"Few now sang England Arise, but
England had risen all the same"
So wrote AJP Taylor of the 1945 election in which the Labour Party first claimed a working majority in the House of Commons. Forty-two years on, Edward Carpenter's socialist song is even less often sung now than it was then. And yet its words - "the long night is over" - must express many people's feelings this morning far beyond England. For England arose again yesterday, and without a change in the heart of England there can never be a change of government. Scotland arose too, for whom the wait has been grimmer and the prospects this morning correspondingly brighter. Wales once more is a waking dragon today. Northern Ireland? That's another matter. But 1997 now joins 1945 and 1906 as the third great electoral landslide of the 20th century.
The long-awaited deed has at last been done in the grand style. The Conservative defeat is cataclysmic and would almost be incredible if the opinion polls had not so consistently predicted it - to the disbelief of almost all apparently knowledgeable observers. When Hazlitt once wrote of the Bourbons - "When a government, like an old-fashioned building, has become crazy and rotten, it stops the way of improvement, and serves only to collect disease and corruption." - also serves as an almost perfect description of the Conservatives.
Their government had to go because it was a bad government proposing obnoxious policies and because it was in the grip of an increasingly hysterical rage against Europe in all its forms. But it also had to go because it had governed too long and too loosely for the good of democracy and of politics. It was essential that the Conservatives were defeated and after the longest continuous single party rule since the 1832 Reform Act, at last they have been.
The impact on the Conservative Party is devastating. In its mind, the Conservative Party has already become an exclusively English party. Yesterday the voters confirmed that fate in a series of extraordinary strokes. No seats left at all in Wales for a party which had 36 of them in 1955. Scottish Tory representation probably obliterated altogether too, in a country where it had the majority of seats and votes in 1955 too. And, most humiliatingly of all, the English nationalist Europhobic Tory party was reduced to a minority in its own England too. The officer class of the Major years was swept away in its dozens - cabinet ministers, middle ranking ministers, the chairman of the Tory backbenchers, former ministers, would-be party leaders, the corrupt and the uncorrupt, the known and the unknown too. The cull respected no reputation and no faction, but it was effectively a vast public repudiation and punishment of a party which had squandered its election victory of 1992 in an orgy of nationalism and incompetence.
If anything represented the British right's total misreading of the political situation in 1997 it was the preposterous and self-deluding campaign fought by Sir James Goldsmith and his Referendum Party. Sir James cast a vast shadow over the Tory party which was panicked by him into believing that it had to engage in an auction of Europhobic promises in an effort to fend off what was seen by many Tories as a massive threat to their electoral survival. What the Tories did not grasp was that the threat was over social and economic policy, not the European delusion. The Tories looked in the wrong direction and have been punished more than ever in their history.
How will the general election of May 1997 be seen in ten years' time? As one of the great turning points of British political history? As the moment when the electorate finally nerved itself to put a stake through the heart of the living dead of Thatcherite Conservatism? As the moment when Britain at last gave itself the chance to construct a modern liberal socialist order, and, by doing so, caught the mood of the troubled western world?
If the early indications were a good guide to the full story of a remarkable night, then the answer to all these questions could be yes. Unlike 1992, the final result in 1997 seems likely to show that when the voters got into polling booths far more of them were prepared to stick with Labour than anyone really believed possible.
The most important conclusion from this is political. Labour has done its job brilliantly well and conclusively at a time when the public was clearly ready for change, perhaps even more ready for even more change than Labour itself was prepared to believe. Labour prepared itself with total thoroughness, disciplined itself to fight the longest and most professional election battle of its history, focused on social and economic issues which mattered far more to the voters than the European and Unionist issues that the Tories tried to promote. In the end the party was trusted because voters have an expectation of Labour's capacity to create a different kind of country, and that is what matters most.
It is impossible to quarrel with the message of Labour's thumpingly large mandate. But in the midst of a night of triumph it has to be said that its mandate is constrained by the same factor which ought to have constrained the Conservatives for so long, namely that the majority of the electorate have voted against the party which forms the government. The result of the election is a tonic - but it also unfair to the Conservatives. It is unrepresentative. That is one reason why Labour must not suddenly assume that the first-past-the-post electoral system which kept Thatcherism in power too long is a wonderful one. Labour must stick to its pledge to hold a referendum on our unsatisfactory electoral system.
If Labour was the big winner last night, it was also a spectacular evening for Paddy Ashdown and the Liberal Democrats. Mr Ashdown fought a fine campaign, and his party's strategy of targeting, especially in the south-west, was triumphantly vindicated. Tactical voting clearly worked very effectively in a number of seats, both to Labour's advantage and to that of the Liberal Democrats. In a parliament produced by a result like this, the Liberal Democrats will have precious little actual leverage, but they are in a better than ever to make their case as the true third party of the nation than they have ever been before.
But this is not a moment for emphasising the problems which lie ahead. There will be lots of time for that in the five years which now beckon for the new Labour government. This is the moment for celebrating the fact that a degenerate Conservative Party has been despatched into opposition and for marking the first Labour election victory for almost a quarter of a century. When Labour was smashed by Margaret Thatcher in 1983 and 1987, that prospect hardly seemed possible. That it has happened is a tribute to many unsung people, but also to Neil Kinnock, in particular, to John Smith and, of course, to Tony Blair. That it has happened in such crushing style is quite remarkable. We greet Labour's election with a congratulation, a cheer, and a surge of hope that it can live up to the expectations which so many millions have placed in it.