The Battle for the Soul of the Labour Party

The public narrative of the cause for 2015 and the way forward has already been framed by the right wing of the party:

It failed in small-town England but advanced in London and big cities. It continued to lose working-class votes but bolstered its middle-class support. How to weave together a winning electoral coalition out of such fragmentation is far from straightforward. But you’d never know that from the response of Labour’s leadership candidates. Taking their cue  from Blair and a string of former New Labour luminaries, all have fallen in – with more or less enthusiasm – behind a Blairite agenda.

The problem with Ed Miliband’s leadership, they intoned from the start, was that it was “anti-business”, put a “cap on aspiration”, threatened rich people with punitive taxes, and failed to accept that the last Labour government “overspent” in the runup to the crisis of 2007-08.

However, the numbers are not on the side of the “modernisers” (a misnomer, given the modernizers are refighting the battles from 1992-1994).  John Curtice (a well known political scientist in the UK) suggests the problem with 2015 was in part the loss of support on the left:

 Britain’s most respected opinion pollster has warned Labour its chances of winning a majority at the next election verge on the “improbable” and that blaming its defeat on a shift away from Blairism is “wholly inadequate”.

Setting aside his pessimistic assessment for the future as I haven’t had the opportunity to explore those numbers at all (but will not be improved by the near certainty of a boundary review during the current Parliament) I do agree with the suggestion that a shift to the right would not enhance the electability of the party. Anecdotally, campaigning on the doorstep over the past two years, I haven’t once heard somebody tell me what the Labour Party needs is more Blairism. I have heard from many former Labour supporters who lamented that the party “has abandoned people like me”. I’ve also heard a lot of anti-immigrant vile, which as an immigrant myself are always my favorite moments (said without sarcasm) because invariably they don’t include me as a target for their life’s frustrations.

While Curtice focuses solely on the debacle in Scotland, the nearly 1.2 million Green Party voters also need to be included in any assessment:

If Greens had backed Labour in Derby North, Croydon Central, Bury North, Morley and Outwood, Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, Brighton Kemptown, and Telford, it would have been enough to deny David Cameron a majority, and Ed Balls would still be in his job. That’s just 2984 votes that would have needed to change hands.

Plymouth Sutton & Devonport is my constituency.  The Labour Party candidate, Luke Pollard, lost to the incumbent Conservative MP by 523 votes.  The Green Party candidate received 3401 votes.

I’m not arguing that the 2015 loss was the fault of the Greens or the SNP.  I am arguing that the Labour Party needs to make itself a more appealing alternative for those voters, one that combines addressing progressive issues and concerns with the chance of actually forming, you know, a government.

It’s Labour’s fault that many former Labour supporters voted for what they perceived to be a more attractive alternative. Embracing 1994 all over again will not get them back.