A year ago, the Prime Minister asked me to take charge of Labour’s election campaign in London.

There was much about the campaign that we can be proud of: in both the mayoral election and the Assembly election, we performed better than we did elsewhere in the country.

We also sparked a wave of activism: the weekend before the election, there were hundreds of Labour supporters – not all of them members, but all of them committed to our cause – out campaigning across London.

But in politics, you win or lose and we lost.

We did so because our electoral support was not strong enough and our appeal was not wide enough. 

Looking at the results, it’s clear that, very particularly, this was due to our loss of support among aspirational working-class voters in their 30s and 40s, many of whom live in the outer London suburbs.

But our task now is not to dwell on the past, but to have an open, honest and searching debate about the future. About the policies that can forge a new, winning progressive coalition. One that can return Labour to power in City Hall in three years’ time.

We must begin by listening a little harder, not just to those who voted for us, but also to those who didn’t. Our challenge is not simply to turn out more of our own voters, but to broaden our appeal and win over new supporters.

And we must accept too that when the people of London chose who to vote for, they did so for a reason. We were not relevant enough to their hopes and fears, the things that matter to them.

So while our values are enduring, our policies must change to reflect what the voters are telling us. That’s the New Labour way and that’s the only way Labour will remain relevant to London.

It’s us, not the voters, who need to change. But what kind of change do we need?

As we shape and debate our future policies we should subject them to four progressive tests:

First, do they promote aspiration?

What is progressive politics for if not to help people achieve the ambitions and dreams they cherish for themselves, for their loved ones and for their communities?

We have to understand too that our goal of opening up opportunity and prosperity to those currently shut out of it – the children and young people growing up in tough Brixton estates in my constituency, for instance – cannot be realised by government alone.

A dynamic, entrepreneurial economy in London demands a London that is open to business, to social enterprise and to the voluntary sector. One that encourages and welcomes private investment and supports business start-ups, particularly among poorer minority ethnic groups, in those parts of the capital where it is all too lacking but needed the most.

Second, do our policies make Londoners feel safer in their homes and on their streets?

Last May, crime was judged the most important issue by Londoners in deciding how to cast their votes. But despite our strong record, Boris Johnson convinced more Londoners that he understood their fears and would address their concerns.
He talked about crime in the terms that people talk about it to each other.

We will not connect with people unless our language, like our concerns, is the same that people hear on the streets, outside the school gates and in the living rooms of London.

We must now be relentless in making Boris defend his record and we must set out an alternative agenda that shows we are truly in-touch with Londoners.

That agenda must recognise that tackling crime and expanding opportunity go hand in hand. The Tories choose to demonise young people. Our job is to protect those young people who are most at risk of being victims of crime while offering an alternative path to those young people who are most likely to commit it.

Third, do they empower the people of London and the communities in which they live?

Running through our entire agenda there must be a common thread and a simple question: what does this do to place greater control in the hands of Londoners and their communities?

Empowerment is not a word that excites. This is a subject that can sound like hot air – until we acknowledge that the real solution to so many of our problems lies in the communities that are most affected. Talk to people on estates about youth crime and they will tell you what needs to be done. Now let us find new ways to hand those people the power and the resources to take control and make that change happen.

Finally, do they bring London together?

The people of London know that the diversity of our city is our greatest strength. We love the fact that we have the whole world within the borders of a single, great city.

But while recognising difference, our political appeal must transcend it and our coalition must be one that is united by shared interests and values. That means we have to be as attentive to the attitudes and aspirations of zone 6 as we are to zone 1. As a party, we need to understand the importance of every community, but recognise that they all fit into a London that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

So let’s step outside our comfort zone. Let’s listen to the voters and let their concerns and our values forge together in a new progressive agenda that’s relevant to London.

And for me, the measure of our success will be easily judged: not simply in terms of whether we return a Labour mayor to city hall in 2012, but whether they are able to win right across the capital and not just in our heartlands.

London is one of the greatest cities on earth – possibly THE greatest.

It’s diverse, liberal, open, tolerant, vibrant. In the UK, newly arrived communities settle here first. Cultures merge and fuse and new ideas are born that help shape our country and even our world. That brings challenges of course, but the opportunities are even greater.

So how on earth did a city like this come to be run by Conservatives whose values seem the opposite of what Londoners love most about this city?

It’s because we let too many Londoners feel we were out of touch with their concerns. We didn’t paint clearly enough the London that Londoners wanted to see – despite some fantastic achievements under Ken Livingstone’s leadership around neighbourhood policing, transport, housing and the environment.

If Londoners are worried about crime, then we have to talk about crime in the way that they do, and last year we didn’t. We don’t have to scaremonger like the Tories do, but we must show we understand people’s concerns or they will think we’re not in touch.

When we look at last year’s election results, we keep telling ourselves how well we did relative to the rest of the country. Certainly there were great results like Navin Shah’s election to the GLA. But the stark truth is Ken lost to Boris, and when your candidate loses and the other side wins things could have been better! Any campaign you don’t win should teach you some lessons about how you need to change, and you fail to learn those lessons at your peril. It’s not the voters who got it wrong, it’s us.

So what are Londoners worried about?

Right at the top of the list today, it’s the economy. Households across London are tightening their belts and they expect Labour-led councils to be doing the same. I’m not sure everything that went on at the London Development Agency said that. By contrast, the majority of Labour councils in London are freezing council tax this year, and doing it without cutting frontline services. That’s because we’re cutting out waste so we can do more for less. That is what Londoners want to see Labour doing in tough times like these.

Next up it’s crime. We didn’t talk enough about crime in last year’s election. But we had a great story to tell with falling crime and police on the beat in every neighbourhood. Labour councils are ahead on this issue too, tackling violent youth crime, tackling drug dealing on the streets, investing in better youth services that give young people positive opportunities to succeed and tackling the inequality that breeds crime. Meanwhile, London’s Tories are cutting police spending and have little to offer young people other than to add to the demonization of them by marching them through knife arches at train stations.

On housing, the Tories have scrapped the requirement for 50 per cent of new developments to be affordable. Instead, they’re trying to corral social housing into boroughs that are already relatively poor. But did we have enough to say about how we could use housing to unite London rather than divide London? With the social housing stock so limited, every time a family moves out of social housing they tend to be replaced by a family that’s even poorer than they were. And until the housing market froze up, rising prices meant that every home that was sold tended to be sold to someone richer than the person selling it. That leads to polarization, with more of the very rich and the very poor and middle-income earners squeezed out. We need to find a new way to talk about housing that means our city stays united with a place for everyone, not ghettoes for the rich and the poor.

What all this says to me is that the future of London is a battle, above all else, of ideas. The media – and the rest of us – like to talk about who Labour’s next candidate will be. Isn’t that the wrong way round? Don’t we need to come together to agree a Labour vision for London’s future that Londoners can buy into, then find a candidate with the credibility to put it across? Rather than find a personality and then fit a policy platform around them?

I don’t think Labour’s done a good-enough job of learning the lessons from our defeat in London last year. I like it even less when I hear people say there are no lessons to learn or changes to be made.

Right now we don’t need a battle of personalities, we need a battle of ideas. We need to get the various elements of Labour in London working together – including the GLA, our Labour council leaders, our Labour MPs, our MEPs, our party members and the London trade unions. We need to build a new, progressive, shared vision for this city that offers solutions to Londoners’ real concerns, spoken in language that Londoners use, about issues that will work not just London-wide but that we can campaign for, in localised ways, street by street and estate by estate.

Sometimes, the shock of defeat can lead to division that only serves our opponents. We need to use defeat instead to look at what was wrong in what we were saying, and then show the voters who rejected us that we’ve changed and that we’re the party of their future.

There’s a big debate to be had in London Labour, and we must not be afraid to have it. We need to be open enough to admit mistakes but mature enough to stick together while we work up a distinctive Labour vision for London’s future that looks beyond London’s recent past.