There is an article in the latest on line New Statesman which asks the question, “Is Labour dead?” Before last month’s General Election, I believed it was anything but dead with a hung parliament or a Labour minority government all but certain, according to the polls. According to the polls, indeed. The only poll that mattered was the one where people actually voted and Labour suffered what could be a mortal blow.
I have spoken to a good few people about Labour’s defeat and I have concluded it was down to three reasons:
1) People did not trust Labour on the economy. Although we know that Labour did not cause the worldwide financial crash, it failed to effectively counter the narrative that it had. The Tories and Lib Dems had been banging on for five years about “the mess Labour left” and the truth is that the issue was only confronted in the short campaign itself. Far too late. By then, the die was cast, the public had concluded, in the near absence of an alternative argument, that it was “Labour’s mess” that crashed the economy. It is all very well to blame the Tories and the Lib Dems for painting a false picture, or to attack the newspapers for their biased coverage, but the failure of Labour to explain themselves properly proved to be a fatal self-inflicted blow.
2) People believed that a minority Labour government would be in hock to the SNP. Again this was a narrative produced by the media which was encouraged joyfully by not just the Tories but the SNP themselves. Again, Labour felt to counter the story that undoubtedly spooked a decent section of the electorate. It might not have been true, but the perception itself was widely held.
3) People could not see Ed Miliband as prime minister. My initial feeling was that Miliband and Labour had failed to provide the electorate with some kind of vision of what a Labour government would look like. The policies in themselves were decent enough but the pieces didn’t join up into a bigger picture. But people who held conversations on the doorstep tell a different story. The ones I have spoken to say Miliband was a problem. They saw him as principled and decent but that was it. He was, I am told, a definite obstacle to Labour’s chances.
I was a Miliband man myself back in 2010, but not this Miliband. I attended a Labour Party gathering at the Watershed where David Miliband was speaking. For some reason – I can’t remember why, perhaps it was a mistake? – I was invited along and came away incredibly impressed. He was highly charismatic, spoke entirely without notes but had an immediate grasp of all the issues that were put his way and believe me there were loads of them. Yes, I know he was called a Blairite but until we went to war with Iraq it was no bad thing to be called a Blairite. It was the war against Iraq that caused me to resign from the Labour Party in the first place so I had no say in who actually won but it turned out it didn’t matter what Labour members and MPs thought. It was what, and who, Len McCluskey wanted as leader that mattered.
Labour’s future, if there is one, is surely not helped by the party having such a pitiful range of talent at its disposal in the leadership contest. Jeremy Corbyn, close ally of the late Tony Benn who helped make Labour almost unelectable in the 1980s? Mary Who? Yvette Cooper? Liz Kendall who is not so much New Labour as Old Tory? Andy Burnham, who now admits in comments that will surely come back to haunt him, that Labour ran too high a deficit before the financial crash when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, accepting the Tory lie? Oh boy. Right now, I see Burnham not as the best of a bad lot but the least worst of a bad lot, but perhaps by his words and his future deeds he can lighten my gloom. Winning the Labour leadership would be the easiest of any of the elections he might face in the future, but perhaps it is better to come into the job with low expectations?
The electorate endorsed further austerity, gave Osborne approval to further slash the welfare benefits bill, not needing to say where, rejected equality, voted for more of the same that we had before, but without the Liberal Democrats nodding everything through to keep their ministerial offices and shiny official vehicles. But that is not to say that Labour should embrace austerity, far from it. I do wonder if Labour’s support for austerity in the last election campaign made swing voters think, “Well, all parties are in favour of cuts. Might as well stick with the one that actually means it and enjoys making cuts!” With no clear vision of the future, Labour offered more of the same, but not quite as quickly. Some choice.
With Labour navel gazing and the Tories bursting with confidence at their unexpected majority, things may get far worse before they get better, if they ever get better at all. Scotland has lurched even closer to the SNP with the current opinion poll showing they now have 60% support. Labour, meanwhile, is poised to slip into third place, with them polling at 19%, but with the Tories closing in on 15%.
There is still hope, though. As Harold McMillan said when asked what he most feared: “Events, dear boy. Events.” Whilst on the face of it, we are looking down the barrel of permanent Tory rule, with the Scots separating sooner rather than later, and Labour becoming a near irrelevance. Until something unexpected, something utterly cataclysmic and game-changing, comes along. You just never know.
Is Labour dead? Not quite in the same condition of John Cleese’s Norwegian Blue, but the people’s party is staggering towards intensive care and no one yet seems to know how to bring it back to life.
