Last week, Labour won a famous victory. But it scored only about 34 per cent of the vote after a campaign in which it was deliberately opaque. Does it have a mandate, or just a majority? And if it does have a mandate, what is it?
In November 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson won an overwhelming victory in the US presidential election. It was the most emphatic result ever achieved by a national candidate. And the same election granted him vast majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Yet the day after LBJ’s big win, commentators were asking what he would use this vast power to achieve. They questioned whether this was really a vote for Johnson and his agenda at all. Perhaps he had triumphed just because of the assassination of his predecessor John F Kennedy in 1963, with LBJ the accidental beneficiary of goodwill. Or perhaps it had just been a vote against Barry Goldwater’s extremism rather than for LBJ’s liberalism.
Johnson’s answer came two months later with his state of the union address. He didn’t accept for one moment the critics’ version of the election result. Instead he claimed a mandate for a sweeping legislative programme and called it “the Great Society”.
The story of LBJ’s political initiative is told in the book Mandate Politics by the American political scientists Lawrence Grossback, David Peterson and James Stimson. The authors use it to illustrate their argument that mandates are achieved in the immediate aftermath of an election. They are not something formal, but instead the product of a media and political consensus that has to be shaped.
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They also argue that if a president achieves a consensus about having a mandate (they give Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 as another example) it is profoundly advantageous to them. The perception that LBJ had a mandate for his Great Society, something he hadn’t talked of during the campaign, helped him speed through civil rights legislation and other bills. A majority alone might not have been enough.
This is a theory of mandates designed, of course, for the United States where the president has to cajole legislators. But, for all the differences here in the UK, where MPs can be whipped more easily, the theory still holds.
After the 1997 election Tony Blair began to argue, quite explicitly, that he had won a mandate to increase spending on public services. This despite the fact that he had spent the election campaign saying he would match Tory spending plans. Yet his claim of a mandate was successful. His majority was achieved by the results on election day. But his mandate was achieved later, by argument and shaping of the media and political consensus.
Blair was helped, of course, by his having won 43 per cent of the vote rather than 34 per cent. But even more, he was helped by his instinctive understanding of what Labour voters anticipated he would do. He wasn’t breaking any promises or disappointing any expectations. He had a feel for what would be accepted.
And this common agreement that he had a mandate to increase spending was profoundly helpful to him. He had the majority in the Commons to do what he wanted. But the mandate allowed him to keep the public with him and to mute opposition in the media.
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In exactly the same way, George Osborne and David Cameron did much of the work on their mandate immediately after victory rather than before. Indeed, their mandate for austerity was shaped into something stronger than their position in the Commons, because they hadn’t won a majority and required a coalition.
It is important to note that Blair and Osborne took care. And they did it quickly, as soon as they won power. A government cannot claim a mandate for any old thing or at any old time. When George Bush and John Major increased taxes having fought anti-tax election campaigns (“Read my lips, no new taxes”, Bush had said, while Major had campaigned against “Labour’s tax bombshell”), they both suffered badly. It was a political fiasco to do such a thing well into the life of an administration and in direct contravention of a main thrust of their campaigns.
So what does the theory of mandate politics suggest to Keir Starmer? He has won a huge majority and an impressive victory with the only election system we have. He is entitled to claim a mandate. But it does not come automatically with a majority. He has to claim it. Achieving a mandate is work he is still doing. You could see it in his speech outside No 10 and the chancellor’s words about planning.
What is a credible response to the charge that Labour only won 34 per cent of the vote and that this was primarily a vote against the Conservatives, rather than for anything Labour proposed?
One way is to own this accusation, to adopt it. It is to say, yes, it was a vote against the Conservatives. A mandate to behave and perform differently to the Tories. It wasn’t just 34 per cent of voters who provided a mandate for this change, but 76 per cent who declined to back the Tories.
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Labour’s majority allows it to legislate. But a majority can still be resisted by state institutions and the government machine. A mandate, on the other hand, helps to lower bureaucratic barriers. The vote against the Conservatives was clearly a vote to reshape government and its conduct, a vote to ensure higher standards of integrity and professionalism and for a government machine that delivers.
A majority can still be undermined by party activists and dissident MPs. A mandate helps control and discipline the party. The vote against the Conservatives was a vote against party disunity and against chaos. But it was broader than just a vote for Labour and was not a vote for an ideological left.
A majority can still be resisted politically by the opposition and vested interests. A mandate will help Starmer to keep the public with him as he makes difficult changes.
The fight over planning will be one such difficult change. The struggle with vested interests in the health services will be protracted, the reimagining of the state and economy prompted by new technologies will use political capital, and there will almost certainly need to be tax rises (other than the ones Labour has ruled out) to avoid big cuts in public services in the next year or two. Each of these battles will be far more easily won if Labour uses this first month to link its election victory explicitly to the hard choices it now has to make.
Labour has won the election, but there is still a vital part of the campaign before them. They have to tell the story of their victory and make that story stick.
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daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk
