If things were that bad for as many people as Ed Miliband made out, he'd surely have won by a landslide
The rhetoric from the Labour Party in the lead up to the General Election in May made Britain sound like a post-apocalyptic nightmare; half the country enjoying daily champagne baths while the other half scratched a living in a frozen wasteland.
Miliband did a lot of talking about all the struggling people out there who deserved a better Britain. He talked of despairing people on zero-hours contracts who didn’t earn enough to feed their families.
He gave plentiful examples of disabled people struggling to get by because the bedroom tax left them unable to fend for themselves. He talked of nurses, doctors, teachers, police officers and firefighters desperately underpaid and overworked to breaking point due to Tory cuts to the public sector.
That’s a hell of a lot of people you’d think must have been desperate to turf out the Tories at the first opportunity, in favour of a left-leaning government-in-waiting poised and ready to save the day.
A Unite survey in the midst of the election battle estimated that 5.5 million people were working on zero-hours contracts. The Department for Work and Pensions puts the number of disabled people in the UK at 12 million and those with a disabled person in their family numbering four times that figure.
There are almost half a million nurses and 150,000 doctors employed by the NHS, along with 1.3 million staff working in our schools and 130,000 police officers and 40,000 fire fighters keeping us safe.
Without even beginning to count the 2 million unemployed people, 2 million students and millions of others that must have been affected by the Tories and their war on the have-nots, that’s the votes for a healthy majority government right there for the taking. In fact, if they all came out to vote, Labour might have won every single seat on offer, let alone the election.
Then when the time came for Britain’s voting public to choose who it wanted to run the country, Labour garnered a paltry nine million votes and lost the election. The question is, if things were really as terrible as Ed Miliband et al had spent the last five years telling us, why did so few of these persecuted millions feel compelled to vote Labour?
The fact is, while there is clearly an unacceptable number of people living through terrible experiences because of what the Tories were then doing, and now will continue to do for the next five years, that number simply isn’t as big as the Labour campaign would have us believe. If it was, Labour would surely have won by a landslide.
Labour now has to face up to the fact that for most people, including many of the teachers, doctors, nurses, students disabled people and zero-hours contract workers, things really can’t be that bad. They might not be all that good for a lot of people, but it certainly could be worse.
There are a lot of people who are just about comfortable, and that’s enough. Enough to vote Tory for some, enough to not bother voting at all for many others. And most importantly of all, enough not to risk voting Labour for all but a few.
With the leadership contest now in full swing, there are worrying signs that the Labour Party hasn’t learned a thing from its embarrassing defeat at the General Election. In fact, in its panic to be different, there is a danger it could lurch further left, decreasing the size of the available voting pool still further.
Of course, calls for change are to be expected, and are necessary, but there are few clear signs that any of the candidates really understand what that change should entail – Jeremy Corbyn aside.
It’s a grim situation when the candidate making the most impact is the one who all the evidence suggests will take Labour’s 30 per cent vote share of 2015 and halve it in 2020. What it does show is the power of a clear vision, however suicidal that vision might be.
Much of the rhetoric from Burnham, Kendall and Cooper still features a muddle of references to the plight of the embattled few rather than setting out a clear vision on what matters to the many.
It may seem heartless to suggest, but the Labour Party should consider that perhaps the best way to help those experiencing really desperate times in this country is to communicate with the many more who aren’t.
It’s the only way to win power. Without which, Labour aren’t in a position to begin helping anyone.
Louis Clark writes on business and politics at medium.com/@louisclarkPR and is a member of the Chingford & Woodford Green Labour Party.
43 Responses to “Is Britain just too comfortable for the Labour Party?”
stevep
If you want an example of making facts up, just refer to your original post.
I`ll be charitable and put it down to right-wing media brainwashing. After all, you`ve just admitted you support UKIP!
Rowdie111
Absolutely …it was the same with most things. Labour banged on as if the whole country was in pain and falling down a black hole. Problem is that is not true and most of the country recognize this. That may have been the situation in the first half of the 20th century….but we are now in the 21st century and Labour continue to be a party of the past with many wanting to go back to the past.ie Jeremy Corbyn !
Rowdie111
Sorry 2010 handed over a £170billion deficit….who was running the country before then ?
Rowdie111
One quarter of growth …but still running a deficit with borrowing of £170billion!
dnspncr
The 2% (of people in employment, not “population”) figure is based on the ONS survey, and this is only one estimate (estimates vary especially as such contracts may be under-reported by people confusing them with casual work). I don’t know where you plucked the statistic showing that half of the employees on these contracts see flexibility as a good thing(!!!), the ONS survey estimates it to be a third… granted that’s only about 230,000 people who suffer from a lack of financial stability and security but hey, things like that bug us empathic types.
Zero-hour contracts are just part of the problem, self-employment is at the highest level since records began despite being in a period of economic instability; Bogus self-employment is on the rise with the building industry, courier firms and employment agencies using payroll companies that force workers onto self-employed contracts – this way they do not have to guarantee work and are not obligated to provide holiday pay, sick pay and pensions (they then charge the worker around £25 for their service).
It’s bad enough that 5 million people don’t earn enough to cover the basic costs of living without denying them job stability… yeah yeah, I know, they’ve all got big TVs and mobile phones, they can always sell them if they don’t earn any money at the end of the week. If you support New Labour or the Conservatives you really need to take your head out of your fucking arse.