Labour fought the 2015 election on a clear and consistent message, writes Roger Liddle. Time and time again Ed Miliband repeated the mantra that he wanted to lead a government that was on the side of working people, whereas the Tories stood only for the rich and powerful. It was an old social democratic message that our leader banged home with conviction and force. Not only did Ed Miliband speak from the heart. He was convinced that he could rally a traditional working-class ‘core vote’ that in his view New Labour had for the best part of two decades taken for granted. He ended up with Labour’s third worst result since the second world war era.
Ironically the day after the election was the 70th anniversary of VE Day. In 1945 Winston Churchill was cheered by millions as the hero of victory over fascism. But in the general election a few weeks later, the Conservatives were thrown out in one of the biggest general election landslides in British general election history, ushering in the heroic Labour government led by Clement Attlee that created full employment and laid the foundations of the welfare state. There was much talk in leftwing circles of recapturing and re-energising that ‘spirit of 45’. Those hopes were to be cruelly disappointed. Labour will never recover unless it understands why. And that will require a deeply painful process of analysis and self-examination.
The danger for the party is that it will try to avoid this necessary period of anguish. The easiest fix would be to elect a new leader quickly and write his predecessor out of history. This would be a major mistake. It is true that Ed Miliband always lagged badly in the leadership popularity stakes. He was southern, he was Hampstead, he came across as a cosmopolitan intellectual with an awkward style in communicating with ‘ordinary people’. The truth is that is what he is. But I do not believe that Labour failed for these reasons or because Ed was photographed awkwardly attempting to eat a bacon sandwich! The election campaign revealed Ed as a battler who stood his ground, someone who didn’t collapse or make a fool of himself under pressure. He exceeded most people’s expectations throughout the campaign. Labour’s problem is not personal. It is political and that is something which requires much deeper understanding.
I spent a lot of the campaign in my home town of Carlisle. This was one of the top 10 marginal seats we had to win from the Tories who had a slender majority of 800. We had a wonderful feisty candidate in Lee Sherriff, who was brought up in Carlisle and had been a local shop worker. In terms of organisation and voter contact rate (the famous four million conversations Labour’s impressively committed activists conducted on the doorsteps) we must have been near the top of the league. Yet in a complete shock to most of us, the Tory majority rose to 2800.
We spent a lot of time knocking on doors on what used to be the council estates of Carlisle (though today many of the houses are owner-occupied or lived in by private renters, the residents are still what sociologists would describe as working class). I found myself knocking on the same doors that I had first been round fifty years ago when I was then a young student. In the 1966 general election I remember on these estates we could rely on about 80 per cent support in these areas and the turn out on election day would be over 80 per cent. Today there was firm support for Labour in maybe one in four or one in five of these households. There was a smattering of United Kingdom Independence party supporters, many who said they weren’t sure this time (some of whom must have voted Tory), and getting on for half who one knew would never bother to vote. They had heard Ed Miliband’s messages about abolishing the ‘bedroom tax’ and ‘zero-hours contracts’ and the promises to ‘save’ the National Health Service, but there was no sense that these messages were moving people out of their general disengagement with party politics.
Some people will say that all you have to do to rally this ‘core vote’ is turn up the volume of ‘on your side’ class politics. But the truth is that Ed’s campaign tested that theory to destruction. It comprehensively failed. How could we do better next time?
Of course Labour should never abandon a message of ‘fairness’: social justice is the party’s raison d’être. But voters will not listen to a message of fairness unless they also believe the party can be a strong and credible government of the country. Many people told me on the doorstep that they did not trust Labour on the economy: “what could the Coalition have done any different, after the mess you left behind?” This can be no surprise given that we were not prepared to launch a staunch defence of our economic record in government prior to 2010 or offer an explanation of what in office we did indeed get wrong. In the first half of the 2010-15 parliament, we preached a ‘too far, too fast’ Keynesian critique of the Coalition’s deficit reduction policy and then switched to a position where it was not even clear whether and in what circumstances we thought public borrowing for investment was justified or not. Instead Labour’s rhetorical populism on business called into question whether we understood the process of wealth creation at all. As many others have said, economic competence and social justice have once again to be harnessed in an indissoluble marriage.
There is also in my view a public yearning for a new language of honesty in politics. The election campaign saw an unedifying auction of extravagant promises in which the Tories were even bigger culprits than Labour. Take an example of what needs to change. If Labour’s distinctiveness in politics is our claim to be the party of high-quality public services, then we have to be prepared to open up a debate about the long-term challenges of funding and organising a public health system and embrace and argue for difficult ideas like a hypothecated national insurance model of funding the NHS.
Finally, I am a firm believer that when many people from across all social classes vote, they think first and foremost about what’s best for the country as they think that will be the best for their own family too. I remain convinced that a sizable majority of voters do not like the Conservatives or their values. They do think they stand up for the rich and powerful as Ed said. But when they come to put the cross on the ballot paper, they reflect hard on what is the alternative. On this occasion the Labour offer was fatally flawed on economic competence.
At the same time the public were right to sense that Labour was incapable of forming a strong majority government without being dependent on the Scottish National party. But that was a story of another comprehensive failure of Labour leadership: to neglect the rising force of Scottish nationalism until it was far too late and then to ignore the impact this would have in England on feelings of English identity and the danger of England being taken for a ride by the Scots. The Labour leadership somehow thought that because Labour was the party of ‘working people’ it could trump these distractions. How wrong they were.
This article was first published by the European Progressive Observatory.
