Like Bush, Major is the pragmatic successor to a radical reformer of the right. Like the Democrats in America, Labor tried to regain power by moving toward the center, decrying the Darwinian downside of conservative economics. “It’s time for a change,” said Labor’s campaign posters. The party wanted to end Thatcher’s calculated neglect of the public sector and raise taxes substantially on upper-income citizens. But the prospect of further upheaval proved unpalatable. “We made our change in the autumn of 1990, and a very important change it was indeed,” said retiring Tory M.P. Barney Hayhoe, who had voted to usher Thatcher out of office.
Last week’s result demonstrated the bedrock conservatism of the British electorate. Major’s 42 percent of the popular vote came within a percentage point of Thatcher’s resounding victory in 1983, after she won the Falklands War. The existence of a strong third party, the Liberal Democrats, and a clutch of smaller factions meant that Major didn’t even need an absolute majority of the popular vote to control Parliament. With his margin there, he should be able to govern effectively for the next five years, controlling–as British prime ministers do-both the executive and legislative functions of government. “Today John Major can walk on water,” said Robert Worcester, chairman of the MORI polling group. “The British system is an elected dictatorship.”
It was a devastating defeat for Neil Kinnock, the Welsh coal miner’s son who had moved Labor from loony leftism and unilateral disarmament to a position much like that of the mainstream social democratic parties in Western Europe. Yet Major successfully waged a negative campaign against him, suggesting that underneath all his opportunistic switches of position Kinnock was an unrepentant socialist. Labor’s gain of 42 seats was no consolation to Kinnock. On the morning after his loss, he said petulantly that he felt “dismay, sorrow for those who do not share [my] personal good fortune and who, as a result of further years of Tory government, will experience further disadvantage.” “The world must look very bleak to him,” said Iain Crawford, a lecturer on government at the London School of Economics. “He’s reformed the party considerably. But if he couldn’t win last night, there’s no way he can.” Kinnock was expected to resign as leader. His party would have to continue its painful search for some way to surmount the ancient British barriers of class and ideology in order to forge a broader center-left alliance (following story).
Polltakers were almost equally humiliated. The final preelection surveys and the exit polls on voting day did detect a swing to the Tories. But they suggested that the outcome would be a “hung parliament” in which no party commanded a majority. The last preelection survey by the usually reliable MORI organization showed Labor getting 39 percent of the popular vote, to 38 percent for the Tories; the actual results for both parties fell outside the 3 percentage-point margin of error. “This is the worst result for British polling since British polling was invented,” said MORI’s Worcester.
There were so many early predictions of a Labor victory that the numerous polls-53 separate surveys during the four-week campaign-may have turned into a sort of echo chamber, with voters telling the polltakers what they thought they should say. Some British voters may have used the polls the way American voters occasionally use primary elections: to send a threatening message " that does not reflect how they actually intend to vote when the chips are down. And perhaps some liberal-minded members of the middle class were ashamed to admit that they would vote for Major. “I think there may be a closet Toryism, a kind of Conservative shamefacedness about voting one’s self-interest,” said Martin Ceadel, a political scientist at New College, Oxford.
The polls showed that about a third of the voters had soft loyalties, or none at all. And surveys suggested that Britons regarded Major as a more reliable leader than Kinnock. Margaret Thatcher claimed personal vindication from the election results. “Everything that was done in the past 13 years will now be conserved and built upon,” she said. But since taking over from her 17 months ago, Major has moved away from both the harsh spirit and the more unpopular substance of Thatcherism. He scrapped her hated community-service “poll tax” and walked a tightrope at last December’s European Community summit in Maastricht, where he managed to look pro-European while preserving Britain’s right to opt out of a common currency if it chooses. For now, at least, Thatcherism was in abeyance. The end of the cold war rendered her staunch anti-communism obsolete. The long recession, which has driven the unemployment rate to 9.4 percent and rising, took the bloom off her economic theories.
Major’s victory may mark the resurgence of the " wets," Thatcher’s derisive term for moderate Tories. The prime minister described his future program in mostly vague-though scrupulously kind and gentle-terms. He called for “wealth hand in hand with welfare” and for the development of “a classless society.” He promised to “build up and cherish” the popular National Health Service, lately beleaguered by his own government’s attempt to introduce a degree of choice and other market forces. He also promised consideration for the large majority of voters who did not support the Tories. Major said “my job as prime minister is to make sure I never overlook their interests when I frame legislation and when I decide what the government does.”
Major would deny that he is a wet. “He’d say he’s got a synthesis of the old Tory position and the new one,” says Ceadel. “But as to what he’ll actually choose to do, given that he’s not constrained anymore, I just don’t know. That question goes to the heart of the ambiguity that is ‘Majorism’.” He will try to lead by consensus, and his reduced majority will reinforce his natural tendency to caution and compromise. But a prime minister can govern for all of his allotted five years on less than a 21-seat margin, and that gives John Major plenty of time to work out his own definition of Majorism.
..CN.-A Win for the ‘Wets’
Major’s moderate Tories lost seats to Labor. But they retained a majority in the Commons, and they have the support of some small-party M.P.s.
Party Before Now Gain/Low Conservative 368 336 -32 Labor 229 271 +42
