28 January 2016
Labour’s Lessons from Defeat
What we expect from Mr Corbyn.
By John Watson
The closure of Kellingley colliery may represent the end of deep mining for coal in the UK but the reader certainly has to do a lot of digging to extract from Margaret Beckett’s report “Learning the Lessons from Defeat” the reasons why Labour lost the 2015 general election. Although section 1 of the report, which discusses the events from 2010 to 2015, points to lots of difficulties which Labour encountered, the emphasis is mostly on the actions of other parties – for example the Tory success in wrongly blaming Labour for the 2008 crash; the coalition partners combining to attack Labour; the lack of media interest in what Labour was saying; the way in which fixed term elections allowed the Conservatives a better opportunity to deploy their superior funding; vitriolic attacks on Miliband; the way in which Cameron’s espousal of English votes on English issues kept the SNPs strong after the Scottish referendum; etc; etc; etc.
Yes, yes, it was all very difficult I am sure, but aren’t these the sort of problems which always come up in the course of fighting a campaign? The Tories and the Liberal Democrats must have their lists, too. The quality of a politician or a political party is shown by the way in which problems of this sort are overcome, rather as it is the mark of a good bridge player that he plays a bad hand well and not simply that he can win when he holds all the trumps. After all, the purpose of an election is to decide who will govern the country and it is no good a government saying that it would have come out right if only everyone else had played fair.
In reading the report, therefore, one should skim over all the things done by the villainous Tories, the treacherous liberals or the unfair gods and focus on those parts which catalogue Labour’s own shortcomings. Alas, there isn’t much there. Apart from the lack of a consistent theme and the early appointment of candidates which resulted in their being stale by the election, most of the points go to failure of communication: the failure to nail Tory lies, the failure to get the message across, the failure to persuade the public that the programme was costed and so forth.
Let’s try our luck with the causes of defeat identified by the pollsters and on the doorstep. Four of them are listed:
- a failure to counter Tory mythology about the 2008 crash;
- a failure to connect with voters, in particular in relation to benefits and immigration. This “lack of connection” first appears in the report as a failure by all the political parties but one which bears particularly hard on Labour who are expected to be more “understanding” than the Conservatives;
- Ed Miliband was not seen as being as strong as David Cameron; and
- a fear that a minority Labour government would be propped up by and therefore influenced by the SNP.
Again something of a mixture between criticisms of the party and complaints about the circumstances but here it is perhaps more excusable. Those on the doorstep merely report voter’s reservations. A report on the lessons to be drawn from defeat should be more focused on the shortcomings in the party’s own approach.
Move on then to the plan for the future. There are various recommendations relating to the technicality of fighting campaigns and electoral organisation. I am sure they are useful in their way but they do not go to the heart of the subject. Nearer to the essence is the statement that the party must set out a vision for the country’s future, addressing what the country needs and how Labour will contribute if elected. Specific policy proposals can then be linked to that vision creating, in a slightly embarrassing phrase, a “campaign in poetry”. The report goes on to say that policy-making must be focused on the likely condition of Britain in the 2020s. For example, it must address the question of high-quality social care. It must address the spread of self-employment and Britain’s interest in an internationally competitive private sector. The party must recognise concerns and criticisms in relation to Europe but also recognise Britain’s place within the EU.
This is all very well but it could equally appear in a mission statement for the Conservatives. Surely Dame Margaret’s task force could have produced something a little less anodyne; perhaps even given some guidance to the party which appointed them as to how it might take things forward? Or do they simply not know? Is their vision one of a Labour Party hanging around, struggling against the demographics as the over 65s who tend to vote Tory become a bigger section of the electorate, always hoping that they will drift into power because the Conservatives make some dreadful error just before a general election? Is that really what has happened to the great reforming party which has made such an important contribution to British public life? If so it is bad from everyone’s point of view. The idea of political parties is to contribute ideas. “Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis”. That is the political process in a nutshell and you can only have it if the ideas are rolling in from different places. We need a spectrum of different ideas from which to select just as nature needs different mutations if species are to be improved along the lines identified by Darwin.
All political parties go through periods of exhaustion from which it takes time to recover. The Tories were there after 1997 and it took some time for them to recover from that. Recovery has to come from new ideas and it takes time, and often false starts, for the party to decide which ones to pursue. Labour’s way forward must be as an intellectual hothouse where new ideas are created and tested against each other, not just the construction of an anodyne vision which the marketing people think it could sell to the public.
Perhaps it is a sense of this which has led to the selection of Mr Corbyn. He is certainly a man who holds strong and, in some cases, unconventional, views. As party leader, however, that may be a disadvantage because it could result in the stifling of debate rather than in the creation of different themes which can then be compared with each other. It is early to see how this will come out but he would do well to reflect that it was the increase in political research sponsored by Iain Duncan Smith which finally lifted the Tories out of the doldrums.
Sometime ago the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was asked whether he had ambitions to become Prime Minister. After reciting his loyalty to Mr Cameron in the usual self-deprecating way, he paused for a moment and said “If the ball came loose from the back of the scrum, which it won’t of course, it would be a great, great thing to have a crack at.” We have yet to see how that will play for Mr Johnson but a year ago Mr Corbyn might have said the same thing. Well, the ball did come loose and he decide to have a crack at it. That is to his credit. Whether he uses his office to turn Labour into a workshop of new ideas will be the test of his leadership.
