Labour’s saviour may never reach Downing Street

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/19/labour-saviour-downing-street-michael-howard

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‘To the extent that the party had identified concerns that people shared, it failed to articulate solutions.” “To the extent that voters who rejected us associate the party with anything at all, it is with the past.” “It will be tempting in the coming parliament to take comfort in the difficulties that will inevitably befall the government… To do so would be a disaster.” It sounds like commentary on Labour in 2015, but those quotes are from Smell the Coffee, a report by Lord Ashcroft into the Tory defeat of 2005.

Ashcroft’s central insight was that the problem wasn’t policy but brand. Voters were not hostile to everything Michael Howard said, but they didn’t want to hear it from a Tory – least of all from a former cabinet minister who sounded as if he hadn’t forgiven the electorate for rejecting him years earlier.

No two elections are identical, and the cultural obstacles to a Conservative recovery a decade ago were different to reservations people had about Ed Miliband. But the situations are analogous in one respect. The popularity of individual items on a menu voters have rejected offers no guide to the direction a party should then follow.

Opinion polls showed support for a levy on mansions to fund the NHS and for restoration of the 50p tax rate. Miliband’s 2013 pledge to freeze energy prices sent focus groups into ecstasies of approval. Meanwhile, Labour got no credit for its manifesto commitments to budget discipline, and suffered in Scotland for the appearance of capitulation to George Osborne’s agenda. The glib conclusion might be that Labour’s two biggest problems were a leader who could not sell desirable wares, and his timidity in challenging tall Tory tales about the economy.

That analysis smells of something, and it isn’t coffee. It is true that Miliband tried to be two things at once: a fiscal disciplinarian and a radical egalitarian. Labour must ask itself why different audiences chose to identify the party with whichever half of the message they liked the least; why the anti-austerity left tuned in only to complicity with cuts, while middle England heard only the beat of a business-bashing drum.

Miliband’s gauche delivery and a hostile press had a lot to do with it. But the deeper flaw was a complacent assumption that Labour was the moral choice, and that people would realise as much if only their misguided quibbles about public spending could be neutralised. The opposite turned out to be the case. People were all too ready to grasp whatever reason was closest at hand to vote for something else – whether the SNP, Ukip or the Tories.

That is a symptom of brand meltdown. Politicians on the left sometimes have a problem with the language of marketing as applied to party preferences, as if it contaminates a higher calling. There is a tendency to venerate the “Labour tradition” as a spiritual vocation – which puts off anyone who feels untouched by the spirit – or to presume only idiots, sadists and plutocrats vote Conservative. Miliband was guilty of that habit. There is a danger it will infect Labour’s leadership contest.

The days immediately after the election were dominated by blunt assessments of Labour’s woes from New Labourish voices – Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall, Tristram Hunt, Peter Mandelson, David Miliband and Blair himself. They rightly identified Labour’s failure to appeal to a wide range of voters, but often in terms that salted old wounds. “Wealth creators” and “aspirational middle class” are trigger words for many on the left, firing up a host of disjointed resentments: deference to the City, privatisation and war in the Middle East – prongs on the trident of demonic “Blairism”.

The stage was thus set for Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper to emerge as Labour’s moderate healers – Cooper with a defiant defence of the spending record, and Burnham with a mushy appeal to the “heart of Labour”. Both echoed bits of the first-wave critique. Cooper agrees that Labour alienated business; Burnham thinks Gordon Brown should “ideally” have run a surplus. But their tone is emollient expediency, not confrontation with hard truth.

The momentum behind the two veterans in the race is partly an expression of MPs’ pessimism about the next election. Scotland is not turning red again soon, so the next majority must include parts of England that rarely vote Labour.

Whatever the official reasons Umunna and Dan Jarvis have given for not running, part of their calculation must be that the winner this time will never get to Downing Street. There are five years before polling day, before which the Tories will have a leadership contest of their own. Alongside the current race there runs a stream of speculation that Labour might fit another one in before 2020.

It feels as if some MPs are shopping for a Michael Howard figure: someone who reinforces the core vote, rebuilds the machine, and allows talent to emerge lower in the ranks. Many Tories speak fondly of Howard’s leadership as a necessary consolidation after the aberration of Iain Duncan Smith’s stewardship, laying the foundations for future success. Some in Labour may be aping that model unconsciously. Some I know are choosing it deliberately.

What the members who will actually choose a leader think is a different matter. In seats Labour should have won, the smell of coffee is unmistakable. The right candidate is the one who has woken up to it.