Blaming the voters is not an option. Labour has to change, write two party activists.
Despite a monumental effort from Labour members, candidates and activists, the election result is disastrous.
In Labour Party’s worst general election result at the polls since 1935, votes have been haemorrhaged in constituencies across the country. Former mining areas, such as Tony Blair’s old seat of Sedgefield, have turned Tory.
What makes it harder to take is that this result comes after nine years of being in opposition. Nine years of austerity and cuts to vital public services. In the past hundred years, no opposition party has lost seats nine years into opposition – until this campaign – Labour lost 59 in a single night.
Why? According to recent polling conducted by Opinium, three core issues stood out in the campaign to voters; Jeremy Corbyn and his leadership, Labour’s Brexit policy – which left many would be Labour voters with more questions than answers – and finally the cost and credibility of the manifesto. This polling backs up much of what activists will have heard on the doorstep this winter.
Leadership
Firstly, no opposition Party has ever won an election while campaigning with a leader that has had such negative personal opinion ratings amongst the public. We are often too introspective in the Labour bubble – while Corbyn was voted in unanimously twice by members, his support was never replicated in the wider country.
Earlier this year, polling marked Corbyn’s personal approval ratings at -60, a sign that a narrative had been set early on with voters that Corbyn, and subsequently Labour, were simply not ready for power.
Antisemitism
The party’s complete failure to recognise and address the issue of antisemitism and improve relations with the Jewish community only solidified this opinion further. Labour will always struggle to campaign effectively if it can’t deliver full-throated attacks on Boris Johnson’s racist, homophobic and crude past comments, if our own record isn’t up to scratch either. Going into an election without this issue rectified, was morally negligent and electoral suicide. Rectifying the party’s slow response on antisemitism and winning back the trust of the Jewish community has to be one of the priorities on Day 1 for the next party leader.
Appeal
It is also imperative that the party’s next leader is someone who can appeal across a broad coalition of voters. It’s one thing to have the support of Putney, Islington and public figures like Stormzy, but to win and govern again, we will need all of the former, as well as voters in places like Sedgefield, Stoke and Stockton – a leader who can appeal to the whole country, and not just our own membership base.
Brexit
While a new leader will offer the party the opportunity to refresh, the other issues that contributed to this result will have to be addressed too. Lessons will have to be learnt about the decision to campaign on a Brexit policy that couldn’t be summed up on the doorstep in three sentences, when our opponents could sum it up in three words.
The immediate direction of Brexit is now very much out of the party’s control, but a new, clear and authentic message will have to be developed to counter the Tory vision for Brexit, and to satisfy voters across the North and South, cities and towns alike.
And ultimately, a policy that protects jobs in core industries like manufacturing will have to be developed in order to avoid further economic downturn in areas that have already been chronically underfunded by governments since Britain’s peak deindustrialisation in the 70s.
What was the message?
As many people around the Leader’s Office have repeated in the past few days – many of the policies were popular – but when presented all in one go, with a manifesto that read more like an endless advent calendar – voters found it hard to envision how a party so fraught with infighting and already lacking in credibility amongst the public, could produce them all.
Moreover, Labour did little to reassure everyday voters how they would actually put these policies into practice, and instead went on to announce more policies – sometimes daily – before they had actually persuaded the public that they were the right people to bring them into realisation.
With no coherent strategy to press home consistently over the six week campaign, it was far too easy for the Tories to paint the manifesto as “too expensive” and to highlight specific policies that were unpopular in their target seats, such as the party’s policy on immigration.
Backlash
Following the result some Labour supporters reacted with disbelief and vitriol towards those who have apparently ‘betrayed’ the party at the ballot box, blaming the supposed ‘ignorance of voters’ in the U.K. This will not do our movement any good. Attacking the people whose votes you need to gain for the chance to govern again won’t make them suddenly change their minds.
Meanwhile, the party leadership and its allies have sought to blame a supposedly unavoidable Brexit backlash as the reason for the result, and focused their efforts on promoting the “arguments” that have been won during their tenure.
Sadly for them, and the many people who desperately needed a Labour government, winning arguments isn’t the same as winning elections.
Instead of making excuses, it’s now time for Labour to genuinely reflect on the country’s decision. Reflect on why people who have previously supported the Labour Party in its opposition of Thatcher’s Tory Party in the 70s and 80s, who have celebrated our successes under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the 90s and 00s, and who have now lived through almost a decade of austerity, didn’t trust us with the power to reverse those cuts and invest in the country’s future.
If we want the chance to govern the U.K. again in the next decade we need to listen, learn and change – right now.
Peter Turay and Alannah Travers are both Labour Party activists.
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15 Responses to “To Labour’s next leader: listen, learn and change or face another decade in opposition”
Patrick Newman
Let’s not forget that Labour defeat was no way as severe as the Tories in 1997 when they were down to just 165 M.P.’s. Furthermore, had Blair not dipped his hands in the blood of our fighting forces in Iraq and Afghanistan we would have had a majority in 2010, possibly without the need for a coalition with the Lib Dems.
Elizabeth Simpson
My main worry has been a growing sense of exclusion/inclusion – that the inner bubble of the Party is so fired with enthusiasm that it feels it can afford to leave the excluded behind. They stopped listening – thought that they had ‘won the argument’ a good while ago. Arguments are only won when enough people have been genuinely persuaded to change their view. Being silenced or dismissed as irrelevant does not cut it.
Pauline Goddard
I have never voted Labour but I joined membership this year because Labour’s policies on Climate Change offered more hope for the future and I wanted its voice in the Commons to be a vital opposition to this Tory government which has caused so much despair and division over the past nice years.
I live in a constituency which has an MP who supported remaining in the EU and where Labour had no hope of winning anyway so my choice last Thursday was easy to make but I feel immensely sad that Labour has lost so badly and lost good MPs.
I’m mystified why the Labour Party seems powerless to combat vile accusations that are almost daily levelled against their leader in the gutter press. Other leaders, notably Tory ones, also met members of the IRA during the time of the troubles. It was the only way that bridges could be built to enable the Peace Process.
On a similar point that Jeremy Corbyn is wrongly accused, it seems to me that his opposition to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians must be what drives the accusations of anti-semitism as I have never seen or heard him do or say anything that could be construed as anti-semitic and examples from his accusers have not been specific during this election campaign. I think he is right to sympathise with the Palestinians but it is unfortunately loathsome if some of his supporters see this as a green light to abuse Jewish people.
I think he could have taken a stronger stand against those who have anti-semitic views and in his own interests he should have done so but, as someone above pointed out, he has never said outrageous things about the attire of fundamentalist Jews such as Boris Johnson has about the attire of fundamentalist Muslims.
It’s incredible how things work for one but not for the other and I believe the reason isn’t, as claimed, that Jeremy Corbyn’s accusers have a dislike of racism so much as an a absolute hatred of the idea of socialism. The policies Jeremy Corbyn stands for have been labelled extreme and the British public seem to believe they are but if you compare with other countries in Europe who have a similar standing and wealth to ours, the Labour party’s brand of socialism is not extreme and would have been balanced anyway by parliamentary opposition to laws it sought to pass. This would have been a much better outcome for our country than the governing structure we have now after this disastrous election result.
Someone said on radio recently that we need humour and lightness, which Boris Johnson provides. I think this is true but such a huge Tory majority is a very bad thing all the same. The country has shown we are easily persuaded by a memorable slogan. It’s tragic.
If Jeremy Corbyn had been better advised to emphasise his commitment to honouring the 2016 referendum result (which I believe he personally would have preferred to do) he might have had more support across the country. As it was, he was disadvantaged from the start by the vilification aimed at him by the Tory leaning press and by the simple and, like the Leave campaign, crude but effective strategy of the Tory campaign.
Alice Aforethought
@ Pauline
As far as I can see the “vile accusations that are almost daily levelled against their leader in the gutter press” consist of accurate reminders of things he has done and said.
“I have never seen or heard him do or say anything that could be construed as anti-semitic”
Then you haven’t been paying attention. The JLM submission to the EHRC inquiry into Labour articulates Jeremy Corbyn’s personal anti-Semitism clearly and gives 11 instances of it.
Mark
Wrong wrong wrong!
Labour listened to much already! We allowed the racist Leavers to stop us from putting the whole Party behind People’s Vote. It is time we told them who’s in charge and put them back in their caves
The next Labour labour needs to be LGBT BAME. No more white people ruining the country for everything else. We are so done with the straight white power structure