With the fallout from the Comprehensive Spending Review and the Democrats’ mid-term pummelling dominating the news, what’s left of the left? Is anyone listening? Does anyone care? The May 2010 general election saw Labour crash to defeat with its worst share of the vote since 1929 and the first Conservative-led Government in 13 years returned to power. Yet Labour still managed to deny the Tories of an overall majority, forcing them into alliance with the Liberal Democrats, despite predictions that 2010 would be like 1997 in reverse and with Gordon Brown the most unpopular Prime Minister since polling began.
So what’s happened to Labour since? Well, after the lengthy period of the leadership election (lasting four and a half months and feeling longer), a prolonged bout of soul searching broke out in multiple treatises attempting to explain the election result. Over the years, the post-mortem texts that inevitably follow ballot box defeats seen as signalling a change in the established order include The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), Must Labour Lose? (the infamous Penguin publication of 1960 that seemed to answer in the affirmative and The Strange Death of Socialist Britain (1992). From the right, there was Whatever Happened to the Tories? by Ian Gilmour (1997) and The Strange Death of Tory England (2005). This roll-call is now joined by a clutch of Labour think tank publications from the likes of Liam Byrne, Giles Radice and Demos calling for rethinking aims and values to learn the lessons of 2010 in order for Labour to win again.
The mythical electoral holy grail that delivers the keys to Number 10 Downing Street has undergone a number of name changes – from “Mondeo Man” to “Worcester Woman” to the “squeezed middle”. However, all represent essentially the same conclusion: elections cannot be won without appealing to suburban voters. Political contests, from national ones such as general elections to more regional ones such as the London mayoralty election, are lost and won in the suburbs. The suburban sentiment has been a key, if under-acknowledged, driver of campaign strategy and subsequent electoral success in the post-war years for both Labour and the Conservatives.
The competition to be the most suburban post-war Prime Minister of all must surely be a tussle between self-styled Finchley housewife Margaret Thatcher and her successor John Major – the son of a garden gnome-maker and perhaps the archetypal suburbanite.
The volatility of the vote in the suburbs has contributed to the complex nature of the political map in the 21st century. Even before the game-changing 2010 election, the 2008 London mayoral election and the Conservatives’ so-called “ring doughnut strategy”, whereby outer London delivered victory to Boris Johnson over Ken Livingstone, was suburban-centred.
The Ealing Southall by-election, Gordon Brown’s first electoral test as Prime Minister in 2007, was won handsomely by Labour’s Virendra Sharma and showed how modern suburbs are far from the faceless, featureless and ethnically white areas of popular imagination. Suburban aspiration has been an enduring feature of British socio-political life and popular culture since 1945. The parlance that accompanies electoral defeat seems to revolve around whether the victor of vanquished “gets it” or not. This is an acknowledgement of the fact that a successful appeal to the electorate cannot be made without having the right offer for suburban voters – the “it” that politicians must get. That doesn’t mean pandering to prejudice, but recognising basic needs and desires that the vast majority of the population shares.
Paul Barker’s recent book, The Freedoms of Suburbia, claimed that 84 per cent of people in Britain live in some form of suburbia. With the developments of the spread of ethnic populations outward from traditional inner-city ghettos after gentrification (“brown flight”?) and the proliferation of gated developments of areas beyond the central core, we are seeing an urbanisation of the suburbs and suburbanisation of the inner city. Our leaders need to “get that”, too.
The 2010 general election pushed Labour into opposition for the first time in 13 years. The party needs to shout louder to be heard and shift the debate back onto its own terms if it not to become irrelevance sniping from the sidelines. We are no longer the masters now.
Sadly, Labour MPs have made headlines for the wrong reasons recently. Phil Woolas was found guilty of lying in election literature. Paul Farrelly admitted to a “John Prescott moment” during a House of Common karaoke party. Harriet Harman’s description of Danny Alexander as a “ginger rodent” was ill advised. (“Although when Neil Kinock was Labour leader and endured taunts of “ginger whinger”, no one batted an eyelid.). The one positive story about the current Labour leader was the news of his second son’s birth. As a result of Daily Mail disapproval, Ed Miliband promised before the event that this time he would go to the registry office. Given the apparently heredity nature of British politics (with the Maudes and the Jenkins on the Tory side and the Benns and the Cryers on Labour’s), it may be less than 40 years before there is leadership contest between two Miliband brothers. l
