European Journal of Political Rcsearch 14: 651-667 (IW6) 0 Martinus Nijhoff Publishcrs. Dordrccht - Printed il l the Nctherlands

The nuclear weapons issue in the 1983 British general election

Ian McALLISTER’ and Anthony MUGHAN’ 1 Australian Defence Force Academy, Campbell, Ausrruliu; 2 Australian National University, Cunberra, Australia

Abstract. In common with many other Western European countries, the issue of nuclear weapons rose to political prominence in Britain in the course of the 1980s. However, whereas the issue was often taken up by newly formed environmentalist parties elsewhere, it differentiated the tradi- tional parties one from the other in Britain. This was made possible by the Labour party’s manifesto commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament. This article details the views of the British electorate on the nuclcar issue and assesses its importance for individual voting patterns in the 1983 general election. The electorate shows itself able to distinguish between. and hold opposing views on, nuclear weapons in principle and control over them in practice. Its general support for them, however, means that Labour‘s perceived hostility to them cost it a considerable number of votes in net terms. These losses could have been mitigated, perhaps even turned into gains, had the party emphasised the security problems stemming from Britain’s lack of control over American nuclear weapons on its soil.

After decades of stability, Western European party systems are in a state of flux. This is nowhere more apparent than in the tendency for their constituent parties to have become more numerous and their electorates more volatile in their voting patterns. As a result, the last twenty or so years have seen traditional cleavages become less salient for many citizens and new ones emerge to command their electoral loyalty (Crewe and Denver, 1985; Daalder and Mair, 1983; Dalton, Flanagan and Beck, 1984). In particular, the unprece- dented affluence and prosperity of the 1960s Europe brought into the elector- ate a ‘postmaterialist’ generation of voters whose lifelong economic security led them to become politically concerned about such topical societal problems as environmental protection, sexual equality, human rights and nuclear disar- mament (Inglehart, 1977).

Coinciding with the breakdown of detente between the United States and Soviet Union and the former’s efforts to station a new generation of cruise nuclear missiles in various Western European countries, nuclear disarmament has become politically the most contentious of this syndrome of issues in the 1980s. These developments have helped to revive the early 1960’s anti-nuclear movement, which had effectively gone into political eclipse (Listhaug, 1986). Comparatively little is known about how western publics feel towards nuclear weapons and how any feelings that they might have affect their vote. No-one doubts the electoral salience of the nuclear debate; it is intimately associated in the public mind with the recent rise of highly vocal and avowedly anti-nuclear

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‘green’ parties throughout Western Europe (Kitschelt, 1986, Muller-Rom- mell, 1985, Nelkin and Pollak, 1981). Their willingness to resort to extra- parliamentary action means that these new, non-pragmatic ‘parties of princi- ple’ tend to have monopolised the nuclear debate.’

This monopolisation of the nuclear debate has had two consequences. The first is that, as the term implies, the ‘nuclear issue’ is commonly thought to be unidimensional and polarised. People must be for or against nuclear weapons; their ‘all or nothing’ character does not allow for a conditional stance on them. The second consequence is that the nuclear conflict tends to be seen as taking place outside the confines of the established party system, the assumption appearing to be that the established parties cannot be differentiated in their pro-nuclear stance. It could even be argued that it was the inability of the established parties to accommodate newly salient concerns like the nuclear one that allowed ‘green’ parties to emerge to electoral significance in the first place.

This article argues that for the electoral importance of the nuclear weapons issue to be appreciated in the specific context of contemporary Britain, it must be seen as neither unidimensional, nor as erupting outside the established party system. Rather, it will be shown that the issue has been contained within the existing party system and has substantially affected the division of the vote between parties traditionally differentiated on other cleavage dimensions. Perhaps more interestingly, it will be shown that the electorate’s response to the nuclear armament debate has not involved a blanket rejection or endorse- ment of the use of nuclear weapons in Britain’s defence. Rather, its response has been more complex and multi-faceted, with each facet entailing different consequences for the balance of support between the established parties.

The argument proceeds in three stages. It starts by sketching the back- ground to the nuclear disarmament debate in British politics. We then show how it is a valence issue insofar as most electors favour nuclear weapons and most feel that the country is safer for having them. This consensus will be seen to disappear, however, when it comes to the question of United States nuclear weapons on British soil; more often than not the electorate feels their presence makes Britain less safe. Finally, wc address in detail the question of the role played by these different attitudes to nuclear weapons in determining the outcome of the 1983 general election.

The nuclear weapons issue in British politics

Nuclear weapons have been an integral part of Britain’s national defence since the period immediately succeeding the Second World War. In the years since, the Conservative party has never questioned the desirability of, or need for,

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such weapons. A similarly unambiguous commitment has not characterised the Labour party, however, and this is largely because its left-wing has never accepted the need for nuclear armaments. Indeed, the whole issue has re- mained a central problem for the Labour left, despite the support for nuclear weapons shown by successive Labour Governments.

Ironically, it was a Labour government, led by Clement Attlee, that for- mally committed Britain to developing her own nuclear weapons in January, 1947. The passage of a 1946 United States law forbidding the sharing of nuclear technology had made a joint project with the Americans impossible. Along with the building of the bomb, this Labour government made two further commitments that were to form the basis of the country’s postwar defence policy. Firstly, unconditional support was given to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as the major buffer against Soviet expansionism in Western Europe. Secondly, the United States was granted permission to establish military bases in Britain.

The first attack on the Labour party’s nuclear commitment came in 1960 after a Conservative government had just been elected for the third successive time. Discontented Labour activists, supporting the newly formed Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), pushed through a conference resolution committing any future Labour government to unilateral nuclear disarmament. Largely through the efforts of Hugh Gaitskell, the then Labour leader, this policy was reversed at the following year’s annual conference, although a resolution was passed which called for the removal of America’s Scottish nuclear submarine base from Britain (McKenzie. 1963: 612-17,622-24).

In 1962, the then Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, agreed with the United States’ president to update Britain’s nuclear deterrent capa- bilities with the Polaris system of submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Sub- sequent Labour governments supported this agreement, although there was a manifesto commitment in 1974 not to initiate a ‘new generation’ of nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the Labour government elected in that year had, by 1977, undertaken an appraisal of the various options for replacing Polaris. It was left to the incoming Conservative government to make a decision in favour of the Trident submarine-based missile system.

Following the breakdown of detente and the escalation of international tension at the end of the 1970s, two developments changed Labour’s tradi- tionally moderate approach to the nuclear issue. First, the CND once again began to attract mass support, notably from Labour supporters and activists - just as it had done in the 1960s (Parkin. 1968). Second, Michael Foot succeeded James Callaghan as leader of the Labour party in November 1980. As a long- standing anti-nuclear campaigner and CND activist, Foot was entirely sympa- thetic to unilateral nuclear disarmament. These developments helped a con- fident and assertive left-wing of the party to pass a unilateral disarmament

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resolution at the 1982 annual conference committing any future Labour government to

an unequivocal, unambiguous commitment to unilateral disarmament . . . (by) opposing unconditionally the replacement of Polaris by Trident or any other system and the deployment of cruise missiles, the neutron bomb and all other nuclear weapons in or by Britain (and by) closing down all nuclear bases, British or American, on British soil or in British waters (quoted in The Economist, 9 October 1982. p. 15).

In effect, the party was seeking to commit the country to the dismantling of the two basic tenets of postwar defence policy, support for NATO and an Amer- ican presence in Britain, at a time of escalating international tension.

The unique feature of the 1982 situation, though, was that it the first time that the party leadership had split on the nuclear issue in public. During the 1983 election campaign, the party’s former leader and ex-Prime Minister, James Callaghan, as well as two prominent shadow spokesmen, Denis Healey and Roy Hattersley, were vocal in their opposition to unilateralism, the latter two attempting to cloud the nuclear issue generally by making the scrapping of Polaris dependent on arms limitation negotiations with the Soviet Union (Kellner, 1985: 77-78). Foot, meanwhile, would not unequivocally reject unilateralism, although as it became clear that, like the split within the party leadership, disarmament was unpopular with the electorate, he did attempt to downplay the party’s commitment to scrap Polaris. In one television inter- view, he was asked seven times to elaborate on the party’s nuclear policy only ‘to give a qualified response that did nothing to dispel the public impression of uncertainty and ambiguity in the party leadership’ (Kellner, 1985: 77; see also Dunleavy and Husbands, 1985: 89-91).

The Conservative party, on the other hand, remained steadfast and un- wavering in its long-standing commitment to nuclear weapons and supported the replacement of Polaris with Trident, as well as the United States deploy- ment of cruise missiles if the Soviet Union continued to deploy its SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe. The Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance (Al- liance), for its part, took up an intermediate position between the two major parties, arguing that NATO should remain the basis of Britain’s defence strategy, but that there should be a move away from complete dependence on the early use of nuclear weapons. They opposed the introduction of Trident into Britain and held that the deployment of cruise missiles should proceed only if the Soviet Union refused to limit its own missile deployment.

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Public opinion and nuclear weapons

This, then, is where the British political parties stood on the issue of nuclear weapons in the 1983 general election. But how did the public in general and each party's supporters in particular feel about this issue? Table 1 summarises different aspects of popular opinion about nuclear armaments; these are attitudes towards nuclear weapons in general, towards British nuclear weap- ons and towards United States weapons on British soil. Column (1) averages the responses for the electorate as a whole and Columns (2), (3) and (4) for voters for the three main parties respectively.

The results show an interesting variation in the pattern of public opinion across the three questions. In the first place, there is no uniform distribution of views on the various aspects of the nuclear issue. N o more than a minority (33 per cent) of the British electorate favours increasing the country's stock of nuclear weapons, whereas a slightly higher proportion (34 per cent) favours getting rid of them altogether and the remaining 33 per cent feels indifferently about them.*

What should caution vote-seeking parties against adopting an anti-nuclear

Trrhle 1. Aspects of the nuclear issue and the vote.

All respondents' Con. Lab. Allnce. (1) (2) ( 3 ) (4)

I . Favours nuclear weapons: Increase 33 Get rid of 34 Indifferent 33 (Total) (100)

2. If Britain has US nuclear missiles: Safe 37 Less safe 48 Doesn't matter 2 Don't know 13 (Total) (100)

3. I f Britain has its own nuclear weapons: Safe 61 Less safe 28 Doesn't matter 1 Don't know 10 (Total) (100)

48 17 24 1s 56 41 37 26 34

(100) (100) (100)

57 19 21 27 70 59 2 I I

14 10 13 (100) (100) (100)

79 42 58 12 49 30

1 0 I 8 9 11

(100) (100) (100)

Includes those who voted for minor parties. refused or did not votc.

Source: 1983 British Elcction Study.

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stance, however, is the different distribution of views when it comes to the role of nuclear weapons in Britain’s national defence. While generally favourable, the electorate is not uncritical about such weapons in this role. Rather, its attitude is crucially mediated by the question of which power controls, and is responsible for, the nuclear arms located on British soil. A clear majority of electors believes that Britain is safer for having its own nuclear weapons, while only one in four of them feels that such weapons make the country less safe. But the distribution of opinion is reversed when it comes to United States nuclear arms on British soil. Almost one elector in two feels that they make Britain less safe, as compared to slightly more than one in three who are of the view that they make the country safer. I t is impossible to explain this distrust of the United States’ nuclear presence from these data, but it is clearly the case that nuclear weapons are generally regarded as being of benefit to Britain if they are British and a liability if they are American.

The first indication of an electoral significance for the nuclear issue, is the observation that these attitudes arc not uniformly distributed across voters for the three major parties. This is obvious from columns ( 2 ) . (3) and (4) of Table 1. The biggest exception to the general pattern noted above is Conservative voters: eight out of ten of them believe that Britain is a safer place for having its own nuclear arsenal, more than half of them also hold the same view for United States nuclear weapons and just less than half of them favour an increase in nuclear weapons generally. The party’s firm pro-nuclear stance, in other words. would seem to have struck a sympathetic chord with those voting for it, Labour‘s unilateralist stance. o n the other hand, does not seem to have been equally acceptable to its voters. who. despite being overwhelmingly wary of nuclear weapons in general and United States nuclear weapons in particu- lar, divided almost equally on the consequences of Britain’s own nuclear weapons. Finally, Alliance supporters took an intermediate position between supporters of the two major parties; a majority of them welcomed British nuclear weapons, whereas a similar number were cautious about the implica- tions for Britain’s safety of United States weapons.

Holding an opinion on an issue may be a necessary condition of that issue’s having an impact on the way people vote. but it is not a sufficient one. For the issue to have electoral impact, this opinion must be accompanied by a recogni- tion that the parties offering themselves at the polls adopt different stances on that issue (Campbell et al., 1960). Table 2 speaks to this matter. It summarises respondents’ own position with regard to nuclear weapons, as well as each party’s supporters’ perception of where the three major parties stood on the issue. Respondents were asked to place themselves and the individual parties on a scale running from -10 (most unfavourable) to + I 0 (most favourable). For ease of interpretation. their rehponses have been re-scored on a zero to 10 metric. zero denoting most unfavourable and 10 most favourable.

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Two conclusions emerge from Table 2. The first concerns just how accurate the electorate was in its perception of the position of the parties on the issue; the Conservative party, with a score of 7.8, was quite rightly seen as being most favourably disposed to nuclear weapons and Labour, with a score of 1.6, least favourably disposed. Scoring 4.4, the Alliance was, again quite correctly, placed almost exactly halfway between the two major parties. The second conclusion speaks to the possibility that, their own position being dictated by their perception of where their preferred party stood on the issue, electors had in fact no independent views on nuclear weapons. If this were the case, of course, the issue could not be argued to have had an independent effect on the way people voted. There proves, however, to be little evidence to support this argument. Conservative voters, with a score of 5.9. are less supportive of such weapons than they perceived their party, with a score of 7.3, to be. Labour voters, on the other hand, were less hostile to them than they thought their party to be.

Tables 1 and 2 together, then, show, first, that the British electorate clearly differentiated between national responsibility for the nuclear weapons located on British soil. While the majority saw the country’s own weapons as making Britain more safe, almost half thought that United States weapons made it less safe. Although these questions relate to the safety of Britain rather than to the political acceptability of nuclear weapons, this divergence of views undoubt- edly allowed the CND to mobilise popular feeling against the siting of cruise missiles in Britain and thereby facilitated the issue’s finding its way onto the Labour party’s campaign agenda. Second, electors as a whole accurately perceived the positions of the major parties on the nuclear issue. Labour’s attempts to fudge its unilateralist stance in the later stages of the election campaign therefore seems to have been to no avail. By that time, the public image that had firmly attached to the party was one of being hostile to nuclear weapons in any form.

Table 2. Opinion on nuclear weapon>. by vote.

(From zero, least favourable. All respondents,* 1983 Vote to 10, most favourable)

Con Lab Allnce (1) (2) (3) (4)

Respondents personal view 4.8 View of Conservative Party 7.8 View of Labour Party I .6 View of Alliancc 4.4

5.9 3.3 4.4 7.3 8.4 x.2 1.3 1.9 1 .5 4.2 4.7 4.5

Includes those who voted for minor parties. refused. or did not vote.

Source: 1983 British Election Study

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These observations about the distribution of views on the various aspects of the nuclear issue raise two questions. The first is what kinds of people subscribe to these views and is it the same kind of people who subscribe to all of them? The second, and related, question is what are the electoral effects of these views and are these independent of the socioeconomic characteristics and other attitudes of those voters holding them?

The social bases of nuclear attitudes

While the nuclear issue may have been of some importance for certain Labour

Tuhk 3. The social bases o f nuclear attitudcs.

(All scored 0 to I unlcss Britain s;it'c~I with Britain safer with Favours nucleai otherwise stated) nuclear wcaporis US nuclear missiles weapons

b I>ct;l I1 be t;i h beta ( 1 ) ( 3 ) ( -3 ) (4) ( 5 ) (6)

Fnriiil! htrck,qro~trrd Father white collar worker - 3 Pnrcnts' Labour partisans - 14.' .,

Ascriherl chrirocre,isricc.i~tir.~ Ase (years) 0.1 Gender 0 Scottish resident - 5 Welsh resident 4

Sociol p""irior1 Education (years) - - 7.. Non-manual worker" - 7

Trade Union incmhcr" - 5 ::. Owner occupicr 7 '

Ridigio/l Catholic - 7

Church at tendance - 8;

Constant 9( 1 R-squared 3

Oh 0 2 0 I 6

- .04 - 7 .02 0

- 01 I -,07 - 7

50 4

- . O l .OI

- (16: ::

.Oh

.01 p.05

- 1 -.Ol - 9 - . I 3

0 .01 i:: ,()7:; .?

- 3: - ,03.,: 0 .oo

p<.05. * ::i p<.OI Multiple regression ;inalysis showing partiill repression cocfficicnts (hs) and standardised regres-

sion coefficients (betas) predicting nuclear issuc's. which ;ire all scored 0 t o 1. Partial coefficients have bcen multiplied by 100 for enhe of intcrprct;ltion. For detail of varinhles and scoring. see Appendix; Head of household.

Source: 19x3 British Election Study

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party activists in the 1960s, there is no evidence that it was similarly regarded by the British public at large. Butler and Stokes (1974: 284), for example, noted that opinions on the bomb were extremely fluid and that the ‘correlation between opinions on nuclear weapons expressed in 1963 and 1964 was only +0.33 and between 1964 and 1966 only +0.38‘. One possible explanation for this instability is that nuclear opinions, not being deeply rooted in social structure, have little or no social reinforcement. Evidence supporting this argument is presented in Table 3, which summarises the separate regression of each of the three nuclear attitudes on a range of politically relevant social structural variables. Insofar as these variables together explain no more than 4 per cent of the variance in any of the attitudes, there is little reason to expect them to be as stable across elections as, say, class-related attitudes.

Despite social structure’s limited explanatory importance, however, a num- ber of interesting observations on the table can still be made. In the first place, the three nuclear attitudes are not as clearly differentiated as their distinctive distributions might have led us to expect (see Table 1). Instead, each of them is predicted by more or less the same set of social structural variables and in much the same rank order. Family background is always the best predictor, church attendance is generally next and ascribed characteristics and social position enjoy about equal explanatory importance. Each of the attitudes might, therefore, be expected to be more or less equally influential in its electoral impact. Secondly, and relatedly, the conventional measure of social class in British voting studies, manual versus non-manual occupation, can be seen to have no effect on any of the attitudes to nuclear weapons. This independence would suggest not only that the chances of the nuclear issue’s affecting the way people voted in 1983 are enhanced, but also that, being equally independent of class, each of the issue’s three aspects should be more or less equally influential.

In sum, then, much else besides social structure affects attitudes towards nuclear weapons, a fact that helps to explain the inconsistency with which this issue becomes politicked in British elections. Nonetheless, there is sufficient variation to show that the nuclear question is more important to some social groups than to others, which means that the effect of social structure must be controlled if a reliable estimate of nuclear attitudes’ electoral impact is to be obtained. It now remains to estimate the relative electoral importance of these attitudes once a variety of other factors have been taken into account.

The electoral consequences of the nuclear issue

Faced with an electorate largely in favour of retaining nuclear arms, the Labour party went into the 1983 election fundamentally divided on the ques-

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tion. Its public bickering over unilateralism finally came to a head when James Callaghan, the party’s former leader and Prime Minister, publicly castigated the policy as disastrous. At that point, ‘the public image of a party in chaos was complete’ (Kellner, 1985: 78). But to what extent did the Labour party suffer in net electoral terms for this chaos‘? Even though its lost votes for its perceived rejection of nuclear weapons, were these losses offset by gains in the near- majority of the electorate sceptical about the ultimate efficacy of United States weapons on British soil? Such qucstions will now be addressed in two stages. The first involves the straightforward estimation of the electoral impact of the various aspects of the nuclear issue. The second takes account of the possibility that this issue could be an artefact of other politically relevant attitudes influencing the vote in 1983. This is tested by introducing such political attitudes directly into the analysis and thereby controlling for their effects. The importance of this second stage is that it will be seen to lead to a different conclusion about the effect of the nuclear issue on Labour’s performance in the 1983 election.

Figure 1 is a path model depicting how the various aspects of the nuclear issue affected the vote in 1983. Although they are not shown in the model for the sake of brevity, the analysis also controls for the full range of social structural variables presented in Table 3. The immediately striking feature of the figure is its demonstration that all three nuclear attitudes had a significant electoral effect. The standardised coefficients (in parentheses) indicate that most important was whether or not the respondent favoured nuclear weapons (a coefficient of -0.22), while United States nuclear missiles ranked second (-0.14) and Britain’s own weapons third (-0.10). In other words, respondents endorsing any of the nuclear attitudes were significantly less likely to vote Labour. Judging by this analysis, however, the nuclear issue was not an unmitigated electoral disaster for the Labour party in 1983; indeed, the slightly higher proportion of voters disfavouring nuclear missiles and the near-major- ity of them who distrusted United States nuclear missiles on British soil were (more) likely to vote Labour. The net result would appear to be that the party made a net electoral gain, especially on the United States weapons aspect of the nuclear issue.

This finding is important if only because of its implications for party strategy should the nuclear issue be salient in future elections. It should therefore be given serious consideration and one possibility is that the relationship it reveals is spurious. The basis for this argument might be that people’s attitudes to nuclear weapons are an artefact of their other politically relevant attitudes in the 1983 election. The Labour party, for example, has traditionally been committed to the goals of pacifism and international reconciliation (Miller, 1977: 22) so that once account is taken of voters’ socialist attitudes, the relationship between the nuclear issue and the Labour vote could well disap-

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.78

Labour voter

Britain safer with own nuclear weapons

-13 (-.I4 Britain safer with US nuclear weapons

Favours nuclear weapons

Fig. 1. Aspects of the nuclear issues and the vote. Path model showing partial regression coeffi- cients (bs) and (in parentheses) standardised regression coefficients (betas) predicting the vote. All paths are significant at p<.Ol; for details of scoring and variables. see Appendix and text. The model controls for the full range of social structural variables shown in the Appendix Table.

pear. Alternatively, taking account of peoples’ left-wing attitudes might have the effect of controlling for the anti-Americanism that often goes with such attitudes and thereby relegate the question of United States nuclear weapons on British soil to electoral insignificance. A thorough analysis of the issue’s electoral effect, therefore, demands that such spurious relationships be tested for and it is to this task that we now turn.

Political attitudes may remain stable over time, but their electoral import- ance will vary according to the circumstances and controversies surrounding particular elections. We have shown that the nuclear issue was a very salient and devisive issue in the 1983 campaign, but what-other attitudes were elec- torally relevant in this campaign? To identify these other attitudes, factor analysis was applied to the data. The outcome was a nuclearism factor, plus five others: socialism, tapping the traditional differences between the major parties on controversies such as nationalisation and comprehensive education; law and order; traditional morality (issues such as abortion and pornography); social welfare (government action on pensions and poverty); and self-help (individuais are responsible for their own economic position) . 3

Treating the three aspects of the nuclear issue separately, Figure 2 shows their individual relationship to Labour voting in the 1983 e l e ~ t i o n . ~ Most salient is the importance of the traditional socialist attitudinal dimension. Someone who strongly endorsed the items comprising it would be 71 per cent more likely to vote Labour than someone rejecting them equally strongly, social structure and other political attitudes remaining constant. In the 1983 election, then, the traditional policy differences between the Conservative and Labour parties were the predominant influence on the vote, just as they had been throughout the 1970s (McAllister and Mughan, 1985: Table 4; Rose and McAllister, 1986: Ch. 7).

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.69

I Britain safer with own nuclear weapons

Britain safer with US nuclear weapons

-19 (-.I Favours nuclear weapons

Social ism

Social welfare 4 Self-help / Fig. 2. Aspects of thc nuclear issue and the vote. controlling for other politically relevant attitudes. Path modcl showing partial regression coefficients (bs) and ( in parentheses) standardised partial regression coefficients (betas) predicting thc vote. All paths are significant at p<.OI; for details of scoring and variables. see Appendix and text. The model controls for the full range of social structural variablcs shown in the Appendix Table.

Equally noteworthy, and perhaps more surprising since it was an issue that had only recently crossed the threshold of electoral salience, is the explanatory power of attitudes towards the various aspects of the nuclear debate. While clearly secondary to socialism, two of the nuclear items, views towards nuclear weapons in general and, more specifically, towards United States nuclear weapons on British soil, rank second and third respectively in the list of attitudinal predictors (with standardised coefficients of .12 and .08, respec- tively). Moreover, a third item, support for British nuclear weapons, ties for fourth place with the social welfarc and self-help attitudinal dimensions (with standardised coefficients of .05 for each).

The fact that all three nuclear items are negatively related to Labour voting does not mean that the electoral salience of all three cost the Labour party votes in net terms. Instead, it has to be borne in mind that while more electors favour British-controlled nuclear weapons, more of them also feel a sense of disquiet about nuclear weapons generally and about the presence of United States weapons on British soil. This means that the general nuclear weapons and United States items in Figure 1 are perhaps better interpreted as a positive relationship, for example, the higher proportions of people not favouring an increase in nuclear weapons and not happy about the presence in Britain of United States nuclear weapons were. net of the other varaibles used to estimate the model, respectively 19 and seven per cent more likely to vote Labour.

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Seen in this light, the nuclear issue, to the extent that it is salient in an election, need not necessarily be an electoral liability for anti-nuclear parties. It is a multi-dimensional issue that can win or lose votes according to which of its dimensions such parties (or, of course, their pro-nuclear counterparts) manage to ‘sell’ to the electorate as being most important and consequential. The important feature of the British Labour party’s 1983 campaign, therefore, was not its anti-nuclear stance, but the fact that it emphasised an aspect of the larger nuclear issue that was simply not acceptable to the clear majority of the electorate - unilateralism. Had it moderated this aspect of the debate and emphasised instead the potential dangers arising from the deployment of United States nuclear missiles, and particularly a new generation of them, on British soil, its performance in the election would in all probability have been substantially better.

Conclusion

This article has argued that, the absence of a ‘green’ party notwithstanding, the nuclear weapons issue was a prominent electoral force in Britain in the early 1980s, as it was in other Western European countries. The Labour party conference’s adoption of the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1982 thrust the issue into the political limelight far more effectively than the emergence of an ecology party or the resurgence of the CND could ever have done. In the process, though, the issue lost the Labour party votes in the 1983 election that it would probably have otherwise kept. The magnitude of its losses, however, was a product of political miscalculation, as well as of the advocacy of a policy that was simply unpalatable to the majority of the British people. This analysis has shown the nuclear issue not to be uni-dimensional in the sense of all aspects of it being harmful to anti-nuclear parties. Such parties are better advised to downplay their opposition to nuclear weapons in princi- ple and to emphasise the proper control of them in the national defence.

At least judging by our analysis, the rationale underpinning this strategy is that the nuclear debate appears not to involve for the public as a whole the question of the morality, or even of the terrible consequences, of the resort to nuclear weapons. Instead, it involves the defence of the nation. The British public favours nuclear weapons because the ‘other side’ has them, which means that a non-nuclear defence becomes impractical and unacceptable. Electors. therefore, may feel exactly the same sense of repugnance about nuclear weapons as does the ‘green’ activist but will not accept unilateral disarmament because their patriotism overrides thcir sense of repugnance. In their eyes, nuclear weapons are a necessary evil, the need for which persists as long as the country remains under the threat of external attack.

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Politically, it might be argued that the only electoral benefit to be gained from an anti-nuclear stance is to respect this patriotism and, in addition to multilateral nuclear disarmament, to emphasis that national security requires not only that the country has nuclear weapons on its soil to deter aggression, but also that it fully controls these weapons and is able to use them in its own national interest. The United States may be Britain's major ally, but there is a residue of doubt as to whether they can be trusted to use their resources to defend Britain should the need arise. This was the aspect of the nuclear issue to be exploited in 1983, but the important distinction appears to have been lost on sections of the Labour party.

Acknowledgments

The 1983 British Election Study was originally collected by Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell, and John Curtice, and supplied by the ESRC Data Archive at the University of Essex. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the disseminating body have any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented herein. Our thanks to two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their comments on a previous vcrsion of the paper; the usual disclaimer applies. Anthony Mughan is also affillated with University College, Cardiff.

Notes

1. The non-pragmatic origins of 'green' parties is perhaps best illustrated by the current dispute between 'fundamentalists' and 'realists' within the West German party over the appropriate- ness of a parliamentary strategy for the realisation o f their ecological goals. Ironically. this dispute has been brought on by the party's considerable electoral success in the 1980s (Muller- Rommel. 1985: 488).

2. In answering this question, respondents were asked to place themselves on a scale running from -10 through 0 to +lo. The percentages in Table 1 arc calculated by collapsing those against nuclear weapons (scoring -10 to -1). those indifferent to them (scoring 0) and those their increase ( + 1 to +lo).

3. For reasons of space. the full factor analysis outcome is not presented here. but can be found in McAllister and Mughan (1986: Table 2).

4. Two of the attitude scales. law and order and traditional morality, had no significant effect on the vote at the .01 level. although they were included in the regression equation.

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Appendix 1. Data, measurement and method

Data. The data are the 1983 British Election Study (N=3,955), carried out between July and October 1983. Detailsof the survey can be found in Heath. Jowell and Curtice (1985: Appendix 1).

Measurement. The variables figuring in the analysis, together with the basic multiple regression results, are shown in the Appendix Table. Family background is measured by parents’ partisan- ship and by whether or not the respondent’s father was a non-manual worker. Ascribed charac- teristics are measured by age, gender and region of residence. Social class is mcasurcd by education (in years), whether or not the respondent is a non-manual worker, a union member, or

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an owner occupier. Religion is measured by church attendance and whether or not the respondent is a Catholic.

The item measuring respondents' views on nuclear weapons was originally a scale running from a score of -10 (least favourable) to +10 (most favourable). To aid interpretation, the metric was changed to one running from zero (least favourable) to 10 (most favourable): this transformation has no effect on the variable in its relationship to other variables.

Method. In Table 3 and Figures 1 and 2 the analysis relies on ordinary least squares regression methods. which assume that relations between variables are. to a reasonable approximation. linear and additive (Hanushek and Jackson. 1977). The results are presented in the form of path models, which assume a causal ordering between the variables (Asher. 1983).

There is some debate about the use of a dichotomous dependent variable (herein Labour versus the rest), but research has shown that the inaccuracy introduced is minimal unless the sample size is small and the dependent variable highly skewed (Gillespie. 1977). Neither is a problem here. As a check, the Appendix Table shows comparative results using an alternative configuration of the vote. scoring Alliance and other minor party voters as an intermediate category. These is little substantive difference in the outcomes of the two equations. Finally. missing values are treated by the 'pair-wise' present procedure, which is statistically preferable to the usual alternatives (Hertel. 1976).

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Appendix 2. Variables, scoring, means and regression results.

Variable Scoring Means.’ Labour voterb Labour voter’’ (alternative)’

b beta b beta

Vote Labour vote Labour vote (alternative)

Family backgrorrnd Parents’ partisanship

Father non-manual worker Ascribed characteristics

Gender Scottish resident Welsh resident Social class Education Non-manual workelc Trade Union membelc Owner occupier Religion Catholic Church attendance

Age

1 = Labour. 0 = Others 2 8 na I =Labour, .5 = Alliance. other. .42 na 0 = Conservative

1 =both Labour. .5 =one .60 26** .27** . 2 1 * * .21’”* Labour. 0 = both Conservative I = yes. 0 = no .31 I .OI o .on

Years 46. I 0.1 .03 0.1 .03 1 =male. 0 = female .47 1 .02 2 .03 1 = yes. 0 = no .OY 8;* * .Oh* * s .03 1 = yes. 0 = no 12* * . O ~ * : K 13** .06* *

Years of full-time education 12.6 0 .02 0 .(lo l=yes . O=no ,44 - 7 * * -,08** -lo** -.11* l = y e s , O = n o 38 9* * . lo** 7** .07** I=yes .O=no .66 - 16’ * - .18* * - 18* * - .19* *

1 = yes. 0 = no . I2 5* .04* - X ’ * - .06* * From a low of 0 (never attends) to a high of 1 (attends once a week or more)

3 7 - 6* * - .06* * - 8* * - .07* *

Safer with own weapons 1 =safer. .5 =doesn’t matter. ,67 - 9 * * - ,06** - 1 2 * * - . l I ” *

0 = less safe

unfavourable) to a high of 1 (most favourable)

From a low of 0 (most .45 - 13* * - .14** - 6 * * - .06* * .48 -33”’ - . 2 2 * * - 3 I t * -.19**

1 Nuclear Issues

Safer with US missiles Favours nuclear weapons

Constant R-squared

55 53 39 30

* 1: p<.oi. * p<.ns Means refer only to those who voted in the 1983 General Election

h Multiple regression results showing partial regression coefficients (bs) and standardised regression coefficients (betas) predicting vote. All partial coefficients have been multiplied by 100 for ease of interpretation. cHead of household

Source: 1983 British Election Study