Hello and welcome to Progress’s annual conference.
First of all, I want to thank everybody in this room.
Thank you for picking yourselves up off the floor and making this the biggest Progress conference in a decade.
And thank you for the work you did on the doorstep through this long, long campaign.
You made tens of thousands of contacts with voters on Progress campaign days alone.
Whatever the reasons for our defeat, you made sure that lack of hard work was never going to be one of them.
And thank you as well for making sure Progress has remained a shining beacon of sense in the Labour family.
When some wanted to drive us out of our party, you stayed loyal, and you remained determined to make the case for electability when so many of the calls Labour made over the last five years just didn’t seem right.
And by God our party, and actually our country too, needs you to speak up now. This is the time we show we are truly Labour’s new mainstream,
When we show that your determination to win runs right the way through our movement.
This is Labour’s first big chance to get together and talk about the future. No one should mince their words today. We need all perspectives and all points of view.
But no matter what you say, say it knowing this:
If we have the humility to listen to those who’ve lost faith, and the courage to change, Labour’s future is bright.
Now don’t get me wrong. Like all of you in this room, I am gutted.
– For the brilliant MPs we lost and the candidates who bust a gut but failed through no fault of their own
– For the activists who ended the night in tears
– And for Ed Miliband, who gave his all, put up with dog’s abuse, and deserves our lasting respect for the service he gave
But most of all, we should be gutted for the families who will feel the pain of five more years of a Tory government
– For the people at work who face a fresh erosion of their rights which their trade union may be rendered powerless to stop
– For the businesses who face going to the wall if we pull out of the EU
It is for them that Labour must change.
But let’s have our debates knowing that if we do change, we will win.
One of the things we got right in the campaign was to expose how poorly this government has served the British people.
– They failed to eliminate the deficit in their first term;
– Their decisions caused a crisis in A&E units across the country;
– And Britain is diminished on the global stage thanks to their isolationism and incompetence.
Of course, the fact our opponents were rubbish only serves to underline how badly we screwed up.
But the nature of our failure is also one of the prime causes for hope. A government that was crap two weeks ago is not suddenly formidable now.
They’ve got a slender majority .
And a bunch of backbenchers that make Iain Duncan Smith look like a moderate.
We can beat this lot in 2020, and beat them we must.
This is going to be a tough slog. But when we get weary, let’s imagine not just another five years, but another decade of this,
And then let’s swear to ourselves that we will do whatever it takes to win next time.
Now, this whole day is about discussing what went wrong and debating how we win again. So it is high time I shut up and gave the floor to the people who you have actually come here to hear from.
But before I do, let me just leave you with two brief thoughts.
Firstly, we must never again let ourselves go into an election not trusted on the fundamentals of economic management.
Our failure to say enough about fiscal discipline until it was too late left us open to the charge that we were big spenders who had not faced up to the post-crash reality. And that made us toxic.
So everything we do from here on in must be built on a foundation of economic credibility.
But on that foundation we must build a vision of the future that is not just more credible, but also more ambitious.
We must all have lost track of the times we were told on the doorstep that people didn’t know what we stood for. When they did understand, they questioned whether we could deliver, or whether it was relevant to their lives.
Our biggest problem was not that we were too left, or too right; or too metropolitan; or too northern; or not northern enough.
It was that we were too weak.
And we were weak because, at root, we had so little to offer on the basic truth of modern life: that the world is changing at a speed which for many people, brings more problems than it seems to offer new chances.
The country looked to us for leadership and they found us wanting. We must never again fail that test. We must never imply we can somehow turn back the clock or reach for a populism that people know in their hearts won’t really help them.
At all our best moments in our history, Labour has been the party that has handed people the power to thrive from the change that is impacting their lives.
That is the party we must be now.
I know you are up for the fight and ready for the debate. So let’s get going.
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John Woodcock MP is chair of Progress. He tweets @JWoodcockMP
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Photo: Richard Gardner
I think it’s a mistake to buy so completely into the Tory narrative about deficit reduction. According to this narrative, (i) Labour left the economy in a ‘mess’ by running up a huge deficit, (ii) cutting that deficit was, and still is, the government’s No. 1 priority and (iii) the only thing the Coalition really got wrong was not cutting the deficit fast enough. All three points are completely wrong and misguided (read the ‘manifesto for economic sense’ signed by hundreds of professional economists in 2012), and conceding these points in order to appear ‘economically credible’ is handing the advantage to the Tories. There are ways to be economically credible without mimicking our opponents.
Could not agree more – fantastic post.
Labour has (at least) three distinct problems it needs to deal with. Two can be seen by looking at a constituency map of the UK with Scotland now virtually all orange and England, South from a line drawn from the Humber to the Bristol channel virtually all Tory Blue (outside London). The third problem is nationalism, and I mean English, rather than Scottish. Dealing with any of these is going to be difficult; dealing with all three may well be impossible as the solutions to one problem, may increase the problem in the other areas,
It doesn’t really matter if we “buy the Tory narrative about debt reduction”, the fact is large numbers of those who vote did, and voted accordingly. For many the question they ask themselves when they vote is which Party will improve the financial situation for me and my family? For a large proportion of the voters, the answer wasn’t Labour, and frankly who can blame them? Creating an alliance of the poor and Guardian readers is not the way to power, and without power we can deliver nothing. Call them aspirational voters, call them shy Tories, call them what you like, but without them there is no Labour majority in 2020, or indeed ever.
By the next election we will have a de facto English Parliament with many decisions taken by it that currently are taken by the UK Parliament. We can win a majority of seats in England, as we did in 1997 and 2001, but it looks unlikely by 2020. The problem with the West Lothian question is that if you ask daft questions, you get daft answers. An English Parliament may be a daft answer, but we are going to have to deal with it, and all the questions of national identity that it raises, for all the Nations of the UK.