Where do we go from here?
By Emma.
The battle’s done, and we kinda won so we sound our victory cheer?
(The geekier (and cooler) among you will recognise this as a lyric from the Buffy Musical song of the same title as this blog.)
So, we won the local elections – narrowly. We beat the Tories into third place in the Euros – even more narrowly.
This is not cause for celebration. We should have done much better than this. We need to do much, much better than this. We cannot carry on as if falling over the line is either desirable or even inevitable. After results such as these it is anything but inevitable.
But the Ashcroft poll! But we won 300+ Councillors! But the Tories came a historic 3rd!
All true. But here are the counter arguments:
While Ashcroft’s poll is encouraging, we cannot let it blind us to the results of an actual election. One where we have underperformed.
While those extra councillors are a fantastic boon and will make an enormous difference to their communities, they are too concentrated in areas where Labour were already strong. I love London. I am only half joking when I talk of one day wanting to be mayor of the greatest city in the world (and I can more seriously be wistful about what could and should have been in 2012). But London is only a small part of our great nation. And it accounts for way more than half our councillor gains. That is not a good balance.
And we should never, ever, ever rely on our opponents to do badly in order to achieve success.
So, where do we go from here?
When firstly we need a proper and full analysis of what went wrong with our campaign. I of course have several theories which I shall expand on below. But they are my theories, formed by my subjective judgement, based on my own political ideas, allegiances and prejudices. We need some objective views (and that doesn’t mean media commentators). We need to bring in some outsiders and some pollsters to be blunt with us, and to test and understand what we failed to do and perhaps start to text what to do next. In the next few days I will post about how the Tories should be more worried than we are (not least because they aren’t). But we are what matters to me, so here is where I will start.
So caveats over here are the things I think we need to discuss. And I’m going to start with the hardest.
We need to talk about Ed
We can’t ignore the fact that the man I supported for the leadership of the Labour Party (and still support as Labour leader) has not won over the voters. They think he’s well meaning but weird. They don’t connect with him.
The last thing Labour needs is a leadership contest. We cannot turn in on ourselves now. We cannot spend this time talking to ourselves about ourselves.
On a more positive note, I am a fully signed up member of the Ed Miliband project. I believe in the changes Ed has brought to our party and the policy direction he is taking us in. Ed is the right leader for us.
But we have to talk about his public perception. We have to address his negatives and understand how to work within that framework.
Ed is never going to play as the good old average guy you want to have a pint with. Fair or not, people with far less claim to that space (Boris, Farage and even Cameron) are beating us hollow on that score. The weakness of us geeky types is we let that then go on to define us. Ed should play to his strengths and stop trying to annul his weaknesses. He needs to be as honest as the electorate are saying they demand of their leaders, and be the serious policy geek he is. There isn’t another positive choice. So let’s embrace Ed’s inner Sheldon and let it be. Be honest with the voters and present them not with the dork who wants to be a jock, but with the geek with ideas enough to run the country.
No it isn’t ideal, but the alternatives are unthinkably worse.
The 80s are over
Rightly or wrongly, I got a sense from Labour that we should leave UKIP alone and let them steal the Tories votes letting us cut through the middle. It feels like our strategists were looking at the SDP effect on Labour in the 80s and expecting a straight line replication on the right of politics. Turns out it’s more complicated than that and the electorate has moved on, even if we refuse to view them as having done so. This means that we should stop expecting UKIP to behave as an SDP style spoiler.
But equally, that simply name-calling Nigel Farage a Thatcherite has less and less resonance. Yes, there are areas - particularly in the North - that will never vote Tory while those who lived through the 80s live on. That doesn’t mean they can or will be taken for granted. They need us to be the Party on their side. They haven’t felt that for along time. So culturally they can’t vote Tory. But we need to stop assuming that means they will automatically vote for us.
Southern Discomfort discomfort
A long time ago, some very clever people realised that Labour were not doing enough to reach into the more affluent middle class. A pamphlet was written and it’s ideas were first lauded, then adopted, then normalised.
And they were right. We weren’t reaching into the burgeoning middle classes. We needed to change. To accept that we had to build an electoral coalition to succeed.
The problem is we over focused on the people who want a conservatory and not enough on the people who will never be able to afford one. In the mean time, our left flank drew themselves into those who can’t afford to get on the property ladder.
In the meantime, since Thatcher’s Right to Buy bribe, the Tories too haven’t offered the working class anything positive to vote for. They tried to sell private ownership of utilities as a share owning democracy, but now the people that was advertised at know they didn’t gain. If you see Sid, tell hin his future’s owned by a hedge fund.
So now we have a huge proportion of the electorate who feel (fairly or not) the political class has not cared about them for a generation. They aren’t the target market. No wonder they vote for a party that tells them they will think and act differently – however false that prospective.
Announcing is not doing
One of the most prevalent and most resonant criticisms of Gordon Brown (the mentor of both Ed and our Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and Campaign Chief Douglas Alexander) was that they had initiativitis. That they confused announcement with action.
That sort of works short term in government to rebut criticism. It doesn’t work at all when you are an opposition trying to build a strong and coherent narrative about why you should form the next government. I haven’t seen polling data, but I know from conversatations on the doorstep, with shop keepers and cabbies, that people have no idea about our rent proposals, our wage announcements or our cost of living contract.
So now we’ve got over our blank slate problem, maybe we can get on with talking to the parts of the country we haven’t managed to reach for a really long time. Maybe we can talk directly to them about what we offer them and not what they should fear from our opponents. And maybe we could stop assuming that as soon as a policy is written about once we’ve done the job of selling it to the voters.
A party that leads
Yes, when we get into government, we will have to overturn a lot of the damage done by the Tories and Lib Dems. Yes we will need to put the health service back on a better, more stable footing. Yes we need to repeal the bedroom tax. But if our offer is only about undoing negatives we lose the chance to have a more positive conversation with voters.
Pretty much all of the coverage of these elections has been about negatives. People don’t like immigration or Europe etc. But they don’t think we will be the party who will stop immigration and we don’t want to stall our first two years of administration with a divisive and damaging argument over Europe that logic and common sense can’t win.
And actually, I think voters get that about us. I don’t think they vote for us to do those things. Polling massively indicates otherwise certainly. So why do we run these small campaigns afraid to say where we are on these huge issues? We have so much capacity to be brave. Ed has shown that when we are – on issues from phone hacking to the energy price freeze -it benefits us. So why not lead? Why not put ourselves out there more.
Yes we now have a great policy platform that I am proud to say I believe in. But we have undersold it while expecting it to over deliver for us. We haven’t pulled it together as a policy platform that can be boiled down from (and – essentially – built up to) a vision for the different county that the UK will be after the first 5 years of an Ed Miliband led Labour Government. This must be the focus of the coming months. Not daft attacks on long since defeated opponents.
Get battle ready
Labour can and should win the next election outright. It is within our grasp. But we are going to have to step our game up to do so. I wish I could afford to focus group my thoughts and feelings beyond the doorstep but I can’t. But I would love for someone to test my ideas and the many others that will come. Because Labour needs a better tested, more robust, more battle worthy party than we are now. The electorate expects and demands nothing less.
