Why Labour lost – Questions and more questions...

Bewildered, shocked, bruised and with a permanent heartache, I look back on Labour’s election defeat and try to make sense of it. I’ve been trying to write this now for a week, but still don’t feel much wiser, ok maybe this week’s events made me just a bit wiser, but my mind is awfully fussy these days. So, here you go! I don’t know it all, but here are a few things I do know:

• ·         We  lost in Scotland to a (nationalist) self-proclaimed anti-austerity party (still need proof if they mean it)
• ·         Apparently we lost in ‘middle’ England, because we were too ‘left’
• ·         We lost to the Greens because we were not left enough
  
• ·         We lost to UKIP because we seemingly neglected the traditional working class
• ·         We lost because the Lib Dem vote collapsed and went to their coalition partner, the Tories, instead of us (a bit like the female spider eating their mate, if you know what I mean)
• ·         We lost because of a five years’ hate campaign by the right-wing media against Ed Miliband -he stood up against them and against vested interests, so it is kind of obvious that they did not like it. If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes true. Now that Chuka Umunna claims to have pulled out of the Labour leadership contest because of press intrusion, it emphasises this point even more (although I don’t quite believe that this was the only reason Chuka left). How Ed could actually bear all this for five years is beyond me, and I admire the man even more for it.
• ·         We lost because Ed and the leadership team neglected Scotland (in the same way as they neglected us in NI, even if our cases are different)

What next?

First of all, forget about people who were irrelevant 5 or even 10 years ago and want to stick their ore in. Of course, everybody is entitled to their opinion, but not everybody is entitled to speak for ‘the party’. Don’t mistake frequent TV and press coverage for present authority.

We need to collect all the information we can get about the election to have data for analysis, not just opinion. We have more members in our party than any political party, we had masses of volunteer canvassers and helpers, and ‘4 million conversations on the doorstep’ in all parts of the UK except NI (but teams of NI canvassers were out in Chester and Stranraer), so we should have good information about what voters were telling us. We might not get this information from the leadership contenders, but we will get it from our members, branches and CLPs. It should be collected and analysed. So here is an example, well, my own.

What I heard on the doorstep: 

Talking to voters on the doorstep in Chester and Stranraer, I noticed that the Bedroom Tax and zero-hours contracts were issues that were often mentioned by people who were voting Labour. Voters who were considering voting Labour often decided to vote Labour because they were concerned about these issues.  These were certainly winning policies (and rightly so!)

What came up a few times with voters was ‘you only come to our door at election time’, which is and shows that constituents feel neglected and unappreciated by parties. However, a lot of Labour voters told me how much they appreciated the local Labour councillors, and how they were helped by them. 

What I heard often were ‘you are all the same’ and ‘voting makes no difference’, showing alienation from politics. If voters think we are all the same, then it means, Labour needs to distinguish itself more from the other parties. I don’t think ‘out-Tory-ing’ the Tories would be a good idea.  They do Tory best, so let’s leave them at that. 

Not knowing that voting can make a difference shows lack of political knowledge and education (or people are just too busy to care about something that seems so far removed from their lives). More political education work needs to be done on the ground, ie talking to people, and also in schools. Quite a bit has been done online, but perhaps not enough. We also need to look at the registration and voting system to see how democratic and inclusive it really is (and we kind of know it is not).

Comments about Ed’s leadership were more frequent in February, and hardly existing in May, which means that his campaign was perceived as positive. A few times Labour voters told me: ‘You picked the wrong brother’ – which I now think is quite extraordinary, after all, this was nearly 5 years after the leadership contest and much water had gone under the bridge. We should have knocked that argument on its head a long time ago – the Tories of course kept rehashing it, and it is now being spread again by enthusiastic Blairites, hoping for their saviour’s return, but this should not have been an issue after all those years. Or is it a case of, the political elephants never forget? Sorry to be sarcastic, but maybe after David Miliband’s sudden re-appearance and getting his moment of revenge, this is the end of that myth. 

What I also heard from a few former Labour voters was that they never forgave the party for the Iraq war, and they are still angry at Tony Blair. Those wounds do run deep, and no matter how much you tell them that we are a different Labour Party now, there is still no closure. Maybe that is another thing the party never put to bed and moved on from.

‘It’s the economy stupid’ also came up, and those who brought up the argument that Labour trashed the economy when they were in government were what I think either Tories or swing voters. Again, more myth-busting should have been done previously.

UKIP supporters were mostly focusing on immigration (obviously) or said they wanted some kind of ‘change’, but didn’t define that change. There was a sense that UKIP was more ‘for the people’.

In Stranraer, SNP voters who were previous Labour voters told me of their sense that Labour had betrayed Scotland. 

There were an awful lot of undecided voters, even on polling day! I don’t believe all were ‘shy Tories’, but some voters really went to the polling station and decided in the booth, which again makes me suspect there is on the one hand an alienation from the political system, and the other hand a confusion about Labour’s message and what we stand for.

This is only my experience, and although I focused more on the negative than the positive, I also got wonderful supportive comments and thumbs up, and love for the Labour movement, and a sense that we were winning.  Well, we did win in Chester, so that was true.

If we pool all the canvassing experiences together, I think we can get a good idea of where we as a party have to work on, and if we do, we will only become stronger and better! We really owe it to the people to win again, don’t we?