Questions about left or right are futile until Labour have asked: why did you not vote for us?
And so the recriminations begin.
In Scotland, Jim Murphy now faces calls from unions, led by Unite, to resign. Their charge? That Labour was outflanked by the SNP because it was not left-wing enough.
Meanwhile across England the argument, led by Tony Blair in his article over the weekend, was that Labour had veered too far to the left for middle England’s crucial swing voters.
Such a conundrum goes to the very heart of the challenge now facing Labour.
Those calling for a lurch leftwards argue that the party will never get back into government without getting Scotland back. Those calling for more New Labour argue that England is what matters most. The reality is that both are equally important.
What is required is to flesh out the One Nation approach that Ed Miliband articulated clearly at the 2012 Party Conference but sadly followed up with relatively little substance.
It is galling to hear David Cameron snatch this mantra now, after presiding over an election campaign that sought to divide the nation by stoking fears of aScottish takeover of Westminster.
So how does the party proceed from here?
Firstly, it cannot succumb to the belief that a swift leadership election is the best way forward. In 2010 the scale of the defeat inflicted on the party was almost hidden from view by the fact that there was a much larger number of Labour MPs than expected.
The view had prevailed that one last push would get the party back into Number 10. Last week’s election shattered this belief and showed that a fundamental root and branch analysis is needed.
This means those vying for the leadership need to be more humble, spending less time coming up with their own theories as to why Labour lost and spending more time listening to the public in Scotland and all those seats the party expected to take in England. The question to ask will be simple – why did you not vote Labour?
But beyond that, Labour has a big job to do in holding the current government to account and tackling head-on the accusation made by Cameron that Labour was to blame for the recession.
On the latter, Liam Byrne’s apology for the infamous ‘no money’ note has been long overdue. Looking to the next five years, the party needs, with ruthless efficiency, to be quoting the words of the permanent secretary to the Treasury. Just before the election it emerged that Sir Nicholas Macpherson had concluded that the financial crisis was ‘a banking crisis pure and simple’. He was right.
On the former, in Scotland, the party has a year until the Scottish election. Under the continued leadership of Jim Murphy the party needs to ensure that next year’s elections to Holyrood focus relentlessly on the SNP’s record in government. It cannot let it become a re-run of the recent general election campaign.
As Labour has previously revealed, under the SNP the history of the NHS has been one of missed targets week after week. Literacy levels under the SNP have fallen, and the predictions the party made for revenue from North Sea Oil during the referendum campaign were completely wrong.
Meanwhile, alongside a longer leadership contest at a UK level Labour needs to focus on the likely 2017 referendum on EU membership. In one of the rare good news moments of the campaign, Labour’s commitment to remain in the EU put it rightly in alliance with much of the business community. This is an alliance that needs to be built upon to provide not just a powerful campaign to stay in, but as a rebuke to the myth that Labour is somehow anti-business.
So Labour has a massive job on its hands. It faces a crunch moment in its history, but the party can only rebuild by talking to the public. It will understand its proposals not through internal navel gazing but by asking the public some tough questions, that in all likelihood will lead to difficult answers.
Ed Jacobs is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
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29 Responses to “It’s time for Labour to listen to the public”
Gerschwin
I’ve always found James Blunts’s letter to Chris Bryant pretty much sums up Labour in a nutshell. How can you ever hope to gain power if you treat success as shameful? Labour deserves everything that has happened to it, it serves it right. The thought we could, had the polls been correct, be living in a nation divided between the SNP in the North and Labour in the South with the two picking over the cadaver of the UK. Miliband becoming ever more grotesque in his persecutions of the middle class (who by the way, Labour people, decide elections not the working class) to raise the taxes he needs to placate the salivating hordes from his party and the cunning, wily Sturgeon outflanking him at every turn – very, very frightening.
Thank God for the English middle class – saved the day, as they always do, a thousand times more switched on and intelligent than anyone on this website.
AlanGiles
You will get a different set of answers from every person who didn’t vote Labour, but I am afraid my main reason was the hypocrisy of Labour.
We forever heard that Cameron was a “toff”, Osborne was a “toff” (it was as if the recent scripts had been written by P.G. Woodehouse), but isn’t Tristram Hunt a “toff” (if you chose to use that kind of langauge?) and Ed and David Miliband are not exactly part of the proletariat, are they?. Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish equivalent of Eton. What started to put me off a few years ago was when the Labour party chose their puerile “toff” campaign against Edward Timpson standing for Nantwich and Crewe, with Labour students making idiots of themselves prancing round in top hats. One of the reasons Timpson was targetted because his family own the high street key-cutting and shoe repair business. Actually that business gives employment to a lot of ex-offenders. They get Sundays and bank holidays off, unlike, say Sainsburys.
We heard Margaret Hodge and Keith Vaz constantly expressing alarm over greedy businessmen – but neither of that pair were exactly honest and straightforward over their expenses (especially Vaz – and he has form going back to at least 2001 – do you remember?, when because of some embarrassment he lost his voice until the day after the general election. In my opinoin, Vaz and Hodge are just as contemptible and untrustworthy as the greedy businessmen they frequently point the finger at.
Labour are too quick to see the faults in others without recognizing any in themselves, and class war should have died out 50 years ago – that Labour choose to try to revive it shows how far in the past they are.
stevep
Despite the outcome of the election, There is still a huge left of centre consensus in the UK. The success of the Tories was their usual trick of making people take their eye off the ball and then apply divide and rule scare tactics. Their friends in the media ran the vilest, negative, most hate-ridden campaign ever seen in this country (and that includes the early`80s when newspapers sacked trades unionists and retreated behind razor wire compounds to print their pro-tory propaganda.). Despite this the Tories only hold a small majority.
Much has been made of the SNP`s success in the election in wiping out Labour in Scotland. All that has actually happened is there has been a colour swop from red to yellow, the voters are still left-leaning in Scotland, they want to part of the UK but with a slightly more radical voice, the SNP offered this. We can learn from it. Time will tell whether voters in Scotland will still be as enthusiastically pro SNP when Nicola Sturgeons band of Mp`s have had their Braveheart moment of lifting their kilts and scaring the English, but repeatedly come up against a three line Tory whip when trying to implement or influence policy and realise they are getting very little change out of them.
The Green Party can teach us much when it comes to a radical, progressive agenda for social change and again, Labour supporters would do well to study their manifesto.
Rather than indulge in a protracted bout of infighting I feel that we should celebrate the differences in our UK left-leaning community and find common ground on which to build a better society. Votes will fluctuate from one party to another over the years but as long as the consensus remains and can be built upon and we don`t allow divide and rule politics to affect us, We can be a formidable force for change, both within the UK and Europe.
Selohesra
‘Huge left of centre consensus’ – Con + UKIP = 49.5%. I assume you think Tories are right of centre and therefore accept that UKIP are not a right wing party
Dave Stewart
Lets be clear. The reason the Tories won has little to do with them convincing new people to vote for them nationally. They achieved less than 1% increase in the national vote share. Labour achieved approaching a 2% increase in the national vote share. That is hardly a massive upswing in Tory support.
What the Tories were successful at was making sure they had votes where it counted in the marginal seats (where they spent eye watering amounts of money coincidentally). There has not been a massive upswing in support for the Tories nationally what has happened is they very cleverly played our outdated and anti-democratic voting system better than any of the other parties.