The people I feel most sorry for in the Labour leadership election are the candidates. They’ve been schlepping around the country, to endless hustings, interviews, and BBQs. They must be bored sick by now. There’s no sign of a slowing in pace. All the candidates were on the road yesterday. David Miliband was mobbed by a dozen over-excited A-level students at Stevenage railway station. By coincidence Talk Sport’s Sean Dilley was there too, and blogged:
‘I was extremely impressed that Mr Miliband (D) kept his composure when the group of loud and drunk teens circled him, singing songs, and even posed for a Facebook photo with the A level celebrators, and I can honestly say that I’ve never witness any politician engage so effectively with such a large group of young, drunk teens.’
As we near the finishing post – ballot papers are out in just over a fortnight – the tasks for the new leader are becoming clearer. The first, painful though it may be, is to conduct a proper audit into the election campaign and scale of the defeat. This has been impossible through the prism of the leadership election. But the new leader can take on the task, perhaps appointing a wise head such as Jack Straw to conduct an inquiry and report to the NEC before Christmas.
The best analysis was the first: Liam Byrne’s paper for Progress which highlighted the collapse in the skilled working class C2 vote, especially in the southern marginals which Labour used to hold. Ed Miliband makes his contribution to the ‘lost voters’ debate in his Fabian essay his week. But by lumping together social groups C2s and DEs (highly skilled engineers with homeless people) and contrasting them with ABC1s (managers, professionals) his paper does not make clear the nuanced nature of British society, especially in the south. It gives ammunition to those people (not Ed himself, I am sure) who want to make an argument that we can safely ignore the affluent middle classes in favour of a ‘core vote strategy’. The reality is, as Joan Ryan makes clear over at LabourList, that the Labour party has only been successful when its appeal reaches across the class divides. This is not some ‘New Labour’ mantra. Attlee did it, and so did Harold Wilson. Blair merely learned from their examples.
The second task for the new leader is to put together a shadow cabinet which can destroy the Tories and appeal to the public. There is a debate raging amongst MPs about how the shadow cabinet should be formulated – its size, the balance between men and women, and whether it should be wholly or partly elected. The experience of House of Lords reform should spur us into getting this debate settled quickly. Nothing says ‘opposition’ like an internal debate about the size of a party committee. Below the shadow cabinet, which will contain many faces who were not cabinet ministers, come the junior shadow ministers, appointed by the leader. This gives the new leader the opportunity to showcase some of the new talent in the PLP. New Labour MPs should be given the chance to take on Tory ministers now, not wait for Buggins’ Turn.
The third task is the party finances and organisation. John Prescott’s article in the Guardian this morning makes all the right points about the state of party finances. They are dire. The post of ‘treasurer’ has been a sinecure for a leading trade unionist for over 20 years. Prescott is right to say that the party treasurer should be a hands-on role. The new leader will need to work with them (it will be either Prescott or the respected Unite official Diana Holland) to sort out the party finances, and prepare for the Tories restricting trade union donations.
With these building blocks in place – an honest audit of defeat, a strong, energetic parliamentary team, and a party machine on a sound financial footing – the new leader can begin the most important task of all – the construction of a party programme. This is about more than a manifesto for 2015; it is about a vision for Britain. The real danger for Labour is to stridently defend the legacies from the last period in office, whilst the Tory-led government radically changes the shape of society and its institutions. This is the trap we fell into over the utility privatisations in the 1980s. The Tories transformed their ownership (and subsequently business performance) in ways the people either welcomed or were indifferent to. And Labour looked like all it wanted to do was turn the clock back to public ownership, when you had to wait several weeks to get a new phone.
Take the NHS. By 2015, the structure of the NHS will be markedly different from today: no strategic health authorities, no primary care trusts, every hospital a foundation trust, fewer health quangos and agencies, and GP consortia commissioning the bulk of patient care. What will Labour’s health policy be? A return to PCTs? More quangos? It will be hard for ministers to see their achievements in office being dismantled or reversed. Labour ministers sweated blood to create the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC); the Tories abolished it within a few weeks. The point is that we need to think about the shape of the world we will inherit, and how we can apply our values to improve it. The new leader will need a policymaking process which allows fresh thinking and new ideas, rooted in values. Defending the fast-vanishing legacy of Labour in government would make us face the wrong way. We need to face the future.
The candidates have had a hard summer. Each deserves plaudits for their commitment and quality of their campaigns. But for the winner the really hard work is just beginning.
Paul Richards’s new book Labour’s Revival is out in the autumn
Paul,
I think it’s unfortunate that you have suggested Ed M supports a core vote strategy.
By definition any people who did not vote for us this time are not part of our core vote.
Ed isn’t in the race for leader in order to lead us to glorious ideologically pure defeats, he wants to lead Labour back to power. He’s trying to work out the coalition of voters needed to do that, just as Tony and his strategists did in the mid-90s.
The starting point pre-1997 was that our DE support was very solid so all we had to do (though this in itself was a huge task) was to target swing C1 and C2 voters.
The task now is much more difficult and we cannot just repeat the successful 1997 or even 2005 formula.
We have to develop policies which win back lost voters across the whole socio-economic spectrum and can no longer take our core or base for granted because of decreasing class and partisan loyalty.
Ed gets that we need a radical repositioning if we are going to make ourselves attractive again to the very diverse sets of voters we have lost.
That doesn’t translate into a move back to the bonkers left positions of the 1980s – they are even less relevant now than they were then, and I would bet a lot of money that DE voters on council estates that switched to the Tories do not want a more leftwing Labour Party. But nor does it mean we can win by being a Blair/New Labour re-enactment society without Blair as Leader, ignoring the changes that have happened and will happen while the Coalition are in power.
I think Ed Miliband is the candidate who most gets the scale of the existential crisis facing Labour – that we lost heartland as well as swing votes so in some ways our position is more precarious than it was in 1983, and the consequent need for a comprehensive rethink of our policies and positioning.
Thats true so the 400,000 who have left Labour are no longer Labour, fine by me, I have spent a life time in Labour and it ended up with Luke’s beloved New Labour, hope you do well at the next election