When the Labour party is using its devastating defeat of 1983 as a benchmarking exercise to analyse the 2015 election, something has gone seriously awry. But you would not necessarily know it if you read Margaret Beckett’s report in to why Labour lost a winnable election quite so convincingly last May. Indeed, there are three contentions of dubious worth contained in just the fifth paragraph alone throughout a report that underwhelmed in the hard-hitting analysis it originally promised. Seven months on from the election, this report is too timid and perhaps already too late. Its conclusions – designed to help learn the lessons and win in 2020 – are remarkably bland for a party reeling from election defeat and now fighting incessantly with itself.
The election result was not ‘a surprise’ to those who recognised during the previous five years that Ed Miliband had largely failed to cut through to the British electorate as a viable candidate for prime minister. Nor to those of us who understood the centrality of the economy in determining an election, and Labour’s failure to establish any sort of lead on this totemic issue. The report stretches credibility with an early section on the fixed term parliament, which surely affected the Conservatives just as much as the Labour party and its rival, as well as complaining that the Tories had the original idea of sending voters direct mail. Labour’s much heralded ‘five million conversations’ did little to stem a comprehensive defeat, but the analysis should – though no doubt will not – end the party’s obsession with #Labourdoorstep. In seats where the party needed to win against the Conservatives, Labour’s share of the vote increased by a paltry 0.6 per cent. Whereas in safe Labour seats it increased tenfold, which would rather tally with the analysed announced during the election campaign that three of the five million conversations were occurring in safe Labour seats. Grassroots campaigning must always be backed up by a strong central campaign, and directed to the right seats at the right time.
Labour did not have such a strategy in place by time of the 2015 general election. The decision to target some 106 seats was not just an act of extreme folly but also of arrogance and of a fundamental misunderstanding of the circumstances the party found itself in. Merely declaring that it would buck electoral history and return to government after one term in opposition did not make it any the more likely however often repeated. Beckett’s section on Ed Miliband’s leadership receives just 127 words, less than the section devoted to attacking the wicked media. That swathes of the press were at best unkind to Ed Miliband – or any Labour leader, for that matter – should not have come as an overwhelming shock to the party’s strategists, nor that those who buy newspapers tend to buy right-leaning titles. As ever, Miliband’s ‘courageous’ attack on Rupert Murdoch is referenced, though it had little discernible impact on the day-to-day lives of voters and thereby the result.
The analysis of the European elections in 2014 is just a passing reference in Beckett’s report, but the lack of analysis is as telling as it is short. That Labour would do badly is almost factored in, even though it was the first time in modern history neither Labour nor Conservatives had won a British national election. Instead, we are told, Miliband ‘made a thoughtful, and well regarded, speech’ on the issue of immigration to counter the vitriol of Ukip’s campaign. The speech does not immediately spring to mind, but neatly encapsulates Labour’s disconnect that a single speech can soothe an issue that is consuming its communities.
Where is the analysis that led to Beckett’s assessment that defeat was sewn-up well before the short campaign? Miliband was convinced, without a shred of evidence, that the nation had moved to the left and duly campaigned there. Scotland is not all to blame for the current frail state of the party. What is clear that if Labour does not finish itself off first, demographic changes eventually will. The Labour party cannot change the electorate. Instead, it must change to meet the electorate. It will have to do more soul-searching than this.
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David Talbot is a political consultant. He tweets @_davetalbot
The councillor who canvassed me did not want a conversation, just to tell me that everything was wonderful with Labour. I emailed my candidate with my doubts about Mikiband only to be told that he was wonderful. After the election, the ex-candidate gave his honest opinion, that Ed was naff. Sensible moderates buried their heads for five years while Ed destroyed the party, indulged in gimmicks such as the marble slab and the pink bus. To the public, he looked gormless and sounded daft.
I’ve emailed Margaret Beckett but know it will be ignored. The assumption and quote “There was certainly no complacency in the Labour ranks” did it for me.
No interest in learning it comes across as her merely wanting to placate those who ignored what was happening, even though it resulted in a defeat.
The assumption of Ed Miliband and his supporters was that he, rather than his brother David, was the better long term leader, implying that he might not win in 2015 but he, like Kinnock in 1987 would produce a result that would win in 2020 (as Kinnock expected to win in 1992). What went wrong? All this analysis and your two reasons given above were valid from day one. None of the voters needed for a victory saw Ed as a PM and none saw Ed Balls as a chancellor. So why are we so amazed? The same is true today of our leader and shadow chancellor. It seems that we have regressed rather than progressed. I would appreciate it if Progress started to lead from the front and started an internal battle to rid the party of all the fuzzy thinking that is allowing Corbyn and McDonnell to act as if they had the best interests of the party in their policies rather than the 30 year old Tribune thinking that they spout as holy writ. Time for a party within a party with MP’s prepared to defy any whip laid down where the policy is mistaken and confused with reality.
The thing that worries me about the factions of the Party is that they’re only bothering to use the report to reinforce their own prejudices: so the Left are bouncing about saying we weren’t gung-ho enough about our own economic record, and ignoring the bit about not being trusted, while the Right are going on about how rubbish Ed was and ignoring the bit about standing up for ourselves. Both are bandying about the bit about targeting too many seats and conveniently ignoring that MPs from both sides of the argument spent too long shoring up their votes in their own safe seats and not enough campaigning in the seats we had to win. And neither side mentions how disastrously we did in Scotland. On the same night we whittled down the Tory majority in Croydon Central from over 2500 to 165, Douglas Alexandar managed to transform a towering Labour majority into an SNP safe seat. All the complacent rubbish about not working hard enough, or being too left or right wing, is frankly irrelevant. We had Scotland, and we blew it, Left and Right together, and we’re desperately looking for anyone to blame other than our own stupid selves. I know we can do better than this. It would be helpful if Progress couls start on that path.