Labour’s 2010 general election defeat is not difficult to explain. Our decline in the polls began when Gordon Brown bottled the 2007 election. We started the campaign behind and never made up the ground. Calls of “time for a change” had resonance since the Government had been in office for 13 years. Britain was in recession and, although we cushioned its impact, recessions don’t make people happy. And Gordon Brown was our leader.
But that’s not the entire story. The Tories didn’t win. Labour lost. So much of the explanation lies with us.
Things are better than in 1997. This was recognised by those in social classes A and B, where our vote held up, but not by the C2s among whom the Tories did well, nor by the Ds and Es, who stayed at home in significant numbers. This suggests that Labour lost touch with its core supporters and with what it actually exists to do. We became preoccupied with ourselves and the excitement of the parliamentary hothouse – a minority sport played largely by the media and Westminster insiders. We lived by that game. And we died by it.
New Labour was the cause. Embracing professional public relations and the recognition that we had to win middle-class votes was sensible. But New Labour was much more than that. It was an expression of a deep insecurity. Unlike a failing product in need of a fresh gloss, we announced that the old product was rubbish. We denounced our past, our associations, friends and our former priorities. We opted instead for Thatcherism, privatisation, populism and the surrender to globalisation because we were so anxious to please and win the respect, even friendship, of our old antagonists: wealth, international finance, the City, big business and the multinationals.
To ensure that we were safe and sanitised, our party was neutered, our conference castrated, selections managed and our messy democracy curbed. The influence of the mass party was neutralised. The leadership, which didn’t really trust the party, created a system of top-down control. That process was completed in office to concentrate power and decision making on the leader and his acolytes, sidelining the Cabinet and the Parliamentary Labour Party.
This changed the nature of Labour. The noisy democracy became monolithic, inflexible and unattractive. The membership declined because members were ignored. Policy debates became personalised into ego clashes. They were exhausting, but the all-powerful leadership was more able to do what it wanted. There wasn’t much it did want to do, but that included cleaving to an aggressive right wing administration in the United States which led us into two wars. Labour developed an intense relaxation about wealth, a deference to high finance and big business which were encouraged by tax reductions, light touch regulation, a blithe lack of concern about tax havens, tax evasion and accountancy fiddles.
Where we did good it was by stealth, through the national minimum wage, set at minimal levels, or covert transfers such as tax credits. Our emphasis was on income and corporation tax reductions, never on requiring wealth to pay its social rent. We dared not raise enough in revenue to finance our increased spending on education, health and defence. So the Government was forced into expedients such as public-private partnerships and the Private Finance Initiative with build now, pay later contracts. There was massive skimping on building public housing for rent necessary to provide for the growing proportion of the population unable to buy as property prices rocketed.
By 2005, the Government was empty of ideas and drifting. Our preoccupation was not building the New Jerusalem but winning and keeping power. We talked of “values” but didn’t seem moored to any as we responded to every populist clamour, allowing the media to set the agenda. The result was that the prison population increased massively, anti-crime and anti-terrorism legislation was made tougher every year, while immigration controls became inhumane and heavy handed.
The Government lurched from panic to panic under Gordon Brown – a panic merchant who missed the opportunity to go for an election in 2007 because he was in a panic about Tory plans to cut inheritance tax. He panicked again in this year’s election campaign when business leaders came out against the National Insurance increase. The campaign switched to pandering to business rather than emphasising the benefits to Labour’s onetime core supporters.
This was no democratic and open party, bubbling with ideas and building a compassionate consensus by showing that equality worked, but a juggernaut with nervous drivers who had no route map. We were preoccupied with spin, consulting but not listening, more anxious for the approval of the City than the labour movement. We were increasingly defensive about our own record, including its more questionable aspects: national identity cards, home information packs, retrospective port rates and deficient military equipment.
This mattered less as the economy grew. The inflating debt bubble made everyone feel better off as asset and house prices rose, while the Tory opposition blundered from one right-wing leader to another. However, when the bubble burst and David Cameron led the Tories towards to the centre ground, our fate was sealed. When the crisis hit, we reverted to Labour’s old basics: intervention, Keynesian spending, industrial policy and even nationalisation. It was too late. Gordon Brown, indecisive and insecure, could neither deliver the new impetus nor eat enough of his own words.
He did get better as things got worse. He dealt effectively with the recession – nationally and internationally. His stimulus spending, though patchy, kept the economy running at a higher level than would otherwise have been the case so unemployment stayed lower. Sadly, his good deeds were lost in the televised leaders’ debates that shifted the focus to personality. Compared to Cameron’s smooth aggression and Nick Clegg’s idealistic naivety, Brown was lumbering. Solid without enthusing, informed without inspiring, clever without convincing, he compounded the image of the stolid, non-listening and authoritarian Government Labour had hardened into.
We built neither a compassionate consensus nor a progressive alliance. We couldn’t generate excitement, idealism or new ideas. We were preoccupied with our internal affairs and rivalries instead of listening to real people. That meant Gillian Duffy came as a shock, even though there are thousands of people like her in every constituency. We were stuck with unpopular policies which we couldn’t give up. We made things better, but generated little gratitude or general feeling that it was worth supporting. No other party generated that either, but they didn’t have to contend with the slings and arrows of “time for a change”.
This explains both the result and the coalition of the less defeated which has replaced us. It also demonstrates why we need to think anew rather than devoting ourselves to defending New Labour’s less than brilliant record.
Austin Mitchell is Labour MP for Great Grimsby
