AN ODD feature of the British election has been the failure to publish the result. Oh, I know they've told us how many seats each party won, dished up endless detail about individual constituencies, and there have been maps galore and figures showing the percentage of the vote each party won in various parts of Britain.
But what I have been unable to find in any of the British broad sheets, either on Saturday or Sunday, is a table setting out the actual number of votes east for each party.
Now that's a fairly important omission, and one that would be inconceivable in Ireland. Without these data it is impossible to judge to what extent there was in fact a dramatic swing to Labour, or just large scale Conservative abstention.
Struggling over the weekend to solve this mystery, I tracked down some clues that made it possible to reconstruct what actually happened. One British paper was so indiscreet as to disclose the number of votes Labour received this time and the number the Conservatives received in 1992. Another gave turnout figures for the two elections.
Putting these clues together with the vote shares for the parties in these two elections, it has been possible to reconstruct for the benefit of Irish Times readers the accompanying table (British papers please copy?)
First of all, although the electorate is now half a million larger than in 1992, the voter turnout this time was down by over 2,250,000. In other words, there was a remarkable drop of about one twelfth in the turnout.
Now comparing these 1997 figures with those for 1992 we can see the scale of the voting shift. Broadly speaking, 4,500,000 people who voted Conservative in 1992 failed to do so on this occasion, almost one third. Moreover, one eighth of the 1992 Liberal Democrat voters also abandoned their former allegiance, over 650,000.
Indeed, allowing for the fact that the electorate is somewhat larger today, it would appear that some 5,400,000 of the 1992 Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters abandoned their allegiances this time. What did these 5,400,000 people do with their votes? Well, 800,000 voted for small parties or Independents, many for air James Goldsmith's Referendum Party. And some 2,700,000, half the total, stayed at home. The number who switched to Labour was only about 1,900,000, barely a third of the total.
By no possible standard can this be judged to have been a voting landslide. The total Labour vote rose by only one sixth. What made it seem like a landslide, of course, was the absurd first past the post voting system, as a result of which this one sixth increase in the Labour vote increased its parliamentary representation by a half.
The scale of the Tory party's defeat was also grossly exaggerated by this electoral factor. A drop of just under one quarter in its vote share had the effect of halving its parliamentary strength.
The disproportion between the scale of Labour's gain and the much greater magnitude of the Conservative loss was accounted for by the perverse relationship between the Liberal Democrat performance in terms of votes and seats.
Losing one eighth of its votes the party increased its representation by over 2 1/2 times! For once the British electoral system worked in its favour, although, of course, if this election had been held on a proportional representation basis, its 18 seats would have grown not to 46 but to 113!
THE significance of all this is that, in terms of votes, Labour's triumph is much more vulnerable to reversal than may have appeared from the way its victory has been reported in the media.
True, the disarray into which the Tories have been plunged by their right wing Europhobes may prove too persistent to allow them to recover, within the lifetime of this parliament, the ground they have lost.
But if the Tories have the good sense, and the good luck, to eschew the surviving Europhobe leadership candidates and choose someone who can lead them from the centre rather than the extreme right, they could fairly readily recover the support of the 700,000 Tory voters who this time went on strike and stayed at home.
Such a recovery of the Conservative abstentionist vote - together, perhaps, with the possible disappearance of the anti Tory tactical voting on this occasion by people infuriated by the sleaze, greed and xenopobia of the Tory party of the mid 1990s - could go a long way towards restoring the party's fortunes, even if at the next election there were to be no major swing back from Labour to the Conservatives.
In other words, this election, with its 44.4 per cent Labour vote, has not been such a decisive and sweeping victory for Labour as appears at first sight. And one must presume that at some stage the British media will get round to, publishing and analysing the votes east on May 1st so that the reality of what occurred may reach the British people.