The Observer view on how Labour must work out why Britain stopped listening
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Version 0 of 1. If a collective noun for a plethora of postmortems existed, it would be much in use today as the ashes cool on Labour’s epic conflagration 10 days ago and the analysis begins on what went wrong. Labour should not delude themselves, as they did after 2010, that they can’t sink any lower. They can and if they don’t read the signals of defeat they might very well. They should also, though, resist easy assumptions about how they are destined to spend decades in the wilderness. There is still a place for Labour in the political conversation, but the party has to find the right language and the right voice to get a hearing. Too much of Britain has stopped listening to Labour. In his farewell speech, Ed Miliband quoted from Ted Kennedy’s oration at the 1980 Democratic convention: “The dream shall never die.” Miliband’s dream was to recalibrate capitalism and intervene more robustly in the market. To win in this grand endeavour he first had to convince the electorate of the quality of his leadership and Labour’s economic competence. He also had to have a grander narrative into which his principled stand on economic and social justice fitted. But too often this was his only message and that proved too narrow to embrace large tracts of the electorate. The difficulty for Labour is that it lost for different reasons in different regions and to different groups of people. As Jon Cruddas, Labour’s head of policy who resigned from the shadow cabinet, says in these pages, the party needs to go to the “dark places”, avoiding superficial arguments about whether it should tack to the left, the right or the centre. Facing what Cruddas rightly describes as one of the biggest crises in its history, Labour has to do the hard graft that allows it to develop a narrative rooted in inclusivity and utility. Their policies need to be seen to be relevant to far larger swaths of voters and they need to look like they might work. It has undergone such a transformation before and it can do so again. Labour’s “bigger story” in 1945 told of a country fit for heroes. In the 1960s, under Harold Wilson, the electorate was persuaded by the promise of “a new Britain”, forged in the “white heat of the technological revolution”. In 1997, under Tony Blair, the narrative was of economic and social modernisation. Much is against Labour. Globally, the parties of the right are faring better after the economic crash. An appeal to a strong sense of national identify forms an important part of the SNP and Ukip’s attraction, winning the latter almost four million votes and presenting Labour with a complex set of political challenges. Cruddas talks of the need for a radical English nationalism personified in an English Labour party that addresses “aching powerlessness and alienation”. He is launching an independent inquiry with allies among the trade unions, activists and others, to dig deep into Labour’s malaise, that began not on 7 May but many years back, as deindustrialisation gathered pace and the party in Westminster uncoupled from its grassroots. Some fundamentals will need to be addressed during Labour’s soul searching and there are lessons to be learned elsewhere. Many candidates in next year’s US presidential elections will include tackling growing inequality in their core messages, but it will not be their only message, as it too often was with Miliband. Nor is there a settled view on the reasons and remedies for inequality. The next leader needs to find a frame to discuss the issue which means something to people’s lives – “predator” and “producer” capitalism can probably be improved upon. Similarly, Labour’s message on immigration didn’t resonate with enough people feeling the effects of low-wage Britain, caused only in part by migrant labour. There is a positive story to tell about immigration and Europe, but Labour is not close to telling it. Labour has to achieve an 8.75% swing to win the required 94 seats back from the Conservatives in 2020. The candidates are making themselves known – Liz Kendall, Mary Creagh, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, with Tristram Hunt wavering on the touchline. These candidates need to find new notes to sing. Cruddas alludes to initiatives that were ignored – devolution to the north, broadband Britain and more. The leadership candidates need a far more extensive offer than the one Miliband chose. It needs to appeal across classes and ages and regions. It needs to be inclusive and have utility in people’s lives. Being humble about how tone deaf Labour’s offer proved on 7 May would be a start. Listening to those people who had switched off would help. Finding positive stories in their offer to Britons – while acknowledging the challenges we all face – is a requirement. POLITICS |