Like the famous curate’s egg, Labour’s election performance earlier this month was good in parts.
A decade of losses in the northern cities was reversed overnight. Labour triumphed in Wales. There was much rejoicing at heavy defeats for the Liberal Democrats, with some especially unpleasant and duplicitous Liberal Democrat councillors losing their seats. Focus on that. Overall, a gain of over 800 council seats, and a vote share of around 38 per cent (compared, never let us forget, with a vote share at the general election of just 29 per cent), gives Labour grounds for mild celebration.
But wait. Before the rejoicing gets too out of control, we should look at Scotland. Labour’s result in Scotland was cataclysmic. The Labour party in Scotland, for over a century a bulwark, is now leaderless, directionless, and without any sense that things are going to improve any time soon. The campaign was described as ‘amateurish’, ‘hopeless’ and ‘inept’- and that was by Labour people. Any postmortem must include the leadership of Iain Gray. But far more significant was the absence of a compelling aspirational offer to the Scottish people. Ed Miliband needs to urgently recognise the danger of an independence referendum this parliament, and the prospect of a UK parliament comprising purely English, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs. David Cameron is drooling at the prospect, no matter what he says in public.
A Scot-free parliament would probably mean Tory governments until kingdom come. Every Labour government has been utterly reliant on the Welsh and the Scots. This raises the most important question to come from the elections on 5 May: why can’t Labour win in the south of England? It’s not a new question. Seldom a weekend goes by without some part of the Labour movement discussing southern discomfort. Labour focused on the south in the local elections, with a successful effort to select more candidates across the southwest, southeast and eastern regions, and focused targeting of councils such as Gravesham and Dover.
Despite all that, Labour performed poorly in the south. In Dover and Thanet in Kent, and Thurrock in Essex, Labour failed to win its target councils. In Dartford, the Tories gained seats. In Brighton and Hove, the Tories lost eight seats, but the Greens gained 10. The Gravesham victory stands as the exception to the trend. There may be a scattering of Labour councillors with a toehold on southern councils, but many areas remain Labour-free zones.
It is worth revisiting the ‘hidden landslide’ analysis by Joan Ryan after last year’s general election debacle published by Progress in October 2010. She points out that parliamentary seats that Labour lost in 2005 were carried away on an even greater blue tidal wave in 2010. She cites former Labour seats such as Welwyn Hatfield, where the Tories now have a majority of more than 17,000, and Wellingborough, which the Tories won by only 687 in 2005 and where Peter Bone now sits on a majority of 11,787. Nine of the seats we lost to the Tories in 2005 now have majorities in excess of 10,000. In six seats, Labour came third. Labour lost Hemel Hempstead by fewer than 500 votes in 2005. Now Labour is in third place, and more than 13,000 behind the Tories. There are few signs of hope in these constituencies where there were also council elections. Yet this is the turf Miliband needs to win back, just as Tony Blair did in the mid-1990s.
To win here, Labour must adopt a robust approach to immigration, antisocial behaviour, crime and tax. Labour must appear to care about victims’ rights more than human rights, to be concerned with the private sector more than the public sector. Labour cannot appear to be metropolitan, elitist and out of touch. In short, Labour must ditch its Guardianista tendencies, and become a party for people who go to work, pay their taxes, want quality schools and hospitals, and own their own homes and cars. Miliband’s appeal to Liberal Democrats is superb mischief-making, designed to cause coalition ministers maximum discomfort. But it’s not the basis of an election-winning strategy. It doesn’t even come close. If there really was a ‘progressive majority’ in England, the AV referendum would have gone very differently. We should never forget that voting Labour in most of the south is seen as wildly eccentric behaviour.
Winning the south is not impossible. Somehow Blair, a Scottish, Oxford-educated, Islingtonian lawyer, representing a northern mining seat, managed to reach the voters in Essex, Kent, Sussex and Buckinghamshire. Blair was about as ‘middle England’ as Pippa Middleton. But he constructed a programme which appealed to Mondeo Man, based on instinctive understanding of how non-Labour voters think and act. Miliband must now do the same.
The Americans have a test for any new product or policy: ‘will it play in Peoria?’ meaning ‘will it appeal to the mainstream?’ For Miliband, as he leads the next stage of modernisation, the question should be: ‘will they stand for it in Stevenage?’
So in short in order to win elections labour must become the conservative party. What a depressing analysis. And for every right wing voter you win in the south you’ll lose a left wing voter in the north and scotland.
How about persuading those that still insist on targetted campaigning that we have reached the tipping point and the law of diminishing returns has kicked in. We are beyond the time when all we had to do was identify our support and then drag it out on polling day. We are now in the era of persuasion, and this means talking to all our constituents.
Stevenage seems a poor example to choose! Labour got 47% in the May 2011 elections and has been a Labour Council since 1973. It is a town proud of being exceptional in its values and politics!
I find it ironic how you emphasise the importance of Scottish MPs to Labour’s hopes of returning to power, because if the party takes your advice and devotes itself entirely to appealing to the Mondeo driving classes of Stevenage, Alex Slamond will be laughing and you can kiss Scotland goodbye.
Labour has bucked the trend in every year here in Peteborough since 2007. From a low in 2005 we have rebuilt the party and its support. At the last GE in Peterborough we stood against trident and stood up for migrants and BAME groups despite the Tory papers making Peterborough out as the migration capital of England and that this was THE election issue. Last year the Con majority was half what they expected we had a great campaign supported by the unions and our trades council. If there had been a GE here on May 5th with last years candidate and our local team would have won possible by thousands as some of those 8000 who voted Lib Dem last year decided to back us this time.
“Labour focused on the south in the local elections” – You could have fooled me. Did Labour focus on the local elections at all, in a really national sense? Neighbours in Oxford helped us in West Oxon, I heard of London activists helping in Thurrock, but the national party seemed to me to be unaware that any elections were going on at all.
Geoff took the words right out of my mouth. However, as we know the threat of Hemel Hempstead being swamped by immigrant labour is overwhelming and one can expect little more than a massive swing to the BNP there. Has it never occurred to you non-working political assistants that the demographic of places change? Also, you haven’t yet understood why the Yes-AV went down the swanee have you? Putting aside that AV isn’t as progressive as you like to tell us it is, it was a vote against Clegg and his Lie Dems, like it or not. The electorate knew that this is what the boy Clegg wanted and voted accordingly. Go get a job, oh, you can’t, can you, there is little or no work for the under 25s!
girls girls ! laundry ! public ! get a room !