Mashed-up metaphors aside, in the Times today, Daniel Finklestein is asking if any election since 1928 has returned the wrong government:

The proposition is that in every contest in these last 80 years the party that was more fit to govern has been victorious. Sometimes both of the main offerings were weak and unappealing, often the winner wasn’t much good, but always the winner was better able to conduct the business of government than was the loser.

There are a number of elections for which this proposition is, if hardly uncontroversial, still clearly correct. I thinks this holds for 1931 (where the National Government swept home, Labour having collapsed in disarray), 1935 (another National victory); 1945 (Labour’s landslide); 1955 and 1959 (Tories defeating a divided and incoherent Labour opposition); 1964 and 1966 (Wilson’s triumphs over the tired and outdated Tories); and for 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 (the market revolution having to be drummed into Labour’s head until they at least partly got the point).

My contribution is to admit that even though I voted Conservative in 1997, 2001 and 2005 and wanted to see the party advance, it wasn’t ready to govern.

For what it’s worth, he might be right. It’s perfectly plausible that his clever counterfactual might have some merit – if only there were some way we could have of checking. Language Log had a post on political counterfactuals the other day which had the perfect quote1: “How can this claim have any real content, given that it refers to a world as non-existent as the world of Narnia or Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings?”

Apart from the fact that the vast majority of data points he uses, until 1992, are times when the government was defeated (if the government is so bad that the public are sacking them, of course it’s going to be the right choice!), the electorate, by definition, cannot make the wrong choice. That’s what’s called democracy. History gets written by the winner. It’s not so much that Finklestein is wrong, it’s just that he’s framed the question in such a way that he could not possibly be anything other than right.

And in 2035, we’ll look back and say that the country made the right decision in 2010 when they sacked Gordon Brown’s Labour Party. And it’ll be true then, too.

  1. so as not to quote out of context, Language Log went on to conclude that the debate was still reasonable and there was good information to be found [↩]