Another election defeat, another round of compulsory cognitive dissonance salves within the Labour party. With the requisite blame on the Iraq War and New Labour tried again by Ken Livingstone and Jon Trickett and found wanting (lads, it has been 10 years and even Tony managed to win an election with both of those on his back – give it a rest!), a new answer to reassure certain groups within the Labour party that they were right all along has sprung up: ‘lazy Labour’. The idea that Labour had the support to win all along – only that three million who said they would vote Labour just were no’t inspired enough on the day to toddle along to the polling station, and therefore the answer for next time to drive those voters out is – (surprise!) – a more stridently leftwing programme that just so happens to totally overlap with the proposer’s ideology. Forget difficult questions like ‘Why exactly did we lose seats to the Conservatives when we got more votes than 2010 and there was a higher turnout?’ and ‘Why did the Tory vote go up so much in our target seats?’ Out with those, in with another round of navel-gazing!
Let’s ignore that the last leader of the Labour party was elected on the classic ‘unite the left’ progressive majority prospectus. Let’s ignore that this myth’s proponents are implying that prospectus is worth one more heave, when it worked in the seats we were trying to win from the Liberal Democrats but nowhere else. Let’s also ignore that it is pretty unlikely all those voters apparently put off only at the last minute by a ‘Controls on immigration’ mug were somehow responsible for us losing our shadow chancellor’s seat to a mass of Labour voters defecting to the United Kingdom Independence party.
Because, even on its own terms, the ‘lazy Labour’ myth struggles to convince as an explanation for why we did so badly in the seats we needed to win last Thursday. It struggles even more as a starting point for how we fight the seats we need to win in 2020.
It relies entirely on going along with Ipsos MORI’s explanation for why it called the election result so far out along with everyone else – that their methodology was right, but that turnout at this election was supposed to reach a dizzying 82 per cent. Given we ran possibly our most intensive ‘get out the vote’ ground campaign ever, for a turnout 16 points below that, you have to wonder exactly how many million more conversations ‘lazy Labour’ proponents expect our activists to make next time in lieu of their ideology making the slightest compromise with the ‘wrong sort of voter’.
This is not a solution – it is a comfort blanket and a pernicious one. The scale of the defeat we had last Thursday is gargantuan, and bromides saying that victory will be ours if only we unite and inspire the left will get us nowhere.
Only a quarter of the seats we lost to the Scottish National party have majorities of less than 10,000.
Along with the eight seats we lost to the Conservatives, over two-thirds of our 106 target seats this time saw an increase in the Tory majority – to the point where the swing we need next time just to overtake the Tories as the largest party is larger than the one we needed to win a majority this year.
On majority sizes alone, a 110-seat target list to get us to a working majority features such true blue strongholds as Chipping Barnet, Canterbury, and Iain Duncan Smith’s seat in Chingford and Woodford Green.
By and large, the seats we need to win had above average turnouts, negligible Green and Liberal Democrat votes vulnerable to another ‘progressive majority’ appeal, and Ukip vote shares that outperformed their national result. And all this before punishing Tory boundary changes.
It is doable, but not if we lick our wounds with inward-looking myths. With Nicola Sturgeon presenting herself as the only legitimate opposition to David Cameron north of the border, we will not win in Scotland until we can convincingly win in England. So we need a leader who can reach out to alienated Ukip switchers in left-behind areas as effectively as they can to the Guardian readers of Muswell Hill, who can communicate our values without lapsing into bubblespeak and persuade them that Labour has answers for them again. And we need a party with a message that speaks just as much to comfortable families in commuter towns as it does to the shelf stacker on a zero-hours contract. This is a task more difficult than the one we faced after 1992, when traditional middle-class aspirational voters were our primary focus. With the quadrilemma of appealing to those voters, winning back Ukip converts and the SNP exodus, and without repelling the voters we have, the next leader faces Roy Jenkins’ Blair metaphor of carrying a Ming vase across a slippery floor, but also up three flights of greased stairs.
With these challenges in mind, nothing could be more ‘lazy Labour’ than an impotent and self-indulgent focus on how to maximise turnout among fellow travellers for fear of appealing to the ‘wrong people’. We need a focus on how we can bring our former voters back and bring more into the Labour tent. Only then will we represent the country – and only then will the voters trust us to represent them.
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Tyron Wilson is a member of Progress. He tweets @TyronWilson
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As always there were a number of reasons why Labour lost however the main ones were as follows (in no particular order):
– Ed Miliband was unelectable – he may have surprised people during the campaign by outperforming expectations but this is only because they were so low. He was a net negative to Labour, whilst Cameron was a net positive to the Conservatives
– Residual unpopularity from period in government – primary issues being the Iraq War, the level of immigration, and the economic issues which arose during the last few years in power
– Lack of popular figures around the leader – Ed Balls is not generally popular and neither is Harriet Harman and who else was there? More use should have been made of Yvette Cooper.
– Perceived as out of touch and too politically correct. Too focused on issues which are of no relevance to working people. Perceived as too soft on immigration, too pro-EU, not really any different to the Conservatives in areas such as taxation.
– Collapse in Scotland – this was the result of numerous factors specific to Scotland as well as those mentioned here
Labour did NOT lose because it was too “left wing” in terms of tax policy, nor because it was seen as anti the rich or “wealth creation. This is the line which will be used by enemies of Labour who want it to be another neo-Liberal party of the super rich.
Labour should:
– Choose an electable leader – Yvette Cooper is probably the best bet
– Become much more skeptical about the EU – the EU is a project to create a United States of Europe. Why should Labour support this? The EU is in many ways neo-Liberal, forcing things like rail privatisation and mail deregulation. And there is no reason for Labour to support a federal Europe. Labour should be much more pr-British and pro-British sovereignty. The mistake is being made that such an approach is right wing. It is not, and is no way contradictory with being the party of working people
– Be clear that immigration has been too high, to the detriment of those for whom the Labour party was created to help in the first place.
– Set out economic policies which will deliver economic growth AND a redistribution of wealth. There is a widespread feeling that society is too unequal. There should be consideration of policies such as a maximum ratio between the salary of the highest and lowest paid in an organisation. An increase in tax on the truly super rich. But also a huge plan to raise productive which will capture the public imagination: devolving much more powers to the big cities in the North; big spending on infrastucture and science, plans for Britain to be a world leader in growing areas like space, renewable energy, 3D printing etc.
“So we need a leader who can reach out to alienated Ukip switchers in left-behind areas as effectively as they can to the Guardian readers of Muswell Hill” – Good luck with that one from the Stepford-like band of wannabe ‘leaders’ who have come forward so far.
Has anyone figured out a way to square this circle yet? UKIP voters in the North of England don’t give a monkey’s about Europe, UKIP has given them a voice to protest about immigration and their changing communities. These voters are more or less permanently lost to Labour, their allegiance in future will go to the most immigration-intolerant party. Labour is fighting to win votes from the ‘aspirational middle’ and losing them twice as fast at the other end. If the Labour party will not stand up for the downtrodden then it’s only a matter of time until some other party fills the vacuum. 15 million people didn’t vote, persuade just 1 million of them across the country that the labour party stands for something and you might just have a chance in ten years time
The Tory majority is not all about failure of Labour – its also about the failure of the Lib Dems.
Far more of their seats were vulberable to Conservatives than to Labour. If the Lib Dem vote had held up nationwide or they had managed to retain 20 seats rather than 8 we would have been looking at a Tory very small majority or minority government.
In large parts of the West country and South West Labour is not in with a chance and so if you are non-Tory in those areas the Lib Dems are you’re only option. I know many Labour supporters in these areas who in the past voted Lib Dem to keep the Tory out but this time I imagine they decided to vote Labour because the Lib Dems had gone into coalition and so were as bad as the Cons, Whilst I and I’m sure others would love to see a full scale Labour operation in places like rural Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall I think realistically the party has to prioritise elsewhere and so effectively the 2020 choice for prgressives in these areas will be between the incumbent Tory and the Lib Dem challenger. Any future Lib Dem revival in seats will help Labour as it will take seats away and reduce the finishing line for a Labour majority.
Labour lost because of numerous factors .Dirty tricks by tories and their supporters were a factor together with the Tories only having served one term . Lower paid Working British people do not trust Labour to care about them by halting immigration . Working people do tend to know many immigrants , and even native British who obtain benefits which they get illegally or undeservedly .Of course strangely most of those fiddling the system vote Tory .
However , my opinion is that an end to Austerity message coupled with the above factors would have won the election for Labour by a large margin . The SNP won on an ANTI Austerity pro working class message . Any move to the right by Labour will be wrong and is being pushed by self seeking out of touch senior Labour MP,s and ex Ministers who have never worked physically ,if at all in their lives .