Shortly after the Conservative Party won its fourth general election in a row in 1992, a symposium met to consider the question of whether Britain – formerly a country with regularly rotating government between the two main parties – was turning into a political version of Japan, where the same party had been in power for nearly forty years.
Even between the event occurring and the publication of a book based on it, Turning Japanese? Britain with a Permanent Party of Government (eds. Helen Margretts and Gareth Smyth), political events in both countries had taken a dramatic turn. In Japan the LDP lost power, starting a period of much greater political fluidity with even subsequent LDP Prime Ministers struggling to restore their party’s previous dominance. Meanwhile in Britain the collapse of the Conservative Party’s economic policies following Britain’s enforced exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) quickly made the government appear very vulnerable, even if debates in Labour continued on whether, as John Smith preferred, one more heave was all that was needed or whether, as Tony Blair insisted on after John Smith’s death, a more radical reshaping of the party was required to win the next election.
However, whilst the question of turning Japanese therefore quickly faded from consideration, the book provides a mini-case study in how easy or hard it is to make long-term predictions about the direction of Britain’s political system – a particularly pertinent point given the speculations now about future progressive majorities or centre-right alignments.
The most obvious lesson is how fragile apparently long-term shifts can turn out to be. Just as shortly after its record fourth victory 1992 the Conservative Party plunged into unpopularity that made talk of Conservative hegemony look woefully misplaced, so too those heralding a realignment in American politics epitomised by Barack Obama’s 2008 victory very quickly also looked to be talking about the past rather than the future. By contrast, in Canada the first minority government of Stephen Harper was treated by many Liberals as a small aberration in a tale of Liberal dominance, yet his repeated success at staying in power means that at some point a long period of minority rule starts looking like a more successful change. (That sentence too of course may soon look rather anachronistic depending on the outcome of the election likely due there in the next few months.)
John Curtice’s chapter read now with the advantage of hindsight enhances his reputation, for he accurately picked out how the quartet of Conservative election victories was brittle, for it was not accompanied by a major shift in the ideological views of the public. As Curtice puts it, “It is difficult to argue that the Conservatives have retuned the ideological heartstrings of the British electorate to a more right-wing pitch … The mistake that many commentators have made is to assume that voters simply vote on the basis of issues”. Moreover, as Robert Waller goes on to point out, a long-term tilting of the electoral playing field in the Conservative Party’s favour thanks to the electoral system and demographic and social changes only gave the party an edge – not a guarantee of victory. As the ERM debacle demonstrated, such edges accumulated over decades can be wiped out extremely quickly by political events.
Hence Vernon Bogdanor’s prediction that a formal electoral pact between Labour and the Lib Dems was necessary to give the Conservatives a real chance of defeat at the next election turned out to be wrong. 1997 did not turn out like that at all. So too Will Hutton’s concluding chapter saying that the route back to power for Labour was to become more critical of markets. New Labour did not turn out like that at all either.
The moral from this? As with the predictions from think tanks, sudden events such as the ERM exit and 9/11 can and frequently do completely overshadow the apparently deterministic long-term trends pieced together by pundits seeking to predict the future.
You can buy Turning Japanese? Britain with a Permanent Party of Government (eds. Helen Margretts and Gareth Smyth) from Amazon here (and at a rather cheaper price than some of the other books I’ve recently written about; just 1p in fact).
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5 Comments
Mark – one of your comments intrigues me:
Are you advocating that the Centre-Right is now your natural home?
We know that it is Clegg + his advisor’s stated aim – Jeremy Browne’s much criticised piece in the Guardian said as much. It is also worth reading Dominic Grieve’s thoughts in the Guardian today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/14/liberal-democrats-ditched-leftwing-voters
But are the disaffected Left of your party to read that even LDV advocates this journey to the Right?
I have noted before the embarrassingly bad short term record of people making these long-term political predictions.
After 92′ people said Labour would never be back in power. After 05′ people said the Tories would never be back in power. After 04′ people said the Democrats would never be back in power. After ’08 people said the Republicans would never be back in power. After the 1920’s I’m sure there were plenty of people suggesting the Liberals would never get back into government. That trend had 70 years of history behind it, but even that proved illusory.
It really is all a bit embarrassing. Basically it comes down to a really obvious point. You can’t make long-term predictions based on only a few data points. 3 or 4 data points (elections) is not enough to make any kind of long term prediction with any accuracy, especially one base don so many fluid and varying influences.
Not to mention the fact that politics is not some deterministic science, and hence these naive extrapolations of trends are just entirely logically bogus.
Sadly such stupidity is the diet we are commonly fed by our so-called expert commentators.
When people talk of “turning Japanese” they can mean either of two different (though ultimately connected) things.
The first is, as you descibe, a long period of rule by a single party which we haven’t had in the UK. What we have had is, to paraphrase the book’s subtitle, “Britain with a permanentidea of government”. Although the party changed in 1997 the ruling political economy continued with remarkably little change – witness NuLabour’s obsequious pandering to the City, its love affair with “free” (meaning oligopolistic) markets, an economy increasing driven by a property bubble and so on. Sure it spent more but then after the Tory years the infrastructure was badly delapidated so almost any government in that period would have done so. The bottom line was that inequality increased as the real (non-financial) economy progressively unravelled.
This sorry state of affairs continues under the Coalition. If it makes full term, we will also have achieved nearly 40 years of rule by a single (wrong) idea counting from Thatcher’s election in 1979.
The other thing that people sometimes mean by “turning Japanese” is their long economic stagnation of the last 20 years. The end of the amazing Japanese post-war economic miracle was the growth of an enormous stock market and property bubble – at its peak the grounds of the Emperor’s palace were (nominally) worth more than the entire state of California. The property bubble burst in 1991 but the LD government, deeply entwined with the banks as it was, made a fateful decision – to keep the banks afloat rather than let them fail as a result of their bad loans on shares and property.
The result has been that the formerly vibrant Japanese economy has stagnated for 20 years as it worked to pay off the huge debts the banks had run up. Now here we see that the Cameron and Osborne have basically decided to “turn Japanese” and save the banks. Vince Cable dissents but is overruled.
Unfortunately we did not start with a vibrant economy as the Japanese did so the outcome is likely to be very much worse for us.
Cuse: There’s plenty of speculation from all sorts of places about either future Lib Dem / Labour relations or future Lib Dem / Conservative relations and it would have been odd not to have mentioned them. Hence the reference to progressive (ie centre-left, at least in this context) as well as centre-right.
The moral is that we in the political class need a bit more humility. Political parties are fundamentally adaptive and opportunistic – and not the just the representation on earth of fundamental political values. Anything opportunistic and adaptive is impossible (not just difficult…) to predict. A second problem is the human tendency to predict the future by extrapolating from the past, without asking about turning points.
Thinking about the 1990s, it is Will Hutton’s bestseller “The State We’re in” that is the most spectacular howler. Not just his prediction that the Tory party was so entrenched in power that it was just about impossible to uproot it. He also lavished praise on the German and Japanese economic models just before both fell into a black hole from failing to adapt to the technology boom, amongst other things. I’m surprised Mr Hutton can still show his face in public.