It is a great pleasure to be here in Birmingham.
A city – like so many of our great English urban centres – completely transformed by 13 years of a Labour government dedicated to rebuilding the public realm.
It would have been wonderful were we gathered here today to debate how Ed Miliband’s new Labour government could advance that cause even further.
Alas, we live in unhappier times.
Further education colleges decimated;
Sure Start provision dismantled;
Climate change dismissed;
Trade unions attacked;
Charities besmirched;
European solidarity undermined;
The union at risk;
The BBC under fire;
No urgency on inequality;
And the plight of vulnerable refugees ignored …
Ladies and gentleman, the full misery of majority Tory Britain has already begun to take shape.
But as Lewis Baston shows in his research for Progress today, to escape it we must first overcome a ‘Midlands Misery’ every bit as entrenched as our traditional ‘Southern Discomfort’.
Since the English civil war, the towns, villages and cities of the Midlands has provided the battleground between the Good Old Cause – our cause – and the forces of Conservatism. In 2015 it was no different.
Here, as elsewhere, the 2015 Labour vote hardened in areas where there was either a high percentage ethnic minority voters or an abundance of the more idealistic, metropolitan middle class.
However, as Lewis correctly points out: there are practically no more seats left to win here in Birmingham.
And across the rest of the region you can clearly see all the components of our broader electoral failure.
I certainly felt it, supporting Kate in Stafford; Jon in Burton; Catherine in Erewash; and even Jess here in Birmingham.
No trust to deliver a prosperous future for upwardly mobile voters.
Not nearly enough appeal for pensioners;
And the erosion of the white working class’s traditional loyalty in the face of the Ukip challenge.
My experience of Stoke-on-Trent means it is the last of these challenges which is most burned into my psyche when I reflect upon our defeat.
And to be truthful it is the one that probably concerns me most – as I’m sure Ruth [Smeeth – on panel] will agree.
Make no mistake: our support in the Midlands is frighteningly brittle among the white working class – as it is in many areas across the country where Ukip are on the march.
And, as Dan Jarvis has recently shown, given that the conditions which ferment Ukip support are unlikely to become any less precipitous in the coming years, none of us can afford to be complacent.
After all, we saw in Scotland what can happen when these politically volatile times find a suitable lightning rod for expressing discontent with the mainstream.
NEITHER PODEMOS NOR PASOKIFICATION
This sort of research will be absolutely crucial for charting our path back to power.
So we should be grateful to Lewis, Liam [Byrne – on panel], Jon Cruddas and others who have already begun the exhaustive work of understanding our estrangement from the public.
They are the heirs to an important and oft forgotten 1980s chapter in the history of Labour revisionism.
However, the difference now is that in 1979 and 1983 it was the far left that initiated our political renewal in the wake of the manual working classes’ widespread conversion to Thatcherism.
Indeed, back then the pages of Marxism Today fizzed with essays by leftist theorists and historians – such as those two late great giants, Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall – which began to shine an unflinchingly brutal light upon the real not imagined political attitudes of the British working class.
To say the least, the left has not followed such a path in 2015.
In policy terms, it has sought to revive solutions many thought old fashioned even in the early 1980s.
But if the revisionist side of the party learns nothing else from the last few months it must be that politics is emphatically not a rational, empirical social science.
It is about people’s hopes, fears, dreams, insecurities – and as such it often responds far more to raw emotion than it does to cold reason.
I do not believe we – and I very much include myself within this – responded to our election defeat and the subsequent leadership contest with the requisite emotional intelligence.
We came armed only with technocratic answers about WHAT Labour should do.
But what the party craved was emotional answers about WHO we are.
You know, members here in the West Midlands and North Staffordshire and elsewhere had just been through a profoundly traumatic experience.
For six months they knocked on doors in communities like Cannock and Dudley.
And for six months they had to endure being told by friends and neighbours, ‘I’ve always voted Labour … but this time I just can’t bring myself to do it’.
No matter that the reason behind this are complex and deep-seated: it was inevitable that such a traumatic experience might lead to a desperate search for cultural affirmation.
Right across Europe, mainstream social democratic parties have been challenged by new populist groups grounded either in nationalism, leftwing community movements, or in some cases both.
And whilst the evidence shows – the exceptional case of Greece aside – that there are clear electoral limitations to this new populism, traditional social democracy isn’t exactly winning any elections either.
The truth is neither ‘Podemos’-style populism nor hollowed-out, ‘Pasokified’ social democracy represent viable routes to renewing centre-left politics in the 21st century.
And it is probably time for us to stop pointing out the flaws of the former and concentrate on addressing the glaring deficiencies of the latter.
Because without a total overhaul of our politics, those of us who advocate modernisation risk becoming a spent force in the debate about the future of the Labour Party.
THE BLAIR COMPLEX
This must begin by understanding how our political culture appears to the outside world.
Because the rejection of European social democracy is in part a rejection of what the public considers to be government by a distant and rootless technocratic elite.
Yet instead of embracing rule changes which can open our party out to the rest of the country, we became inward-looking.
As a general rule, if you are losing elections, it is not a good idea to complain that too many people are voting. The solution is to go out and win some more votes.
We should be self-confident enough to recognise that we are many and the far left are few.
Renewing our party now means bringing in hundreds of thousands from the millions who want Labour to be a party of power, harnessing their energy for the future, building a broader tent of support – not building barriers to keep people out.
Second, we must rediscover the potency of the future.
In the current leadership election we focused too much on restoring policies from the 1990s rather than a programme for the 2020s focused on the way the world is heading.
The digital revolution.
The hour-glass economy.
The impact of super-computers.
Mass migration.
European competitiveness.
This collective inability to embrace the future has led to some rather bizarre consequences
Because if we are honest with ourselves, the last two leadership transitions have been about positioning the party against Tony Blair.
Both Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband sought, to a greater or lesser extent, to position themselves against Blair.
And Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign playbook contains a more extreme narrative about his opposition to Blair’s legacy.
My question is: Where does this stop?
The public will be confused as to why a politician elected to the leadership more than 20 years ago continues to occupy the minds and dominate the thinking of today’s leadership ranks within the Labour party.
We have a Blair complex, we need to get over him and it.
We cannot constantly define ourselves for or against a figure from our past.
Don’t get me wrong – I know how absurd it is to be insulted just for defending his achievements.
I know how much it hurts to hear civil partnerships, the national minimum wage, Sure Start, new hospitals, new schools, radical welfare redistribution and the most sustained period of public investment this country has ever seen, airily dismissed as ‘power without principles’.
But we must now move on from the politic arguments of the past and focus squarely upon the future.
WE ARE LABOUR
But one thing we should not tolerate is our loyalty to this party being called into question.
I was born into the Labour party and I will serve it till my dying days.
Besides, the history of our party is marked by two great splits – National Labour in the 1930s and the SDP in the 1980s.
Both came from the right. Both achieved nothing but prolonged periods of Conservative rule
So I have no patience with anyone muttering now about breakaways or legal challenges or changing the rules to keep people out.
Nor do I have any respect for those talking up division for their own factional agendas.
They are all playing into the hands of the Tories.
The lesson we should draw from this is that no matter what happens next week – and this contest is far from over – we must accept the result, stay loyal to Labour, and work with everyone in the party who wants to make it electable again: a party of government not just a voice of protest.
I disagree with Jeremy Corbyn on much but that is nothing compared to the revulsion I feel for what this Tory government is doing to our communities, to our public services, and to our country.
So reject any talk of splits. Now is the time for a loyalty that declares: we are Labour, we will always be Labour and we will, with perseverance and renewal, find our way back.
That journey has to begin, as it always has done, here in the Midlands. These are the battlefields we need to win on. And today is about ensuring that we have the ideas, confidence, and mettle to do so
Politics can be as much about persuasion as moving the party to the perceived ‘Thatcherisation’ of the working class.
If this process of embourgoisment of workers has taken place, and the evidence is contadictory, the question is what has happened to the attitudes of those workers and their children since 2008, the crash, the housing crisis and austerity?
In Scotland the workers moved to what they perceived as left via the SNP. In England they moved to UKIP as they were given simplistic answers to the question, what/who is to blame for what is happening.
Hunt meanwhile argues that all that needs to happen is the majority who agree with him need to flood the party.
How about some theory to explain the crash, to explain how to improve lives and to stop austerity and some principles. This is some of what appeals about Corbyn, not simply an emotional, irrational response.
Corbyn will never gain full power because his policies can not appeal to swing voters. So he will be unable to implement more nationalisation, removal of large scale assets, money creation, leaving the EU, leaving NATO, pursuing a maverick foreign policy and so on. Chuka and now Tristram may think this will be patched over but unfortunately there are many in the party who will not reconcile themselves to this nonsense let alone the voters who will be frightened before any election as the markets start capital outflows and disinvestment and interest rate rises. Corbyn will never see power so we are all have to now play a 10 year waiting game or some alternative.. Its the former Chuka and Tristam are suggesting.
Does no one see this leadership election as Labour’s IDS time. Remember the quiet man who had nothing to say and was replaced in a coup in 2003 by Michael Howard. Well, Jeremy may have a better three years, especially if he manages to sign all his supporters up as members and starts winning by elections.
What matters is three things; the voters, the voters and the voters. Mr Michael Foot had supporters but the voters in 83 gave Labour its lowest vote since 1918.
You forget the Falklands War which reminded people of what it was like to win something.
Good to hear from our education spokesman at last.
A pity he has nothing to say about the great ‘skills’ challenge we face and the corresponding investment needed to equip the future workforce. Has he transformed his approach to now offer something not already offered by the last two governments? Has Hunt got anything new to say or offer on the subject at all. I must admit to a personal view that Hunt is bored by the humdrum of everyday department type issues and feels he is profound thinker and destined for something more important.
Also a pity he has taken many words here to say absolutely nothing except his usual style of trying to sound profound about nothing very much. In my opinion Hunt has not demonstrated the capability, interest or potential for shadow cabinet responsibility, although I do admit he does appear to gather the audience and air of someone with something to say. I for one have not seen it over these last few years and we do need our leading team to develop some new radical policy measures ( with implementation plans) in so many important areas not to indulge themselves in the pleasures of a study of history.
Tristram Hunt has said before (and I think he’s right) that we shouldn’t be focusing on individual policies right now. We are 5 years away from an election, many things will change between now and then, and no one will remember what the Opposition was announcing back in summer 2015.
I was at the Birmingham event, and one of the overriding messages that came out was that swing voters are motivated as much by emotion as by a rational analysis of the policies of each party. Most of Ed Miliband’s individual policies played well in opinion polls (so well that Osborne has nicked half of them), but that didn’t translate into an overall feeling that Labour deserved to be in power.
Is it a misprint about too many people voting? The problem Labour has, in part, is that over seven million are not even registered to vote, and that only 67% of those registered do vote. We need to get all our natural voters registered and out to vote, or encouraged to use a Postal Vote. I agree that we must accept the decision on the leadership but fear that many will not accept it.
One wonders why Ed and his team did not get more registered given it was a big part of Obama’s and the Democrats upsurge in the swing states. Clearly it went off the radar of Labour’s strategy.
He is part of a labour hierarchy which allowed two totally unelectable leaders to remain unchallenged and lead the Party into 10 years of opposition. Unfortunately three of the current contenders played their part in that also and from the above Tristram appears to be urging another 5 years of loyalty to the newly elected leader however unsuitable he/she is.
Not again Tristram, not good enough, we expect Labour MPs and Labour members to keep on the lookout for a leader of calibre, someone who can lead our party into government. I am not sure that any of the four are that person albeit pretty sure that one of them definitely is not. We must keep an open mind about a further leadership election and we must insist that those able to do so challenge individual egos and act effectively to ensure that the Labour leader in 2020 has a fighting chance of winning.
The end of the beginning, (hopefully) not the beginning of the end…