Ask a silly question, get a stupid answer. While Five Million Votes – the cross-factional group that is aiming to win back the five million Labour voters who deserted, died or stayed in and watched EastEnders during the 13 years of Blair and Brown – isn’t asking a silly question, it is asking the wrong one. That means that it comes up with the wrong answers.
New Labour is a lot like Chris Nolan’s Inception: almost everyone saw it, but very few of them understood it. At the heart of the Five Million Votes’ approach is a critical misunderstanding of New Labour. New Labour wasn’t based on ‘triangulation’. It was a philosophy built on conviction, not summoned into existence out of convenience. It was a deeply held, evidence-backed set of beliefs about how best to create a more equal society. Yes, it was part of the international ‘Third Way’, a progressive movement that set out to restore and revitalise social democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but that isn’t the same as triangulation.
Triangulation was the strategy that Bill Clinton was forced to embrace after two years of progressive overreach saw the Democrats lose their Congressional majority. It was a creed of necessity, one that was obsessively and exclusively focused on retaining the White House in 1996. New Labour – or ‘Blairism’ – was not about winning. New Labour was not strategy but ideology. It was committed to using success from sector beyond the old public sector to bring the excellence of the private or third option to the general public. In foreign policy, it was fiercely internationalist: something which led to the foundation of DFID and the salvation of Kosovo and Sierra Leone, but also to the disastrous war in Iraq. What it wasn’t about was winning for winning’s sake. If it had been about winning, then it would have soft-pedalled on city academies, given way on ASBOs and tuition fees, and stayed out of Kosovo and Baghdad.
Five Million Votes is a category error: it’s an institutional answer to an ideological problem. The problem for Labour isn’t whether or not to have a mobilisation strategy, not least because, at no point in the Labour party’s history has anyone advocated a low turnout strategy, apart from in university towns and internal contests. The problem for Labour is far more complex and difficult than that. How is Britain going to get growth? How does that square with deficit reduction? How are we going to fight crime and improve schools? How are we going to ensure that all of our people are cared for in their old age? How are we going to pay for universal childcare? How are we going to fight poverty on an international scale? How are we going to protect ourselves? And the simple truth is: if Labour doesn’t have answers to those questions, then it doesn’t deserve to win.
Does Labour need to win back the voters it lost in 2005 and 2010? Yes, of course it does. But it wins them back by having the answers to the urgent questions of 2015, not by raking over the mistakes of 1997-2010. That was the mistake of 1992, when Neil Kinnock’s Labour adopted a policy of retreat and half-hearted compromise with the electorate, because it believed that was the way to win. The triumphs of 1997, 2001 and 2005 came because Labour had a programme that it genuinely believed in that was relevant to the concerns of modern Britain. To do so again, it can’t triangulate, but it can’t just knock on doors either. It has to come up with a policy programme that it genuinely believes in.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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What Labour needs is more pontification and rhetorical questions. Thank god this article has come to fill that gap in supply.
This is absolutely spot on. Labour lost those 5m votes because it’s ideology of privatisation, consumerism and vapid ‘aspiration’ at home – and of brutal military intervention abroad- was out of step with the British way of life .
Smith543 your obviously taking what this article say’s out of context to say that labour lost 5million votes because it was new labour, but seeing as Labour won the 2005 election after Iraq It’s hardly accurate comment of course what labour stood for in the mid 80’s resulted in labour doing worse than it got in 2010, but the answer to not be new labour is away to win back the 5million votes overlooks the fact that, being old labour resulted in labour losing more than 5milion votes in the past place, the point about Kinnock didn’t really in what he stood for in 192 was why the public just wouldn’t vote for a Manifesto that in real terms wasn’t much different than 1997, is the point of if we just denounce things like DNA, 42 days or being to soft on Immigration as we think it will win back one nation Tories who will give us a chance ,then that’s no different to Kinnock not really believing in the 50p tax rate ,Europe or not undoing the union reforms, as such if Ed appears to just be saying stuff to appeal to the unions when he knows the public as a hole won’t tolerate it ,it will appear phoney to the electorate too
The choice facing Labour at the time was to educate the public about our values or to find a middle ground which would appeal to voters. Clearly having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 1992 the party lost confidence in the former and focused on the latter. The incompetence of the Major regime helped swell the votes too. So the party grasped at everything it could to win including courting the Tory leaning press who were embarrassed by Major and saw Blair as fairly right wing and no danger to the establishment.
Clearly this was better than nothing but everyone was wanting everything from the incoming party so there was huge amounts of wishful thinking on all sides. I acknowledge that there was a lot of good done by the government, the investment in the NHS principally so. However it did not do many other things such as renationalise the railways even though it would have been popular within and without the party and was agreed at annual conference.
To regain power the Tories have replicated Blairism but are 10 years after the event.
Today Labour needs to move on and focus on how it achieves growth yet maintains fairness. Uniting with the unions.
We need to relearn the lessons of the thirties and rediscover Keynesianism, so putting our people back to work, getting them properly housed and our children in decent schools.
Blair encouraged the party to be bold! No better time than now.
I can’t help but feel that if renationalisation of the railways would really have been really popular with the public either Labour or the Tories would have gone for it. I never understand why people insist ‘such and such’ a policy is so popular with the public if only a party would back it. If a party genuinely believe a policy would be workable and popular with the public, then surely they’d back it!
No when that party is more interested in and spends more time on sucking up to the corporates. New Labour presented us with basically Thatcher-lite, complete witrh all the neo-liberal “public sector bad – private sector good” cobblers.
Re- engage with the party’s roots and stop fellating the corporates
The polling seems to indicate that it was.
The Tories are a party founded on the protection of the private interest. They were hardly going to nationalise it.
For Labour, it would have been expensive, and potentially politically risky. The paradigm of New Labour was so tightly drawn and controlled that it basically didn’t allow nationalisation of anything at all (despite all the guff about it being ideologically neutral on ownership).
In short, there was a legitimate question for Labour about how you prioritise resources, and a question of disputed legitimacy about whether it was acceptable to nationalise anything.
This may not be the most scientific poll: http://www.politicshome.com/uk/majority_of_public_support_full_railway_nationalisation.html
But it’s also replicated here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8253804.stm
I reckon you would get quite good numbers back.
Simply because a policy is not in place, it doesn’t mean that it’s not a good or popular policy?
Your argument does gut politics quite a bit…
“How to create a more equal society”? Perhaps the singular failure to achieve this was the key cause of the lost 5 million. New Labour supporters (and I am one) need to face up to the policy failures as well as credit the undoubted successes. They need to recognise that we lost millions of our traditional supporters who simply stayed at home because we seemed to not represent them and their concerns. The turnout in “Labour” areas says it all really. So, Stephen, how do we create a more equal (and fair and just and better) society?
“it was fiercely internationalist”
I’m sure the shell-traumatised families of Fallujah will thank New Labour for its solidarity – along with the thousands of dead, and the lads and lasses at the UN who were busily ignored in the name of this not so multilateral approach.
Can we please stop pretending that co-opting the language of the democratic left makes something socialist or social democratic?
As for the rest of the article, proponents of the third way are all too keen to retreat to “It is the single credible strategy” arguments when they are opposed on substance, but then bounce across to the “It isn’t strategy but ideology” argument when tackled on whether this strategy was successful. One is always used to deflect the other, rather than actually dealing with either.
Even when it was all the rage, the fact that it had to resort to this sophistry was (and indeed remains) a tell-tale sign of an ideological system beyond its prime, and its capacity for endurance.
The fact that the right of the party still spends all its time trying to defend the negatives of the notion (albeit often in a less than adequate fashion) points to a wider paucity and unwillingness to evolve in those quarters.
Progress supporters – you are supposed to be revisionists – not denialists.
“it was fiercely internationalist”
I’m sure the shell-traumatised families of Fallujah will thank New Labour for its solidarity – along with the thousands of dead, and the lads and lasses at the UN who were busily ignored in the name of this not so multilateral approach.
Can we please stop pretending that co-opting the language of the democratic left makes something socialist or social democratic?
As for the rest of the article, proponents of the third way are all too keen to retreat to “It is the single credible strategy” arguments when they are opposed on substance, but then bounce across to the “It isn’t strategy but ideology” argument when tackled on whether this strategy was successful. One is always used to deflect the other, rather than actually dealing with either.
Even when it was all the rage, the fact that it had to resort to this sophistry was (and indeed remains) a tell-tale sign of an ideological system beyond its prime, and its capacity for endurance.
The fact that the right of the party still spends all its time trying to defend the negatives of the notion (albeit often in a less than adequate fashion) points to a wider paucity and unwillingness to evolve in those quarters.
Progress supporters – you are supposed to be revisionists – not denialists.
Does anyone ever actually say anything tangible on this website? All the articles and comments seem to fall into two categories, the “labour lost its roots” camp, and the even more boring “Labour needs to build on its successes” camp. As far as I can see both of those comments are of no value to the democratic process or the electoral success or otherwise of Labour.
Why not try talking about something that actually exists, other than intangible navel-gazing comments about groups that were “disenfranchised” by Labour; groups which incidentally exist in broad enough strokes that they are completely valueless in the real world – though do allow self-appointed pundits to make statements without having to evidence them.