So Tony Blair, possibly the most unpopular man in British politics, and Peter Mandelson, the second-most detested, think Ed Miliband would be a ‘disaster’. It takes some gall for the architects of Labour’s ruin to think that they have any right to give us lessons on Labour’s prospects when their own record was – well, disastrous. Labour won in 1997, not because of Blair or New Labour mantra, but because the electorate was heartily sick of the Tories and wanted them out at any price. John Smith would have won by a huge margin too.
But having won in 1997 on the back of virulent hostility to the Tories, Blair in two further elections then achieved the biggest loss of voters of any party in modern times.
The Labour vote collapsed by almost four million from 13.5 million in 1997 to just 9.6 million in 2005. For someone who was such a monumental failure to claim any credibility in predicting political success takes one’s breath away – like someone who’s engineered a train crash lecturing on how to cut the accident rate.
Even leaving that aside (which I wouldn’t), his constant refrain that the party will lose if it resorts to its ‘comfort zone’ is a non-sequitur that flies in the face of all the evidence. Of course Labour has got to win substantial support from the middle class and from voters in the south of England – everyone knows and accepts that. But equally if Labour ignores, spurns and repudiates its own natural voting base, it will assuredly be consigned to electoral oblivion. It’s the balance between these two not incompatible principles that’s at issue.
The figures from the last four elections tell a very different story from the fiction constantly being peddled by Blair et al. We didn’t lose the election in 2010 because we sacrificed the support of the middle classes (defined by the voting surveys as ABC1), but because we sacrificed the support of the working class and those so poor as to be dependent on the State long-term (the C2DE classes). In 1997 Labour won 31% of the ABC1 vote, and still retained 26% of it in 2010.
But at the other end of the scale, having won 59% of the C2DE vote in 1997, Labour could win only 40% of it in 2010 – a disastrous slump of 19%. Or put it another way: in terms of actual votes, Labour lost just 0.5 million AB voters since 1997, but a whopping 3.2 million C2DE voters.
Then we are told in the Guardian last week that David Miliband would pose the greatest threat to the Tories. How convenient for David that this alleged private remark of David Cameron’s has hit the headlines, via an unidentified ‘well-placed’ source, just a few days before voting starts for the Labour leadership. It is, of course, the oldest trick in the political book – ever since the children’s story of Brer Rabbit and the Fox and the briar bush – to pretend when one is under threat that the one thing the political enemy fears most is X (in this case a vote for Miliband Senior) in order to get gullible supporters (or foxes) to do precisely that. Only later – if at all – do they find out that it was just a ruse to escape a threat, or win an election.
But even if Cameron did make the remark attributed to him (which is highly unlikely), that David Miliband stood the best chance of reaching out to middle Britain, the comment is way off the mark.
Who now is middle Britain anyway? There is a serious misperception that it reflects people such as teachers, managers, doctors, architects, surveyors, stockbrokers, who are largely in the £50,000-£100,000-plus income bracket. But the average wage in Britain today is £24,000, and 90% of people in the UK earn less than £40,000 a year. They are far more concerned with making ends meet in a climate of austerity, where the deep cuts being imposed haven’t even started yet to bite, than the lofty aspirational images of Blairite propaganda would have us believe.
The Blairite picture is a fantasy, fabricated for one purpose only – to preserve its failing hold over the party, even though the actual evidence from the last four elections exposes it as a complete canard.
There is one silver lining though. To be attacked by Blair and Mandelson, who led Labour down an electoral cul-de-sac for 13 years and frittered away the unique once-in-a-century opportunity that the victory in 1997 represented, can only be the strongest recommendation that one is on the right course and should stick to one’s guns.
Michael Meacher has been Labour MP for the Oldham West constituency (now Oldham West and Royton) since 1970
