I don’t have the resources to poll the public. I don’t have the resources to run focus groups. I have only my gut, my conversations with colleagues and the public and my interpretation of history to go on. As will the dozens of other writers whose pet theories will be blasting from their fingers to their keyboards tonight. I put this disclaimer up front then. This is what I think we are getting wrong. This is not what I know, this is what I want to know. These are the questions I believe the Party should be asking ourselves with some urgency. 

Sharp-eyed readers may have sensed my disappointment at the Labour Party’s recent Party Election Broadcast. Not only did I think it was a terrible piece of campaign art in and of itself but it was also – as I hope I demonstrated – a missed opportunity. A missed opportunity in the piece that I wrote to make a profound and serious pitch to the nation, but other opportunities have been missed too.

First of all, I think I need to make an apology. I – like many others – have called on Labour to have a greater understanding of the damage that the “classless” politics of the New Labour years did to us in communities we used to consider our heartlands.

Wait, come back – that’s not what I am apologising for.

I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t make it clear there are ways to put class at the centre of your campaign – to stick up for the majority –  without dressing a single person in a Top Hat or mentioning Yachts. It’s possible to run a campaign that has a positive offer to make to the majority who feel left out of the recovery, rather than focusing on an ACME cartoon version of those who are benefiting. I’m really sorry I assumed that – after the dreadful Crewe and Nantwich result we might have learned that lesson. I hoped that we would have learned that you can do class without being classless. That to act this way is as patronising and insulting to the working class is it is to to Tories. I want to know why we haven’t.

I’d like to know why we feel the need to target Lib Dem voters and ex-voters exclusively in this campaign when we know that the first pool is so small as to be statistically almost irrelevant to us and the second have switched to us and stuck. Where is the evidence that this is the best channel for us to achieve our maximum potential. I’ve never believed that Labour are running a 35% strategy. That’s long been the feverish imaginings of a particularly odd and embittered hack. But we certainly haven’t offered a sense during this election campaign that we are looking to maximise our vote – only to minimise that of other smaller parties. I want to know why.

We have not made a positive case for the UK’s relationship with Europe. We delegated that to Nick Clegg who did it dreadfully, and then we took the opportunity not to show him how it’s done, but instead to laugh at him all over again, making ourselves look small and mean. Showing a side to ourselves and politics that is nasty and shallow. We are a Party that prides ourselves on standing up for the downtrodden. We don’t do this to revel in the failings of our opponents but to make ours a better country. We failed ourselves on both scores last week. I want to know why. 

We have not made the case for Labour in local government either. While Labour have announced a raft of good and popular policies, we haven’t put forward a coherent message on how this translates in town halls. And while our policies are good and seemingly popular in the same polls that now show us falling behind the Tories for the first time in two years.  We have shown why Labour nationally is important at a time when people are focused on their local issues and on the role supra-national institutions play in our lives. Where has been our local offer? Where has been our proud Europeanism? We have failed to make this election about us and not an attempt to win a crude anti-politics game that can only ever backfire on us. I want to know why.

Why are we taking our core vote for granted? Why are we antagonising and belittling ex-Lib Dems? Why are we acting like playground bullies rather than the champions of a better politics of which we know we are capable? What are the lessons we have learned from recent failures in Crewe and Nantwich, in 2010, in Scotland and in Bradford West? Where is the evidence we have applied those lessons when they are offered to us by others on a plate? I want to know.

There is a phrase that is currently en vogue in Labour circle: “shrinking the offer”. The recent letter from a number of think tankers to Ed was seen as a plea not to do this. To offer a big, transformative policy offer to take our country to the next level. I agree with that ask. I think – in policy terms, we’re actually getting there. But for me, it is impossible to see the size, breadth or scope of our emerging policy agenda through the tiny, dirty, misguided and misused filter of the way we are currently conducting our national politics. The offer that has been shrunk is more in the presentation of our Party as a whole. I want to know why.

The positive offer we have needs a positive campaign fit to champion it. We don’t have that now. We don’t have anything like that now. And I want to know why.

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