In November 1988, the Democrat presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis, led his party to its third consecutive defeat. In its aftermath, two academics, Elaine Kamarck and William Galston, published a short monograph, The Politics of Evasion, in which they accused their party of engaging in a decade-long ‘systematic denial of reality’ about the causes of its successive defeats and how it could regain the White House once again.
Since its defeat in 2010, Labour has engaged in its own systematic denial of reality, its thinking dominated by the politics of delusion. Underlying it is a simple belief: that every single political rule which the party learned in the 1990s, and which underlay its three consecutive general election victories, no longer applied. The rules of politics are, of course, not immutable. But the fundamental delusion peddled by the party’s leadership and its outriders for the past five years is that they could now defy all of these rules.
The result of indulging this myth was tragic – for Labour and the country – but entirely predictable. As it has done on each of the previous occasions when it lost office, Labour has emerged from the subsequent general election with a lower share of the vote. By contrast, the Conservatives became the first governing party in six decades to put on both seats and votes.
This piece does not offer Labour a road back, but it does seek to nail some of the deeply damaging delusions which have been allowed to run wild for the past five years.
The vanishing Tory threat
The most hubristic of the politics of delusion was the notion that the Conservatives were holed beneath the water line: that, having failed to secure a parliamentary majority in 23 years, the party was destined not to do so again.
In The Conservative Dilemma, shadow cabinet member Jon Trickett enunciated this thesis most clearly. Trickett was careful to claim that there was ‘no iron law of politics’ which said the Conservatives could not win, but, he suggested, the party faced an ‘existential threat’, its ‘electoral base is deeply fragmented’ and the ‘long decades of the hegemony of a certain form of Toryism have now come to an end’. Conveniently, this provided Labour with an opportunity: ‘To put an end to triangulation on to Tory territory and to establish its own independent identity based on our abiding values of community, justice and equality.’
Closely allied to this delusion was the notion that the Conservatives’ difficulties winning seats in the north of England and the country’s big cities was somehow more damaging to their prospects than Labour’s problems in the south were to it. The reality was rather different. In the early 1990s, thanks to the work of Giles Radice and others, Labour sought to address the ‘southern discomfort’ which afflicted it during the Tories’ 18 years in power. But the danger of southern discomfort was, if anything, greater two decades later; with over two million more people living in the south of England compared to when Radice penned his original pamphlet and a million more people compared to the 2001 election. Indeed, outside London, the south-east, east and south-west are the fastest-growing regions in the country.
Rather than the Tories’ lack of appeal consigning them to the opposition benches, it was Labour which was hit by a double-whammy last Thursday. In the north, the Tory vote proved resilient enough to limit Labour’s gains and prevent the party picking up seats such as Morecambe and Lunesdale, Carlisle, Weaver Vale and Warrington South that were at the top of its target list in the north-west and Pudsey, Keighley and Elmet and Rothwell which it had hoped to gain in Yorkshire. Indeed, across the north the Tories managed to offset their handful of losses with gains from Labour in Morley and Outwood and Bolton West and from the Liberal Democrats in Cheadle, Hazel Grove and Berwick-upon-Tweed. In the south outside London, Labour made a solitary gain from the Tories in Hove, while losing Southampton Itchen and Plymouth Moor View, and failing to pick up any of its other Conservative held targets seats.
If the Tories’ failure to win in the north would not stop them winning, we were told, Ukip’s attack on their right flank would peel off enough voters to scupper their chances. Just as a split on the left supposedly helped keep the Tories in power during the 1980s, so a split on the right would now benefit Labour. This, of course, ignored the mounting evidence through the last parliament that Ukip also posed a serious threat to Labour.
In reality, the results suggest that Ukip may have done as much damage to Labour as it did to the Tories, especially in the north of England and the Midlands. As Stephen Fisher wrote in an early analysis of the results:
Actually it seems that the Ukip rise hurt Labour more than the Tories. Where Ukip were up by less than seven points the Conservatives were up by 1.5 points on average; Labour up 6.9. Conversely, where Ukip was up by more than 14 points the Conservatives down 0.9 points and Labour were up only 1.6. So Labour were up 5.3 less where Ukip did well but the corresponding difference for the Conservatives was just 0.6. Another way of looking at this is that the Tories lost six seats to Labour where Ukip were up less than 7 points. But Labour was not taking any seats off the Conservatives where Ukip was up by more than 14 points.
Indeed, an examination of the results in the north and Midlands by Survation suggests that:
Those Labour 2010 voters that moved to Ukip from Labour instead of breaking from the Conservatives were the deciding factor in many northern and Midlands seats. By taking disproportionately from Labour in these places, Ukip directly contributed to a series of Conservative victories, holds, and also to Labour’s failures to gain seats.
Beyond constituencies such as Bolton West, Bury North, Telford, Derby North, Weaver Vale and Morley and Outwood cited by Survation are seats in southern England such as Plymouth Moor View, Thurrock and Brighton Kemptown; Gower and Vale of Clwyd in Wales; and Croydon Central in London, where a strong Labour campaign came within 165 votes of wresting a seat from the Tories.
There was a further irony in this wishful thinking about the Tories’ apparent poor prospects. Even after he had routed them on three occasions – twice with triple-figure majorities – Tony Blair constantly warned about the threat the Tories posed. As he put it in his first address to the Labour party conference as prime minister, four months after the Conservatives had been reduced to their lowest share of the vote since the Great Reform Act of 1832, ‘No cockiness about the Tories. They’re sleeping. Not dead.’
Had Labour reacted to an election in 2010 in which it had won two million fewer votes and nearly 50 less seats than the Tories with the kind of caution Blair displayed on each of the occasions on which he beat them, the party may have avoided at least some of the damage it sustained last Thursday.
Superfluous Tory switchers
If Labour was unduly sanguine about the Tories’ inability to win, it was also remarkably blasé about whether those who voted Conservative in 2010 supported it or not.
Even before Nick Clegg had sealed his fatal pact with David Cameron in 2010, the Fabian Society confidently predicted that this would be ‘an electoral gift’ for Labour: the perfidy of the Liberal Democrats would allow Labour to unite the centre-left vote with little need to attract the support of those swing voters who backed Labour under Blair but deserted it for the Tories in 2010. Two years later, the Fabians’ general secretary, Andrew Harrop, reiterated this line. Analysing ‘Ed’s converts’ – voters supporting the party who did not vote Labour in 2010 – he wrote that they were ‘distinctly left-leaning’: three-quarters were Liberal Democrats while only six per cent had been won from the ranks of those who voted Tory in 2010. Harrop concluded: ‘With the “uniting” of the left behind Labour it therefore becomes possible to imagine a Labour majority without a “new Labour” appeal to lots of those famous swing voters who choose between Labour and the Conservatives at each election … All Ed Miliband would need to do to win would be to keep the very modest number of former Tory supporters who have already switched to Labour.’
As the newly elected MP for Enfield North, Joan Ryan, warned three years ago, the so-called ‘35 per cent strategy’ – which aimed to push Labour over the top with the votes of disgruntled Liberal Democrats – was fatally flawed. She argued that Labour should not be looking at the number of Liberal Democrat voters in each constituency per se, but the Liberal Democrat switchers – those who had voted Labour in 1997 but backed Clegg in 2010. Her premise was that those who had not been willing to support Labour in 1997 to end 18 years of Tory government and, even faced with the prospect of Cameron in Downing Street, had still voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 were highly unlikely ever to support Labour. On that basis, even if Labour had been able to win back every single ex-Labour voter who supported the Liberal Democrats in 2010, it would still have managed to win only 38 of the 83 seats among its top 100 targets which were won by the Tories in 2010. Moreover, Ryan suggested, although there were a few Labour-Tory marginals – the likes of Hendon, Thurrock and Weaver Vale – which, in theory, might fall if Liberal Democrat ‘switchers’ could be brought back to Labour, such a strategy was ‘extremely risky’, relying as it did on a small pool of voters and a very high conversion rate.
The 35 per cent strategy may have helped deliver Labour 12 seats which were held by the Liberal Democrats until last week but, as is now painfully obvious, those seats left the party far short of being the largest party, let alone winning a majority. This has nothing to do with Labour’s implosion in Scotland: even if the party had held all of the 41 seats it was defending, it would still have failed to become the largest party, holding 272 seats – one more than Neil Kinnock won in 1992 – to the Tories’ 331.
In the ashes of Ed Miliband’s failed strategy lay the dozens of Labour-Tory marginals which the party failed to win back. While Labour pulled off some notable victories in London and made five gains overall in the north-west, it took only one seat from the Tories in southern England, lost eight seats to them overall (nearly cancelling out the 10 it gained), and is now facing even bigger Conservative majorities in the likes of Hendon, Harlow, Hastings and Rye, and Halesowen and Rowley Regis, where it hoped to elect Labour MPs only a week ago.
The shifting centre-ground
A constant refrain over the past five years has been the notion that, in the wake of the financial crisis, the political centre-ground has moved to the left. This was a highly expedient fiction: it allowed the party to avoid some tough choices by simply proclaiming they no longer existed. It is true that voters may be angry at bankers or concerned about inequality in a way that they were not during much of Labour’s time in government when the economy was booming.
But the notion that these sentiments signalled a wholesale leftward shift in public opinion was a false one. As the most recent British Social Attitudes survey suggests, the political centre-ground has tracked to the left since the 2010 general election. There is nothing usual about this phenomenon: as the BSA explains: ‘The political centre invariably moves against the government of the day. Beginning in 1964, the average left-right position generally tracked rightwards until 1980, the year after Margaret Thatcher came to power. The public then gradually moved left-during the 1980s and remained there for the duration of the Major premiership. The mood shifted rightwards from 1997 under New Labour and then left under the coalition.’
But where had the centre-ground shifted to? The claim of the proponents of the shifting centre-ground delusion was that the leftward shift they had supposedly detected would allow Labour to break free of the alleged timidity of the New Labour years. That claim is somewhat undermined by the fact that the BSA placed the political centre at roughly the point it was located in 2006. Moreover, underneath this apparent shift lay some rather unsettling conclusions for a party which appeared to believe the country wanted a more leftwing policy agenda. Take, for instance, attitudes towards public spending, taxes and welfare revealed in this year’s BSA survey:
After falling from 63 per cent in 2002 to 32 per cent in 2010, the proportion of the public who want to see higher taxes to pay for more spending on health, education and social benefits had only increased slightly to 37 per cent.
Only 30 per cent wanted to see more government spending on welfare benefits – a proportion only marginally higher than the 27 per cent who backed that view in 2009 and just half the proportion (61 per cent) that did so in 1989.
Nearly three-quarters of the public endorsed the government’s benefits cap, while only 44 per cent of Labour supporters believed that more should be spent on welfare, while 50 per cent believed the unemployed could find a job if they wanted one.
Leadership and economic competence
It is a near-inviolable law of politics that no party can win a general election if it is behind on both its ability to run the economy and leadership. Some appeared to believe, however, that this was a law Labour could break. They reminded us that Margaret Thatcher was less popular than Jim Callaghan when she won the 1979 election and that Labour lagged behind the Tories on the economy in both 1964 and 1997. All of these things were true.
However, as Peter Kellner of YouGov pointed out on a number of occasions: ‘I can find no example of a party losing an election when it is ahead on both leadership and economic competence.’ He also repeatedly attempted to debunk the comforting myths about 1979 and 1997. In 1997, for instance, Blair held a double-digit lead over John Major on who voters would prefer to see as prime minister and, while Labour was behind on running the economy, the party led on each of the top six issues (albeit narrowly on two of them). As Kellner wrote in June 2014: ‘Today, the economy is by far the bigger issue, and the Tories enjoy a bigger and more sustained lead than they did in 1997 – and now it is Cameron who enjoys a double-digit lead over Miliband.’
Labour was unable or unwilling to address the issue of its leader’s poor ratings – a year before the election, for instance, Miliband had, at -39 per cent, a lower net satisfaction rating than Nick Clegg and, in its final election poll Ipsos MORI found that, despite the supposed rise in his popularity during the campaign, he still trailed Cameron by 15 points as the most capable prime minister – and remained stubbornly behind on the economy. Its response was to attempt to change the subject, arguing that its leads on creating jobs and raising living standards outweighed its huge deficit on economic competence.
The delusion that it could sidestep its problems on economic competence and leadership spoke to a wider Labour problem. All parties naturally attempt to play to their strengths, but Labour appeared blind to the need to address its weaknesses, seeming to pin its hopes on a relentless focus on issues such as the NHS, the bedroom tax, zero-hours contracts and the minimum wage. Its promises during the campaign to ‘balance the books and cut the deficit every year’ were late and unconvincing having never been part of its core narrative. More importantly, its pledges on cutting spending were easy to dismiss given the lack of detail it had provided. By contrast, while Tory claims to be the ‘party of the workers’ may have appeared somewhat implausible, the barrage of announcements the party made during the campaign – on increasing NHS spending, providing more childcare and building more homes – at least suggested an effort to address issues it lagged behind Labour on and step outside its comfort zone.
Miliband’s defenders would no doubt argue that his repeated mantra of ‘we got it wrong on immigration’ showed a willingness to engage with his party’s supposed weaknesses. But, starting with the 2010 leadership election, the singling out of the issue of immigration, in fact, represented an attempt to avoid more difficult questions on, for instance, spending, welfare and public service reform. Indeed, beyond cack-handed gimmicks like its ‘controls on immigration’ mugs and some unpleasant rhetoric about ensuring public service workers speak English, the issue of immigration largely led Labour back into its comfort zone with a (entirely sensible) package of measures designed to tackle the exploitation of cheap labour.
Back to business?
New Labour won strong support from leading businessmen and women in each of its successful general election campaigns. 1997 saw the party winning its first significant business backing in a generation, and screened a party political broadcast featuring its prominent business endorsers, while in 2001 and 2005 it managed to organise letter to the Times and Financial Times signed by around 60 business leaders. But in 2010 Labour was unable to muster a response when a group of business leaders sent a letter to the Daily Telegraph backing the then Conservative opposition’s plans to stop rises in national insurance contributions.
While some argued that winning the backing of some of those who run the country’s leading companies and employ thousands of workers might help Labour to rebuild its shattered reputation for economic confidence, others suggested that not only had the post-financial crisis drop in public trust in business made such an approach redundant, that there was also something ‘old school’ and ‘out of date’ about it. Instead, the shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, suggested a new test: that Labour should be ‘in tune with and engaged with the majority of businesses in this country which are not big massive businesses’.
Labour’s attempt to proclaim itself the party of small business and entrepreneurs may have had more credibility had it been able to counter the Tories’ inevitable barrage of letters to the newspapers from captains of industry with endorsements from those running start-ups and SMEs. Instead, it responded to the Conservatives with a letter featuring only a handful of business people, an actor, feminist writer and theatre director.
…
The neck-and-neck opinion polls and Miliband’s competent performance during the election campaign made the shock of Labour’s defeat akin to 1992. But the catastrophe which befell the party last week is worse than that which it suffered at the hands of John Major – not simply in terms of votes and seats or the fact that in 1992 it, rather than the Tories, was – albeit too slowly – advancing. In 1992, the project of modernisation was already under way: it may not have gone far enough, but Labour’s leadership was already aware of, and had begun to tackle, the hard realities their party faced.
Over the past five years, however, a politics of delusion has been allowed to flourish and grow. The New Labour ‘playbook’ was joyfully ripped up and the rules which govern how parties win elections were declared obsolete. Those rules are not complicated: take the threat posed by your opponents seriously; attempt to win votes off of the only other party which might realistically form a government; do not indulge in wishful thinking about where the centre-ground of British politics lies; tackle your weaknesses; and recognise that your claim to economic competence is strengthened in the mind of the voters if you can convince those running businesses both big and small to support your claim. Labour has paid a heavy price for believing it could twist, break and ignore all of these rules.
In the 1980s, the hard left proclaimed: ‘no compromise with the electorate.’ Since 2010, the cry of the adherents of the politics of delusion has been no less destructive: ‘no compromise with reality.’
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Robert Philpot is a contributing editor to Progress