Attitudes, Issues, and Labour Party Decline in England, 1974-1979

This article critically examines the argument that the Labour party's poor performance in the 1979 general election reflects a long-term decline that is largely the result of its own natural support groups, Labour identifiers and the working class, developing political attitudes that serve increasingly to estrange them from the party's traditional principles. This argument further holds that issues emerged in the 1979 campaign that, deriving from these same principles, compounded the tendency for Labour supporters to defect at the polls. We argue that these findings are conceptually and methodologically flawed and that the evidence does not, in fact, support this explanation of Labour party decline. We conclude, instead, that what the evidence does suggest is that Labour suffered from a widespread voter “backlash” as a result of having been in office during a particularly difficult period in British social, economic, and political history.