I think a basic message from the election is that the other lot are in much, much bigger trouble than we are. The Tories continue in their chronic state of confusion, not just about who their leader is going to be, or should be, but what they actually stand for, and are going to stand for, or at least what they can say they’re going to stand for. You will receive many more months of very confused messages from them. My heart bleeds – with joy.
Meanwhile they are introducing a very innovative style of reform. The last occasion on which somebody abolished votes for the masses in the name of democracy was when Vladimir Ilyich Lenin did it. I don’t know what the modern Conservative equivalent is going to be but I guess that they’ll come up with their own version of ‘all power to the Soviets in the dictatorship of the proletariat’.
As far as the Liberals are concerned, I think there is a four-way tension. They’ve got a small element of urbane common sense represented by Menzies Campbell. Then there are populist wind-direction followers that are particularly well-established in their local government ranks, Third, there is the rightist element that I think is particularly well-developed among the younger Liberal members of parliament who counsel that – to get over the hump – they should be going for a substantial part of the residual Conservative vote. That produces a tension with the fourth fragment, the ‘power to the people’ new leftists, the people who I will insist on referring to throughout the next few years as the dilettante tendency.
As far as Labour is concerned, we won, although a notable number of vociferous members in the party that I love were determined to try and demonstrate that we didn’t. They must be addicted to opposition. It’s a killer disease in politics. We won on the manifesto. The manifesto has been transformed into the programme for government and so the main challenge is to sustain momentum, to get on with the implementation of the programme that was, literally and genuinely, put to the people. It’s extraordinary that in the wake of the third successive time that Labour has been victorious, we should need to speak of ‘building momentum’. But in the nature of this election, and the nature of the victory and the size of the share of the vote that Labour took, ‘building’ is the correct verb to use. What now is needed is to do what I am convinced should have been done for at least the previous four years, and that is to make a much more deliberate and insistent effort to plainly and publicly connect accomplishment with purpose.
I say that because in terms of the achievements of the Labour government, and I think we can say this without being hagiographic, the facts speak for themselves. Reducing unemployment; generating additional real value-added employment; sustaining the highest-ever investments in the renovation of the health service and the development of the educational system; fastidious efforts, not all successful but certainly sustained, to achieve a greater degree of what I call civil serenity. I prefer this more elegant term, and I think it’s more accurate, because I abominate the word ‘respect’ that’s used as if it was an aerosol product. Achievements such as the gradual rise towards the UN’s target of 0.7 per cent of GNP for international development also deserve real acknowledgment. All those efforts and many others have gone on.
However, all those and other advances appeared to be anonymous and automatic. They were all there on the score sheet, they were all worthy of credit. But they were hardly understood by the electorate in general. They generated a feeling of progress, which is substantially what got us re-elected, but nevertheless the electorate wasn’t really cogent about its reasons for voting Labour. I think that that is partly due to the fact that Labour wasn’t effectively articulate about the achievements itself – not for weeks before the election, but for years before the election. There was no consistent effort to demonstrate a connection between the accomplishments, gradual and growing, and the deliberate progressive purpose for which they were being pursued.
It is not enough, for instance, for Labour to claim credit for the neatness and the arithmetical satisfaction of higher employment. Labour also has to repeatedly refer to the fact they’re not just against unemployment as an expensive waste, they are against unemployment as a social evil, a source of fragmentation and despair and powerlessness and alienation. The case that we always made as the dole queues lengthened must now be made when success is being accomplished, so that people understand there is a conviction behind the achievement, and it isn’t something that’s been casually come by as a consequence of fiscal discipline or monetary rectitude.
The same thing applies to investment in education and health. The task of rebuilding after decades of underfunding and actual deprivation was always going to take a considerable time. Just about everyone comprehends that it takes much longer to construct than it does to demolish. And the public can understand that particularly if it’s put in the context of the application of values to the practical tasks of reconstruction and innovation in vital public services.
I make particular reference to people who are patronisingly called ‘traditional voters’ as if there were a sort of lumpen electorate. I think ‘traditional voters’ demonstrated, for instance – in Blaenau, Gwent – just how untraditional they’re capable of being if they feel affronted. They may be wrong to be affronted, but in 1970 they did the same thing in Merthyr Tydfil with complete loyalty to what they regarded to be Labour values. As long as party people remember that there are traditions of support but that they must be regarded gratefully and not complacently, then we get the traditional Labour vote into some kind of perspective. And if the traditional Labour vote understands the connection between Labour accomplishment and Labour purpose, it will then comprehend afresh the reasons for continuing to vote Labour.
That very strongly applies in similar terms to young voters; strangely, for almost the opposite reason. Those who have not had the experience, the background, the convention of voting Labour, but are voting for the first or second time are looking not just for results but for the purpose behind the results. I further believe that this is the way to extend and sustain our appeal to the people I call the ‘enlightened centre’. These are people who have been voting for us, and must continue to vote for us if we are to remain in power.
They also want to know that there is a purpose that connects directly with the accomplishment and provides the rationale of values that produces the accomplishment.
We have got four years to get a maxim along the lines of ‘Labour is the party of real opportunity and increasing security’ properly and widely rooted and to get the link between conviction and achievement widely recognised. However, while actions do speak louder than words, certainly we must remember also that the electorate looks for a definition, a justification, of the purpose of engagement as voters (let alone as joiners) in democratic politics. So, the words must illuminate the actions just like the actions give substance to the words. The need to make that connection is a lesson from this election. It’s a lesson that’s got to be heeded, learned, and applied.