All elections are unique. But 2005 was almost a rite of passage for Britain. Never before has the country elected a Labour government for a full third term. What’s more, we were elected with a majority of 64, the eighth best result of the 17 elections since 1945. But the 2005 election was also the closest election for 30 years, and the final margin of victory, at just 770,000 votes, amounts to just 1.8 per cent of registered voters. Learning the right lessons is essential if we are to win a fourth term in 2009.
Once the complexity of the results is marshalled, there are two key conclusions. First, we need to maintain the new Labour coalition of 1997 that was decisive in securing victory. However, we also need to reconnect with those traditional Labour voters who either stayed at home, or felt that they could not vote Labour this time.
A major part of this reconnection with traditional voters is about more boldly communicating our radical mission as a party committed to social justice and collective action. Our 2005 manifesto is full of policies to lift hearts across the spectrum of the Labour movement. But we should not kid ourselves that we can communicate this agenda through the pages of the Daily Express. One of the best ways to get the message across is through strong local campaigning by local parties and elected representatives.
Furthermore, the results of the general election show that local candidates and local campaigns matter. Seats with first-time Labour candidates saw their share of the vote drop by some 13.9 per cent compared to 2001, whereas in seats with first-time incumbents, the drop-off was just 3.9 per cent.
What’s more, we’re pushing at an open door. Recent analyses of the UK electorate show a continued thirst for politics and political action. In The State of Participation, Paul Whiteley notes that the lesson is not that participation has declined, but rather that it has evolved over time and taken on new forms. Similarly, Pattie, Seyd and Whiteley’s study into the extent to which the UK electorate has become disengaged from political life, found that 62 per cent of people had given money, 50 per cent had voted, 42 per cent had signed a petition and 28 per cent had participated in a boycott. Yet just 5 per cent had attended a political meeting or rally, and only 13 per cent had contacted a politician.
This is where Constituency Labour Parties have an opportunity to harness the public’s hunger for change. In my constituency of Hodge Hill, we are running big local campaigns on tackling anti-social behaviour. We’re also campaigning for better youth services, and are now going one stage further by recruiting mentoring networks to support our young people. And when we have campaigned on strong progressive issues, like Make Poverty History, we have been inundated with support. We plan to make Labour’s campaign to abolish child poverty within a generation a key campaign in Hodge Hill this year.
But beyond campaigning, CLPs could go further to help drive change. At the moment, CLPs are excellent at connecting activists to the business of winning council seats and to parliamentary representatives and our vital sister organisations. But they often fail to connect to the 36,285 institutions that spend £25m every hour of the working day on the issues on which Labour was elected to bring change. In fact, some 401,445 councillors, governors, board members, quangocrats and JPs look after around £154bn (£383,614 each) of public money, try 95 per cent of crimes and appoint thousands of our frontline public servants.
Such deep-rooted involvement with the community is older then the party itself. In the 1760s, cooperative corn mills were built by dockworkers in response to monopolistic local mill owners. These were the early industrial progenitors of the Rochdale Pioneers, a group of artisans who founded the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society in 1844. These were the communities that fostered trade unions and, in time, the Labour party. Many of the secrets of our renewal lie here in our history and our proudest traditions of changing communities for the better. Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Health