We need to appeal to the whole country, not just odd sections of it
Harriet Harman’s comments today that the leadership contest should be ‘public facing’ should be welcomed by all in the Labour movement.
While the party needs to have a deep inward think about how it operates, we cannot forget that ultimately the lessons to learn from defeat will be learnt not from any one candidate or union. Instead they will come from the public that, when it came to it, could not put their trust in us.
But within it all, we have to be prepared to stand up for our proud legacy in government. We should not seek to define ourselves by putting distance between the party we are now and the party that won three successive general elections.
How can we ever hope to secure the reins of power again if we cannot give a clear and robust defence of what we did when we were last in government?
For all the problems of the Iraq War, we would never have got a minimum wage and record investment in our public services had it not been for Tony Blair’s achievement in getting Labour into government. He did this by challenging the party to reach out to areas of the country that had previously been written off as no-go areas.
The peace process in Northern Ireland, the Human Rights Act and a Britain more confident in the world are all legacies of Labour. We must shout from the roof tops about the difference a Labour government could make come 2020, pointing to the radical changes we made when last held the levers of power.
The Labour party now stands at a crossroads, and the reality is that we will only get back into government by taking on and defeating the Conservatives in those marginal seats we should have won – seats like Nuneaton, Lincoln, Broxtowe and Hastings.
Let ‘s not forget that even if the party had kept its seats in Scotland, it would still be in opposition.
As a party we need to stop navel-gazing and reach out across the whole country, engaging with all those voters in marginal seats who could not bring themselves to put a cross next to their Labour candidate.
The blunt truth is that it is only by persuading voters as a whole that Labour is credible will we get back into power; not by persuading ourselves.
And for those in any doubt, have a look at this weekend’s polling by YouGov for the Sunday Times. Forty per cent of voters said the next Labour leader needs to position the party firmly in the centre ground of British politics, with just 21 per cent saying they should take it to the left.
In an interview with the Economist prior to the recent election, Tony Blair observed that May’s election was shaping up to be one ‘in which a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result’.
He was right then and he is right now. Whatever people think of Blair, the fact remains that he won three resounding victories, one of only two Labour leaders since 1974 to have won elections for the party.
If opposition is what the party ,then, let’s pick up where we left off.
But if power, and the ability to actually change things, is what we want then we need to be challenged, we need to be modernised and we need to be reformed into a pro-aspiration party. We need to be a party that talks to the whole country and not to odd sections of it.
Ed Jacobs is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
31 Responses to “Comment: Labour can only win from the centre”
James Chilton
You’ve had to admit that no Labour government since the time of Attlee has been elected on a left wing manifesto or anything like one. They’ve all been, at best, centre-left administrations.
If you believe that a Labour government could still be elected with a set of socialist
policies which would amount to a full frontal attack on capitalism, then you should give some evidence in support of your belief.
It’s easy to cite at least half a dozen major things a “true Labour government” ought
to do, but it’s getting a majority of the people to vote for them – that’s the problem.
Power for its own sake isn’t the only alternative to a Labour victory based on political principles that you’d approve. There’s always an argument inside the Labour movement between the “purists” and the “realists”. While the purists can claim to stick to their principles, what use is that if they can’t apply them because they’re never in power?
We live in an imperfect world and all politics is the art of the possible. Unless Labour adapts to the political possibilities now, the Tories will remain in power indefinitely. Cameron’s attack on the right to strike is just a beginning. If they’re in office long enough, the only freedom left to trade unionists will be the right to obey the police.
Ian
What’s the point of being in power if you have no principles (or only have Tory principles)? I don’t want hard left, I’m a realist in that sense, but many of the things I do want are fully supported by the public when questioned on policies. Renationalised transport and utilities, no more baseless wars, a decent wage, a fully nationalised NHS… These are all things that are perfectly in tune with the public mood and all things Ed Miliband was not offering. He didn’t offer an alternative and his leadership was weak and ineffectual. Those are the two big reasons (IMO) why Labour lost. This talk of Miliband having moved left is absolute tripe. He showed perfectly what I’m talking about; many traditional Labour voters just stayed home because they had no-one to vote for.
This has been happening since 2001, pretty much straight after people realised what the Labour Party had become after 4 years of Blair. They stuck with it for a while but the last election was the time of reckoning. New Blue Labour’s time has been and gone. A further rightward shift will just put the tin hat on it come 2020.
Time to get with the Greens, folks. Labour is almost dead.
James Chilton
I think we understand why Miliband lost, so let’s not get into that.
I would like to see, for starters, a Labour pledge to renationalise all public utilities plus the Post Office and BT without compensation. I won’t bore you with further details from “my manifesto”, but I just slipped that one in to show that I’m far from satisfied with the wishy-washy centre-left standpoint.
It’s a question of what a majority of the public will vote for these days. I don’t think there’s any evidence to show that a hard left manifesto, promising significant redistribution, stood a chance in any election of modern times.
So it’s wishful thinking to believe that a big shift to the left is the way to power in future. If that was true, it would have been tried and succeeded already – and we shouldn’t have had to put up with the likes of Mandelson’s yapping in the Labour party.
Ian
There’s the rub; a more left wing manifesto wouldn’t have been tried because there’s barely a left wing MP in the party now, Blair stuffed the pace with drones in his image.
If the majority of people will only vote for policies from the right – which I doubt, given the amount of people who want nationalisation etc mentioned earlier – and the Labour Party moves right to meet them then it renders itself pointless. There are two other parties covering that ground, there is absolutely no need for another.
One practical problem is Labour would have to chase the Mail/Telegraph voters and there is no way in many millions of lifetimes those people will trust anything with Labour in its name. I mean, how far to the right do you want to go before you realise you’re not voting for Labour in any real sense of the name? This tribalism gone mental.
James Chilton
The reason why New Labour has invented was because latter day Whigs like Blair, knew they couldn’t get the party elected on a left wing ticket. So the Prince of Darkness was consulted – to lay out a ‘centrist’ political scheme which would put them in government three consecutive times.
It’s a political fact that Labour can’t get enough votes to win from its traditional supporters. It has to get support from a chunk of the population who would not feel threatened if the Tories were in power. In other words, it needs the support of many people who would vote Labour, not out of self interest but on the basis of a social conscience. It can’t afford to frighten them.
I don’t much like the situation any more than you do. But unless we bear in mind what’s possible for Labour, we can end up thinking it’s “better” to have the Tories in power than have a Labour government which isn’t left wing enough. That’s crazy.