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?”
Patrick Nelson
Very true indeed and really if Labour had won we wouldn’t be hearing many of these attacks on pre-election Labour policies. The Tories only got 6% more of the vote than Labour did, but people talk as if they gained some great victory and a heavenly mandate that meant that everything Labour said before the election must be exorcized forever for Labour to ever win another election, which is of course nonsense. (PS. 8 plus shift gets the star button, a great thing for when you want to express yourself strongly in time honoured fashion whilst also making a gesture of respect people of other sensibilities).
dnspncr
Ha, cheers Patrick – blame the wine ;-P
Jacko
According to Wikipedia, the Conservatives got 11.334M votes, Labour got 9.347M votes.
In other words, the Tories got 21.3% more votes than Labour. That’s the scale of the mountain Labour has to climb.
Patrick Nelson
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results Tories 36.9% Labour 30%
dnspncr
Politicians exaggerating to make a point, well I never. Iain Duncan Smith tells us that our society is beset by jobless layabouts who opt for welfare benefits as a lifestyle choice, surveys now suggest many believe that a large chunk of the welfare budget goes on benefits to unemployed people (it’s actually 3%). He has deployed statistical evidence to back his claims…
In the Telegraph he wrote “Tax credit payments rose by some 58% ahead of the 2005 general election, and in the two years prior to the 2010 election, spending increased by about 20%.” LIE: 2003-04, £16.4bn was paid, and the following year (the one that included the general election) £17.7bn. That’s an increase of 8%. In 2008-9 £25.1bn was paid in tax credits, the following year it was £27.3bn. Which means that in the two years prior to the 2010 general election, spending on tax credits increased by 8.8%.
On QT he ranted “two and a half million people were parked [on the dole], nobody saw them, for over 10 years” – LIE: 18% of working-age households were workless, but in only 2% of households had nobody ever worked. More than half of adults in ‘never-worked’ households were under 25. 2% of the population is not 2.5m people, and under-25s cannot have been unemployed for more than 10 years – the figures actually highlight the high level of young adult unemployment.
In September 2013 a leaked documents showed Duncan Smith was looking at “how to make it harder for sick and disabled people to claim benefits”, he pursued this goal with vigour. A DWP press releases came out stating that “more than 50% of decisions on entitlement are made on the basis of the claim form alone, without any additional corroborating medical evidence.” – LIE: it was 10%. It was also stated that “under the current system of DLA, 71% of claimants get indefinite awards without systematic reassessments” – LIE: 23% and 24% of claimants were given indefinite awards.
IDS has been criticised by the UK’s statistics watchdog for misusing figures to promote the effectiveness of his benefits cap on getting people into work. IDS claimed “already we’ve seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs. This clearly demonstrates that the cap is having the desired impact”. LIE: Andrew Dilnot, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, said this claim was “unsupported by the official statistics published by the department”.