OK, so it wasn't a great night for Labour, but it wasn't a terrible one either. The majority currently predicted is 66 and, as has been pointed out by many people, in historical perspective that is more than comfortable. In so far as one can attach aggregate meanings to the individual decisions of large numbers of people - and this without detailed after-the-event research - it seems clear that the voters of Britain have exacted an electoral price from Labour because of their (the voters') opposition to the Iraq war and/or to procedural short-cuts and improprieties in the way the case for it was made in cabinet and parliament. Those of us on the left who supported and support the war would prefer that these same voters had been more receptive to the reasons in favour of it which have been central for us; but it hasn't been so, and this is the democratic outcome. We have simply to look ahead on that basis.
However, there is no need for dejection. Even the Guardian, not Tony Blair's best friend in recent times, has managed a reasonably proportionate editorial today, in which after making the inevitable points about the war, it says:
[T]here is another perspective on yesterday's voting that is part of the balanced picture too. Yesterday the British people finally did something they have never done before in the whole of our political history. By electing Labour for a third consecutive term with a third successive working majority, albeit a far smaller one than in 1997 and 2001, the voters made a choice from which they had persistently drawn back through the whole of the 20th century. Neither the fact that Labour's third win in a row has been widely expected, nor the fact that this third win is much less overwhelming in scale than its two predecessors should be allowed to detract from the essential importance of the event. Tony Blair has achieved something that Ramsay MacDonald never got near, that eluded even Clement Attlee, that Harold Wilson strove unsuccessfully to do and of which the late James Callaghan could only dream. The prospect this morning is of Labour in power for more than a decade. Our nation is set for the longest period of peacetime progressive government in its modern history.Polly Toynbee too, for whom, strangely, Tony Blair 'is the man who alone takes the blame for so many lost seats' - what, is the parliamentary Labour party, and that section of the party in the country which supported Blair over the war, made up of automata without either judgement or will? - writes:
Nonetheless, this is still Labour's third great win with a majority that would have seemed handsome enough to previous Labour governments. When the votes are combined with the Lib Dems' strongest showing since its alliance with the SDP in 1983, there is no major rightward shift.Of course, it has already been said plenty of times, and will be said plenty more, that 36% of the popular vote is the smallest share for any government since... I don't in fact know when. But while I wouldn't want to be taken as suggesting, by the following remark, that I defend the existing voting system in Britain, this would-be damning statistical fact has a plain companion fact: namely, that Labour's competitors received an even smaller share of the popular vote. What ya gonna do?
So I'd say optimism not only of the will in this case, but also of the intelligence. It could have been very much worse.