| Summary/Abstract |
This was the most interesting election of my lifetime, and in many ways the most surprising. Quite why what happened actually happened, we don't altogether know. For the most part, we can only speculate. The most remarkable of the election's results was the return of the two-party system to England. The two major parties together won eighty-eight per cent of the votes cast—a figure not seen since the 1970s. At one go, this reverses a tendency apparent since the late 1950s, which was for the proportion of the vote won by the Conservatives and Labour to fall—not steadily, but remorselessly. Furthermore, there were perfectly good historical and sociological reasons for this; and of the two parties, they harmed Labour most. At this election, the increase of the Tory vote was the easiest to explain—or apparently the easiest. The most difficult to explain was the extraordinary rise in the Labour vote. International experience, as well as our own, suggested that the condition of the social democratic parties everywhere was almost terminal: the collapse of the French Socialist Party merely the most extreme example of this. It is true that the evidence could be a bit mixed. The Australian Labor Party has staged an unexpectedly strong recovery in the last couple of years, but there was little to suggest that the British Labour Party had done so.
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