1 ‘The Private World of Political Science’, by Iain Macleod, M.P., in The Times, London, 30 10 1969 Google Scholar - a hostile review of Political Change in Britain, by David Butler and Donald Stokes, London 1969. The hostility of the active politician to the academic observer, in Britain, has been concentrated on those who study political behaviour and elections; though it has not prevented many politicians from being influenced by academic thinking, after the 1959 election, on the embourgeoisement of the working classes, or in the early 1960s on the importance of the young voter.

2 See, for instance, ‘The New Revolution in Political Science’, by Easton, David, in American Political Science Review, 12 1969, pp. 1051–61;CrossRefGoogle Scholaror recent numbers of PS, the APSA newsletter.

3 It may be remarked that academic involvement in partisan activity is not new. Harold Laski was for some time chairman of Labour’s National Executive Committee, and Ramsay Muir was chairman of the Liberal Party. It is detachment, rather than involvement, which is new.

4 The increasing emphasis which successive Nuffield studies of British elections have given to the period between elections reflects a growing concern with this level, and a belief that the campaign period itself is much less important to the electoral outcome.

5 In 1968, for instance, the Gallup Poll registered a conservative advantage over labour in electoral preferences of above 20% in April, May, and December; it was above 15% for most of the year. Labour’s highest point of popularity in 1963 had been to achieve a lead of 15% in two months.

6 Their Campaign Guide claimed that the annual average percentage price rises since 1964 had been 4.3%, compared with 2.5% in the last six years of the previous conservative government.

7 This dissociation of the national campaign from the campaigns in the constituencies has been noted by several commentators. See e.g. The British General Election of 1966, by Butler, D. E. and King, Anthony, London, 1966, p. 217,Google Scholar or Constituency Electioneering in Britain, by Kavanagh, D. A., London 1970, p. 61.Google Scholar

8 Kavanagh, op. cit., pp. 64–6, confirms the importance of canvassing and personal contact with voters as a source of information to the candidate, from a survey of candidates in the 1966 election. He adds some cautionary remarks about its reliability as a source, in that voters may tend to say what each candidate would like to hear. But for the candidate, its immediacy outweighs in value its possible unreliability. Opinion polls are a week to ten days old by the time they are published; and as the 1970 election appears to have shown, opinion can change considerably in a week.

9 Kavanagh, op. cit., p. 44, notes that the methods of constituency campaigning in England, ‘are essentially relics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’. However traditional they are, electors still seem to expect their candidates to run through them.

10 The new parliament contains 12 MPs who are not members of either the Conservative or Labour Parties, compared to 18 at the dissolution. But of these 4 represent Northern Ireland constituencies.

11 It may be remarked that the argument in Political Change in Britain, by Butler, D. E. and Stokes, Donald, London 1969,Google Scholar that labour support in Britain was growing for generational reasons, misled those commentators and politicians who received it in a ‘popularized’ form through reviews and newspaper articles; just as the academic discussion of the embourgeoisement of the electorate had misled people ten years before.

12 One conservative candidate in the West Riding, in his opening campaign speech, doubted whether Britain would see another general election if labour were re-elected. Another, induding the liberals in his attack, suggested in his election address that liberal policy might ‘encourage the spread of Communism in the world’.

13 One came across the oddest examples of the mistrust which was aroused by this image of labour. On a small housing estate just before polling day a young housewife asked my astonished wife, ‘but what will happen to Elizabeth and Philip if the Labour Party was elected?’ One wonders if some enthusiastic conservative canvasser had cast doubt on labour’s loyalty to the monarchy.

14 This was a major theme in his first full television interview as Prime Minister, on 24 September 1970.

15 To someone who was involved, the attitude of some of the communications media, in particular television, seemed to reflect, even to foster, this attitude. The BBC’s election night programme, with its anecdotes about removal vans at No 10 and jokes about Mr Wilson’s accommodation problems, displayed an almost flippant attitude to the unexpected result. To an involved academic, the activities and pronouncement of some academic observers seemed a little indecent; their meticulous but bland comments, their fascinated but detached air, like voyeurs of the passionate activity of the campaign.

16 Mr Wilson, speaking in Cardiff, 29 May 1970.

17 Students who attended an opening campaign rally in Manchester, for instance, commented that speaker after speaker had defended labour’s record on overseas aid, on race relations, on housing, by comparing it with what conservatives might have done rather than by presenting it as an achievement in itself.

18 Opinion Research Centre, reported in The Sunday Times, 28 June 1970. This report also contains some interesting material on the shift in opinion during the campaign, and the appeal of Mr Powell.

19 There is an interesting, and perhaps sad, comparison here with the performance of the FDP in the West German elections of 1969. They fought the campaign ‘with the most rational and intellectual slogans ever used by a German party’ - and lost support heavily. See ‘The Ostpolitik in the West German 1969 Elections’, Beyme, Klaus von, Government and Opposition, Spring 1970, p. 195.Google Scholar

20 The turnout in several central London seats dropped below 50% in 1970; in Stepney only 44% voted. Local holiday arrangements in Stoke-on-Trent cut the turnout there by 20% Compared with 1966; it is a pity for academic study, as well as for democracy, that Stoke was not allowed to vote a week earlier.

21 A good bibliography of authors in the United States and Britain who made this argument is to be found in the footnotes to ‘The New Democracy’, by Duncan, Graeme and Lukes, Stephen, in Political Studies, 1963, pp. 156–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The classic British exposition of the idea is to be found in ‘In Defence of Apathy: some Doubts on the Duty to Vote’, by Morris-Jones, W. H. in Ibid., 1954, PP. 23–37.Google Scholar