Did it work? If the campaign was a lack-lustre affair, this odd era may be more to blame than Labour’s campaign managers. How do you fight a heroic bout against an opponent who starts out on the floor and never once gets up, let alone lands a punch? It was the sort of brain-damaging mismatch a ref would have stopped at the end of week one.
Once the Conservatives’ tax-cutting bonanza failed to cause the George W Bush effect they hoped for, it was all over. No double whammy, no whammy of any kind. So Labour was left conducting a monologue, one hand clapping with virtually no engagement with the enemy: that made a campaign duller than any in living memory. It seemed interminable, four weeks far too long, especially after the one month foot-and-mouth delay. The law declares campaigns must last for a minimum of seventeen working days – but that was in the days when Gladstone and Disraeli had to travel slowly from Midlothian to Margate to get their message out. These days identical television images, fed into the hungry 24 hour maw of rolling networks, bore the viewers in no time at all. They just tuned out.
Did Labour get across its message? Yes. Schools and hospitals, four more years to deliver quality public services and no to tax cuts. It was simple, non-ideological, not particularly idealistic, appealing to an essentially self-interested desire for things that work well – trains running on time. The campaign never risked trying to inspire a greater sense of common responsibility for the poor. It rarely boasted of Labour’s greatest achievements in alleviating child poverty, leaving a lack of fire and vision its own supporters yearned for.
It was a competent campaign, but with 40 percent abstainers, it was no triumph. It was unambitious – no boat-rocking, no risk-taking. But with the opposition vanquished, this was a missed chance to push forward arguments on Europe, to explain what really works in reducing re-offending and why asylum seekers are not a national plague. It was cowardly to have made needless promises on income tax or on jailing more criminals. Even those who might not agree on these issues admire leaders who dare to say unpopular things occasionally. People prize conviction, even if it is not their own.
It made a passionless campaign, firing few imaginations, raising no horizons. But then that may be what New Labour is at heart: Tony Blair never said he was anything else. Sincere competence, steady progress towards solid goals is all that was ever promised – political bread without roses or circuses. Is that enough? The 40 percent disengaged suggest that voters do not live by bread alone: they need something more to get them to the ballot. The result provided an overwhelming argument for proportional representation, which does increase participation. The Labour Party should now adopt a non-tribal concern for reviving a democracy in dangerous decay.