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Election 2010 - what does it mean?
Two damaging wars, an economic crisis, a government that has served three terms in power, and an unpopular Prime Minister. If you wanted to create the circumstances for an opposition victory in the UK 2010 election you couldn’t do much better than this. Yet the Tories have been unable to win a clear victory in the way Labour did by a landslide in 1997 after 18 years of Conservative rule. In local elections on the same day as the national poll the Conservatives and LibDems lost ten or more councils while Labour gained at least a dozen. Labour has been written off many times in the past. And Britain has been seen as natural Conservative territory that social democracy has to fight to win every time. But, despite heavy losses for Labour nationally, this result doesn’t support such a thesis. One of the most striking things about the 2010 election is that the Conservatives, with an articulate young leader, failed to win more handsomely in circumstances about as propitious for them as it’s possible to get.
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PolityPlace of publication
Polity Blog - Anthony GiddensDepartment affiliated with
- Sociology and Criminology Publications
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2012-02-06Usage metrics
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