Now that the initial process of MPs nominating leadership candidates has passed, Labour is about to embark on the more important task of involving its four million members and levy-paying trade unionists in debating our future direction.
Labour’s restrictive rules mean that there is not as wide a choice among the candidates as many would have liked. At the time of writing, it appears no one from the left will be on the ballot paper. This is regrettable and the rules should be changed to ensure future contests reflect a greater breadth of opinion. New Labour consistently excluded left MPs from positions of influence within the party hierarchy over the years.
In truth, though, the left must also take a long hard look at itself, its culture and its factionalism, and the manner in which we have been marginalised. This task is urgent. The times we inhabit and the failure of New Labour at the general election require a resolution which only the progressive left can offer.
Nonetheless, our first task must be to ensure the leadership debate over the coming weeks discusses in depth the reasons why Labour lost and how we win back our former voters.
To do so, a serious and factual assessment is needed as to what has happened to Labour’s support since 1997. Several points are important to stress in looking at how to rebuild a winning coalition.
First, while this may have been the year when the roof finally collapsed on the Labour Government, it is clear that the foundations were beginning to crumble much earlier. Labour lost five million votes between 1997 and 2010. Four million of these came at a time when Tony Blair was Prime Minister and when his credo was the dominant force within New Labour. So we must not retreat to Blairite formulae – perhaps relevant to the early 1990s but long since rejected.
Second, it is clear from the table (right) that Labour’s support broke down among all social groups, but that the greatest levels of decline were among social classes C2, D and E. These groups – manual workers and welfare dependants – make up almost half of the population and a much greater element of Labour’s support. Their importance to the coalition of support Labour needs to win can be seen from the fact that 50 per cent or more of these groups backed us during our 1997 landslide.
It is incorrect also to suggest that the vote in the south and south-east of England moved against Labour more strongly than elsewhere. The reverse is the case, with areas where the decline was greater than average including Wales, the north-east, Yorkshire and Humberside, East Midlands, West Midlands and the east of England So the proposition that we should focus on so-called swing middle-class voters in the south is erroneous.
Third, throughout the election campaign, Labour maintained an overall lead over the Tories when pollsters asked with which party people most closely identify. We failed (as we failed in 2005) to convert these identifiers into voters.
In order to win again, we need to address why support declined so rapidly and correct the past policy errors to mobilise the millions who still identify with Labour. This – rather than the outdated idea of triangulating to win over Tory voters – lies at the heart of rebuilding Labour’s support.
Our defeat cannot be attributed to any single factor, but one thing more than any other damaged us. This was the remorseless decline in income and standard of living among the middle and lower-income earners even before the recession started.
Since 2002-03, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, median income growth was never above 1.1 per cent. Such sluggish income growth at a time the economy was moving forward left many feeling abandoned by Labour. And from the 2005 election until April 2008, when Britain saw the return of economic contraction, income growth was negative for the bottom 20 per cent and below 1 per cent everywhere except in the top 15 per cent of the population.
The rapid expansion of credit, together with the housing bubble, for a time allowed people to enjoy rising standards of living during a period of declining and stagnant income growth. But the banking crisis then served as a sharp reminder of how much households depended on unsustainable borrowing.
Consequently, Labour was seen to be failing to protect the economic conditions of precisely those middle-income earners who could guarantee a majority in the House of Commons.
Given the economic circumstances we now face, the priority must be for Labour to outline how it will protect the living standards of low and middle -income earners. The failure to have done so sufficiently over the past decade, alongside the Iraq war, privatisation of public services and a casual attitude to civil liberties played a crucial part in undermining Labour’s appeal and breaking up our wide coalition of support.
Too often, those citing the need to address this problem have been told they risk damaging Labour being a party of “aspiration”, especially as far as those in the south are concerned. Hence Peter Mandelson’s infamous remark about being relaxed about the filthy rich.
Aspiration and opportunity are central to our vision for the future. But they have to be the aspirations of the majority. Half of all workers earn below £21,300 a year, three in four earn less than £32,500 and nine in 10 earn less than £46,300. Most people aspire to job security, to their living standards increasing, a safe and clean environment, a decent home, security in old age. In these more difficult circumstances we will not meet these aspirations if our focus remains on not alienating the less than 1 per cent of high earners paid more than £100,000. We certainly will not meet them if we are a party advocating cuts.
In the post-election period it has been said that this “phase” of new Labour is over. The attitude from some quarters seems to be: “New Labour is dead, long live New Labour”. Something more fundamental is surely required if labour is to win again.
At a time of a recession brought about by the excesses of finance capital and when those excesses are being paid for by the hard-working majority, the stale ideology of New Labour is no longer convincing.
The party must move on and the broader left has an important role to play in creating the alternative. We should take confidence that we were correct to argue that Iraq, attacks on civil liberties, reliance on the free market and a failure to increase living standards would erode Labour’s support.
Of course, we have not always got everything right – all too often being divided, dogmatic and puritan. Nonetheless, we live in a time when only progressive policies can resolve the problems facing the country. The left needs to find new ways of working together and to develop a serious-minded agenda for these critical times.
Equally, whoever becomes leader must never again be allowed to ignore our ideas.
