Labour must understand why it did so badly in
the election, as it is unlikely to be able to mount a successful campaign in
the future if it doesn’t. Much has been written already, although we await a
full analysis in terms of voting patterns and movement by age, class, gender etc.,
but from what we know I believe that we can draw some valid conclusions.
The pollsters got it
significantly wrong, at least for the two main parties, rendering all the
debate about a ‘hung’ parliament redundant, and we await their explanations for
that (There is an interesting article in Open Democracy on this, ‘The polls and
all but one of the forecasts were wrong, Shaun Lawson’).
There were short run factors
that counted. Of these the most significant by far was the unscrupulous use of
the ‘Scottish Card’ by the Tories, tapping in to English nationalist fears that
a Labour government would be controlled by the SNP. There would appear to be
some evidence that this caused a disproportionate swing from ‘Don’t Knows’ to
the Tories ( This could help to explain the polls, as ‘Don’t Knows’ are usually
divided equally between the parties) and for intending Tory defectors to UKIP
to remain where they were.
The oil price fall was a
bonus for the Tories as it helped to promote the impression that the recovery was
well under way.
The continued treachery of
Mandelson ( even in early March he said that he doubted that Labour would win) was not unimportant, and I
do not understand why he has not been suspended pending an investigation into his
undermining of the party – or is it that such things only happen to those on
the left?
While Miliband improved his
standing in the first three TV appearances his performance in the last, and for
that reason crucial appearance on Question Time was fairly dire, and didn’t help,
while the bizarre ‘Edstone’ episode can only have confirmed prejudices that he
was some sort of crank.
However, the election was not
lost primarily for these reasons. There were, in my view, five major factors.
Firstly, Miliband. While I
personally liked him and he came across as honest and principled he should not
have been chosen as leader simply because he lacked the gravitas, authority and
oratorical power that every leader in the television age needs. Much of this is
contrived – Cameron comes across to me as a complete phoney, although large
numbers do not see it that way, but Miliband was unable to inspire as a leader.
This might not have been fatal, but because of other adverse factors it was
telling.
Secondly the party was
divided between the Blairite/Progress wing, who broadly believed that with
suitable updating the policies pursued under Blair, if not Brown, were correct
and were the only basis for a successful appeal to the country, and a broad
left which saw the huge loss of support for Labour in 2005 and 2010 as
indicative of the failure of Blairism in tackling the problems the ordinary
people of the country faced and looked
to a renewed form of social democracy to as a means of tackling those. There
were of course all sorts of variants of these positions, but this fundamental
divide was reflected in the manifesto, in the shadow cabinet and PLP and at all
other levels of the party. The result was the failure to promote an over
arching message or pattern, even though many individual policies were good in
themselves.
Thirdly the decision to avoid
discussion of Labour’s economic record in government, particularly in its third
term, was disastrous as it effectively conceded the Tory lie that the deficit was due to government overspending
and not, as was the case, to bailing out the banks after their collapse. (The
lie was allowed to take root during the long leadership campaign in 2010 – are
we making the same mistake again?)
Fourthly, Labour’s effective
capitulation toTory austerity in 2013 meant that it was not possible to present
Labour as committed to measures to stimulate the economy to promote the growth
needed to provide the income required to pay off the deficit. It is admittedly
difficult to persuade large numbers of people that a Keynesian stimulus was the
only way to successfully move forward – as Polly Toynbee remarked ’The paradox
of thrift proved too paradoxical’, but tragically no serious attempt was made
to do so, and it was left to the heroic efforts of Michael Meacher and others
to consistently argue that Labour should campaign on this as well as Labour’s
economic record as in three above, but to no avail.
Fifthly, and perhaps most
tellingly, the electoral strategy was fundamentally misconceived, in that it was
based, as in 2010, to appealing to the centre ground. The 2010 election
conclusively demonstrated that in one sense the strategy was successful in that
social group A/B voters attracted to Labour in 1997 and later largely stayed,
but was disastrous in a more important sense in that large numbers of Labour’s
traditional core supporters in the C2 and D/E social groups went elsewhere or
didn’t vote. The assumption that those to the ‘left’ of the centre have nowhere
else to go was proved wrong. But exactly the same circumstances presented
themselves in 2015, and exactly the same mistakes were made. The article by Jon
Trickett on this blog (Why any leader who can’t reach working class voters will
lose again) reproduces figures for social class movement which prove this, with
once again a substantial falling away in the D/E vote but the A/B vote
remaining steady.
At the same time it is likely
that many of those leftish middle class voters attracted to the Lib-Dems over Iraq and other things in the noughties
but who left them after 2010 and came to Labour decided to go elsewhere, to the
Greens, who recorded their highest ever vote in a general election, to other
left parties or to non voting, on the grounds that Labour policies were not
left wing enough. Likewise the D/E voters, notwithstanding some good policies
on housing tenure and rent, the bedroom tax, agency workers and zero hours
contracts, were not given the impression that their interests, particularly
with regard to housing, jobs, and living standards, were of the greatest
concern to Labour, and thus went elsewhere, particularly to UKIP who probably
took more votes from Labour than from the Tories, or remained as part of the
one third of voters who didn’t vote. Some of the better policies were
introduced too late or were not given enough prominence.
What we know about the class
basis of the recent vote renders all the talk by the Blairites about the
manifesto being anti business, too left wing and not in tune with
‘aspirational’ voters as nonsense. (On this it is surely the task of Labour
governments to seek to make possible the aspirations of most people for a job
with decent pay and conditions, decent housing at affordable cost and decent
education, health and social services. Or is it just the middle class that has
aspirations?)
Labour is at a crossroads. It
can either continue on the path falteringly begun under Ed Miliband towards a
renewed form of social democracy, seeking to provide real solutions to the
problems faced by ordinary people, or it can revert to being a party that ultimately
accepts the dictates of the market and is thus incapable of providing those
solutions. I hope it chooses the right path.
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