This article is a summary of Liam Byrne’s pamphlet which you can read here

As the election results sink in, we need to look hard not just at how our vote has changed, but how Britain has changed, if we are to renew and win again. What happened??Our headline results were sobering enough. We lost almost one million votes on our 2005 performance; 97 seats fell. Just 258 Labour MPs won – 13 less than in 1992.

At the first meeting of the new parliamentary Labour party, the mood was defiant. We knew that the wide and winning coalition we put together had cracked – but it had not crumbled. In our great cities we fought well and defied the odds. We held seats like Birmingham Edgbaston and Westminster North and won back a seat in East London. In traditional strongholds like Scotland, our share went up by three per cent. Among the over-65s, our share fell by just three per cent. Crucially, we combined these traditional strengths with a sustained appeal to the better off in society – the ‘ABs’ – a slice of society that makes up one-third of voters. Between 1979 and 1992, just 18 per cent of this vital group voted Labour. This year, 30 per cent gave us their confidence – the same share as 1997. Among C1s our vote share polled 29 per cent – well above the long-term average of 25 per cent we captured before 1997. ??

But let’s not kid ourselves. Our coalition is now under serious strain. In 2005, Labour retained 85 per cent of the seats won in the 1997 landslide. No more. Nearly 70 of those seats fell and now two stark facts stare us in the face. First, Labour now has a major southern-eastern challenge. Seventy per cent of the 938,000 votes we lost were in the east, south-east and south-west. Our share of the vote in the south-east (outside London) halved to just 16 per cent. Our share in the south-west is 15 per cent and in the east of England totals 20 per cent. This election cost us the service of 30 Labour MPs across the three regions. Now, across the entire southern-eastern sweep of England there are just 10 Labour MPs, sustained by a combined majority of just 57,500 – out of the 10 million votes cast by local residents. ??

Key to this was a major fall in support among ‘Motorway Man and Woman’, the residents of those six seats like north and south Swindon along the M4, the seven seats like Harlow, Watford and Stevenage in the M25 belt, four seats like Chatham and Dartford in Kent, and the 11 seats like Loughborough and Northampton North along the M1 and into the east Midlands. Together, these 28 seats – almost one-third of those we lost – have a high proportion of younger families, often with children at school or university and with slightly higher incomes and big aspirations for the future.

Second, the 2010 election has punched a serious hole in the bedrock of our coalition – those blue-collar workers working in a range of modern jobs from retail, logistics and routine manufacturing. Often known in the jargon as the C2s, they make up one-fifth of Britain’s voters. Historically, they overwhelmingly voted Labour. Yet in 2010, our support fell a full 20 per cent, down from 43 per cent to just 23 per cent, its biggest ever fall. Dig beneath the figures and some shocking conclusions emerge. Almost 50 per cent of C2 women voted Tory. This loss cost lots of seats, especially in the east and West Midlands, the north-west and the north-east. Indeed, in over half the seats we lost, these voters make up one in six of local residents.

Now, some might say we lost this election on style. But I think there is something else going on. When new Labour set out its principles, we put work, opportunity and aspiration centre stage. We said: play by the rules and you’ll get your reward. But the plain fact is too many families today – working in retail, manufacturing, the service sector, construction – feel they’re working as hard as ever and just not getting on. They’re not wrong. Research shows that workers on between £20-30,000 a year have faced huge forces in our economy, squeezing pay packets and the cost of living for at least five years. That’s why so many are so frustrated with welfare reform and immigration.?These are families like my constituent whose wife works 12-hour factory shifts while he took casual work because he couldn’t get the construction job he was trained for. They earned just too much to win any state help. Or the security guard working all hours who couldn’t get help for the care his mother needed because he too earned just too much. Britain is immeasurably fairer and stronger for 13 years of Labour, but we have to accept that, for some, the deal has stopped delivering enough, fast enough.

So, what next? I think there are three lessons. First, we have to transform the politics of aspiration once again. If we want to revitalise the coalition that took us to power in 1997, we have to set out with a new crispness how the power of government is going to help modern families get on in life in 21st-century Britain. In 2005, Labour was 18 per cent ahead of the Tories among 25-34-year-olds. At this election, we were five per cent behind. It was the age group where Labour’s vote fell sharpest. Aspiration and opportunity have always been the uniting idea that bonds our coalition together – and education has always been its symbol. At the last budget, we boosted education spending, even amidst the budget challenges we confronted. We were the only party that did. But we couldn’t find a way to punch this through a hostile media. We should redouble our efforts.

Second, let’s agree that now is no time for a modest renewal. A wide sweep of policy needs to change. Britain has extraordinary chances to flourish in the decade ahead; today we trade more with Ireland than with Brazil, Russia, India and China combined. That is going to change and with it a new prosperity could come.?But modern markets will not ensure that national prosperity means prosperity for all Britain’s families. We are not going to assuage frustrations with welfare reform and immigration unless we tackle the reasons why people feel their livelihoods are stuck in limbo. Without a plan that renews our approach to jobs, tax and benefits, the minimum wage, welfare reform, skills and higher education, university funding, child care, social care, social housing and pensions, we will be left without an offer for aspirational families. We should take a lesson from President Obama’s Middle Class Taskforce. When I met their team in Washington last year, what impressed me was the way the president’s team is looking at the crunch that middle-class families face in the round. ??

Third, we must put community politics at the centre of our party work. In Birmingham, we did well fending off a Tory attack. Gisela Stuart’s extraordinary triumph in Birmingham Edbadgston will be one of the great memories of election night. In my own seat, we managed to put up the Labour majority. These results were not delivered by direct mail from on high – but by community campaigning on the ground. Not many of Gisela’s, or my, volunteers were paid-up Labour members. But they delivered a Labour victory.

So, we urgently need a style of campaigning-led politics in our communities led by local Labour politicians. Success will demand reaching out to the civic activists and social entrepreneurs who share our appetite to make a difference on the ground. Canvassing is not enough any more. Community campaigning means bringing progressive people together to battle for local change. That means going back to the organising traditions that gave birth to the Labour party over a century ago, where the ballot box was only one of the ways we made change happen. ??

Every MP I’ve spoken to found no love for the Tories on the doorstep. Lots of people knew what Labour had done for them, low interest rates, tax credits, better pensions, decent schools and a transformed NHS. But voters want to know what’s next. This country is immeasurably fairer and stronger for Gordon Brown’s extraordinary political life. Our tribute must be to learn lessons fast and get back out there and win again.