right-wing press’s scathing attacks on Kinnock and Labour’s economic platform loomed large in party memory. Blair’s approach to handling confrontational media outlets became one of appeasement and he nurtured a friendship with Rupert Murdoch based on mutual benefit. The shift to the right that had begun under Kinnock would accelerate before the next election, in a sharp pivot away from many of the party’s closely-held traditions.