Those seats Labour lost in the Midlands and the M4 corridor have scores of Labour MPs travelling through them as they return to our heartlands. If Swindon, Burton or Sherwood are holding a CLP meeting, fundraiser or campaign day, numerous shadow cabinet members let alone backbench colleagues will be travelling through or very near twice a week as they visit their constituencies in Scotland, Wales and northern England. The challenge we face in many of the seats that we must win back at the next election, places like Crawley, Brighton, Hove, and all those in Kent (from Medway to Dover), Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, is compounded by the fact that they have no Labour MP who travels past (or even near) on a regular basis.
Until we recognise this and our parliamentary team take a different approach we will never be match fit and ready to take out this odious coalition.
The next election is going to be Labour’s hardest for a generation – far harder than 2010 as so many Labour people espouse. In Labour’s history, every time we lose power – bar one – we lose more seats the election after. 1983 was worse than 1979.
Winning back is never easy for Labour. This was made abundantly clear by Joan Ryan’s piece for Progress magazine, ‘The hidden landslide’. In many seats that Labour won and held since 1997, we are now in third place. In more, Tory majorities make them look more like safe seats than the battlegrounds seats we need them to be.
One simple explanation for the massive swing against Labour in these seats is the advantage of incumbency lost by Labour and gained by its new Tory master. If this happens again in the 94 seats we lost in 2010 we could look further rather than nearer from government on 7 May 2015. When you add this to the fact that none of our 2005 losses are in our top 100 targets – the challenge seems even greater!
Currently the Labour party is weaning itself away from its obsession with the Liberal end of this Tory-led coalition – but there is still more to do. The Labour party is acting like a ‘woman scorned’, as if the Liberals are having some kind of illicit affair. While none of us likes the choice they made, we cannot be led by our hearts and must campaign with our heads. It will be fun to watch us win Sheffield, Newcastle and other northern cities from the Liberal Democrats, but ultimately it is votes won from Tories in the south and midlands, that hold the only prize worth winning in 2015 – Labour back in government.
This needs to be our challenge. Now the Lib Dem vote has collapsed, Labour has two equally important. Firstly to give those people a reason to vote Labour (this will be slightly delayed by our policy review) and secondly to stop them going to the Tories. Every cut blamed on the Conservatives, every choice defined against Cameron, and every policy a dividing line with the majority stake in this coalition of cuts.
As Peter Kellner points out there will be no magic formula for this. However, New Labour does provide the best template for going forward. At its best, it separates our ideological attachment to ends and focused heavily on what would deliver the social justice we desire in a way that embraces modernity and is seen to be on the public’s side. We know how to win the arguments on economic competence, crime, and public service reform, but we now need to make sure that we are out there every day, in places like Great Yarmouth, Gillingham and Hove, making that case until May 2015.
The Progress Speaker List is here to help if you are looking for someone to speak at a CLP meeting, fundraiser or any other local Labour event.
The cost of living is 20% higher in the South East than elsewhere – so we can and must re-connect with working families facing hard choices to ensure they are represented, and represented wherever they are…Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Essex…We’re not all in this together and those being hit hardest need Labour most. The lost advantage of incumbency is a challenge but can be overcome by winning in places like Gravesham on May 5th – Targeting winnable seats in the local elections and laying the foundations to fight back in 2015.
I don’t understand the conclusion of this piece re. New Labour. It’s pretty unevidenced in your otherwise excellent piece, for a start, but secondly it just lost a general election and was in heavy decline by 2003/2004. It’s dated. Staying obsessed over it will firstly make us look rooted in the past rather than the future (a great irony), but secondly, means are important to how ends are achieved. Consider the fact that Britain became a more financially unequal place under over a decade of Labour. This was used succesfully by the Tories to get to our left in their rhetoric, which was reasonably successful even though we all know their record will be far worse. New Labour lacks the tools to deal with a modern Conservative Party capable of doing this, and that is because it lacks any means to generate the end of a more financially equal society (the fastest route to more equal power and opportunity). In all of these way, strategic, electoral and ideological, it is now both rendered insufficient and outmoded. The more moderate wing of the Labour left has been saying this for a decade… the fact Ed Miliband was able to do so well in the leadership election is evidence of the failure of a good chunk of the party right to engage with those points or take them on board, in anything like the way the sensible left has had to do, with accepting the need to win swing voters, for example. Labour will always have a centrist wing, but it needs to stop obsessing about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s political project – to take its fingers out of its ears, revise, and move on . That’s what it is supposed to be good at anyway.