However British politics now unfolds for the Labour Party, the time has come to move on from “new” Labour.
We need a politics that is neither “new” Labour nor a return to “old” Labour, but something relevant to the changed times we live in.
There will be a band of true believers, including in the media classes, who will develop a narrative that we did not win because Labour was insufficiently “new” under Gordon Brown. But the biggest number of Labour’s lost voters departed earlier than May 6 2010, and were lost by the Government led by Tony Blair.
Labour won 43 per cent of the vote, with 13.5 million votes, at the 1997 general election. It lost around three million votes by 2001, down to 10.7 million. By 2005, we were polling 9.6 million votes. That period of decline in the Labour vote took place when the economy was growing – whereas this election was fought when the economy faced its worst crisis since the 1930s. So learning the lessons of this election requires us to learn the lessons of the previous two general election results as well.
The economic and political crisis lost us votes – but so did the narrow political strategy which had already lost four million votes between 1997 and 2005.
Any response to the general election that involves nothing more than a restoration of the course that lost us so much support after 1997 would be a mistake.
For Labour to win, it must be a coalition – not merely a core-vote party or a party that concentrates on swing voters, but one that does both and seeks to lead the whole country. It must be a coalition between voters of middle and lower incomes, middle-class people and working-class people alike. It cannot take any part of that coalition for granted.
It is true that our record in many respects is good: peace in Ireland, devolution, higher public spending, better schools and hospitals, the national minimum wage, falling crime. Those are all things of which we can be proud. They are reason enough to have fought hard to win the election and to have sought to keep David Cameron and the Tories out.
But we have to be honest about the fact that, on many other matters, we did not deliver enough, or made the wrong judgements. Particularly in the early years of the first terms, the Labour Government did not build enough homes for working-class communities. It failed in many cases to protect manufacturing or where that would have been impossible to create the kinds of new jobs and industries that could underpin secure communities.
Our Government got it so wrong on Iraq that we ended up on the side of George W Bush, not the large numbers of Americans who ultimately turned out to vote for a leader – Barack Obama – who gave voice to widespread international concern about what had happened.
The Government pursued adventures in foreign policy as a junior partner in a relationship with the worst Republican leadership in American history that drove away many urban middle-income voters and alienated Labour’s previously loyal Muslim supporters.
That not only hit the party as far as those electors were concerned, but also became a symbol of the breakdown in public trust for politics, way before the MPs’ expenses scandal.
Even in this election, there was an expectation that Labour could rely on the votes of people having told them that we would deliver cuts worse than Margaret Thatcher.
It is time to move beyond “new” Labour.
Labour must show it understands that the economic crisis means the market model underpinning many of the policies of the past decade or more has collapsed. Labour will need to show that existing political structures need to be reformed as a matter of urgency. It must draw a line under the Blair-Bush episode and acknowledge to the public that the Iraq war was a disastrous mistake.
Our leadership will need to unite millions, pulling together both working-class and middle-class voters in a winning political coalition for progressive change.
To do that, it will be necessary to build on the tremendous benefit the trade union link brings to Labour.
The willingness of the Liberal Democrats to try to deal with the Tories will be rejected by many layers of their electorate – something Labour must engage with openly.
Global events require a new framework for the Labour Party. If we are to succeed, we must break through the shell of the party’s established formulas and lead real change.
