It would be shortsighted to look only at the final few weeks for our failures on 4 June. The parliamentary expenses scandal, untimely resignations and government U-turns or retreats in the face of opposition. None of those helped – and certainly fueled the public’s desire to give the major parties a bloody nose. But the truth is that Labour has had poor poll ratings for two years. Nor can we blame the recession for our battering: many other European governments were not punished because their economies are in a recession.
Government is busy, never more so. Barely a day goes by without a new announcement. But the flurry of government promises too often miss the mark; they don’t connect. To many voters, it is all just white noise. ‘Narrative’, ‘vision’, our ‘project’ – call it what you will, the electorate has stopped listening.
In terms of the European elections, our failure is not one of the past six weeks or six months, it is a failure to take on Euroscepticism for the last 12 years. There has not been a continuous and simple pro-European mantra from the government. The sceptics can sum up their opposition in a few words.
Labour has had a positive agenda in Europe. Yet, in truth, when we succeed, we often claim the result as an achievement of national government. And when things go wrong, we blame the EU. Either way, Britain’s crucial relationship with the EU gets few pats on the back and quite often we appear equivocal, almost apologetic.
As an MP for 12 years, I am as guilty as my colleagues of not weaving our European message into my local campaigning. Nor does Gordon Brown deserve all the criticism; it is a legacy of the last 12 years.
I have always said it is not ‘love the EU’ versus ‘hate the EU’. The issue should be ‘what’s the divvy?’ – the reward, the added value we get that we could not achieve alone.
An issue for the government, though not for the electorate, is the lack of ministerial coordination across Whitehall – each department agreeing what the balance of benefit is on, say, enlargement of the EU, and what the impact will be on each. To date, Whitehall departments have tended to do their own thing; and the Foreign Office does its best to pull it together. Having 10 Europe ministers in 11 years did not help this process.
A real challenge exists for the European parliamentary Labour party. There is little coordination with the Labour party over their campaigning and message. They have been, for various reasons, semi-detached. And no MEP has been helped by the PR voting system which requires huge regional constituencies. MEPs are largely unknown to their electorate – despite their best efforts to promote their work. The result is that their message is marginalised until the year of European elections. That needs to change.
We all have to wake up to the reality of elected BNP MEPs. There was no surge in BNP support. The collapse in turnout helped to open the door to the fringe parties. It is a sad irony that, 65 years after D-Day, we send fascists to represent us in Europe.
The way forward is to bring our European message home. Not just a few months every five years, but all year round. All politics is local. Let’s promote the jobs at home that rely on Europe. Let’s involve the public in our campaigns – if the EU has reduced mobile charges, why haven’t we run text and twitter campaigns to mobile users to sign up to the campaign for lower costs? Not a big issue, but a simple campaign none the less.
Let’s counter the scepticism by winning on the big issues – recession, trade, jobs – that are real to the public. Labour MEPs and MPs should be advertising the EU loans available to small businesses, promoting takeup. Celebrating companies that win EU contracts abroad or who have workers on contract elsewhere in the EU – evidence that working across borders is not one way traffic to the UK’s disadvantage. The petty nationalism of the right is not only wrong, it is against the UK’s interests.
One Labour publication listed hundreds of achievements of Labour in Europe. It was a nice, factual document. But I’m not sure Labour voters could tell you one of them. The best political messages are simple; about your life, here and now. When New Labour was riding high, that was how we spoke to the electorate. It’s time to cut through the white noise.