How many times must we lose for the same reason?

by Dan Hodges

RIP the progressive majority. “There never was any progressive majority strategy”, a member of Ed Miliband’s inner circle told me yesterday. “People have misunderstood the game plan. We’re not going to be making some desperate appeal to the Lib Dems. We’re going to be saying to them, ‘you’ve been duped, wouldn’t you be better off on board with us'”?

The claim that Labour’s leader never envisaged marching up Downing Street with a crowd of exultant  liberal progressives is a touch disingenuous. “I want to see Labour become home to a new progressive majority”, Ed said in August. Labour must “earn the right to be the standard-bearer for the progressive majority in this country”, he repeated in January. “A yes vote would, above all, reflect confidence that there is a genuine progressive majority in this country”, he urged in May.

But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. One of the hallmarks of good leadership is the speed with which you learn from your mistakes, and if Ed Miliband’s immediate reaction to last Thursday is to extricate himself from his liberal progressive cul de sac, it’s a positive sign.

One of the few. “We just can’t believe it”, an exultant Tory MP told me, “We actually gained seats. It’s incredible”. Many Labour insiders reflect that view. “Don’t be fooled”, said one shadow cabinet source, “These results were dire. Much worse than people realise”.

The line from those around the leader is that while the solidity of the Tory vote was troubling, they still secured an important tactical victory. “We’ve torn away the shield”, said one. “The Lib Dems were giving the Tories  cover, and we’ve smashed them. Cameron’s peachy pink arse is exposed now”.

Whether the prime minister has indeed been debagged is an open question. But what is not in dispute is that this was the voters’ first opportunity to pass judgment on the coalition since the election, in particular the cuts and higher taxes that constitute their deficit reduction strategy. And in the case of the Tories, they gave a reluctant but clear thumbs up.

What appears to have been forgotten is that a key part of Labour’s strategy since the turn of the year was not just to undermine the cuts, but to pin blame for them fairly and squarely on Cameron and Osborne. That strategy has palpably failed. “When Ed’s guys were coming round the press gallery on Friday morning we asked them if we still had to describe it as a Tory-led coalition”, said one lobby correspondent. “They didn’t answer”.

The cuts were supposed to be Labour’s magic bullet. “What is remarkable is how quickly we’re starting to earn back permission to be heard. We’re only in the tenth month”, Sadiq Khan told Total Politics last week. “As sure as night follows day, we are going to see a collapse in the housing market, a collapse in support for the Tories and the return of a Labour government”, taunted Kelvin Hopkins at PMQs.

At least complacency like that is now a thing of the past. “What’s terrified people about the Scottish result is that it’s seen as being a precursor of what could happen nationwide”, said a shadow cabinet source. “We sat back, said ‘we’re not the Tories’ and waited for the voters to flock to us. Next thing we knew, Alex Salmond was the new King of Scotland”.

But though the complacency may be gone, one simple fact remains. When the party says that the Conservatives are cutting too far and too fast, people don’t agree with them.

As my Uncut colleague, Atul Hatwal, has identified, at the start of the year the government enjoyed a 17% majority among those asked if they thought that the way the coalition was cutting the deficit was necessary. By last month, this had grown to 28%. Similarly, in January, 41% of voters blamed the last Labour government for the cuts, compared to 25% blaming the current government and 24% blaming both. In April, it was virtually the same. 41% blamed the last Labour government, 25% the current government and 23% both.

Labour has placed our strategy for the economy and deficit reduction before the British people twice. At the general election 12 months ago, and at the local elections last Thursday. On both occasions it was rejected.

I understand the economic logic behind our approach. I also understand the political rationale. But the country doesn’t.

“We’re not going to give the Tories a big headline that says ‘Labour spent too much’”, says one senior Labour advisor. Fine. There is a legitimate case to be made for running up a deficit in the wake of the banking crisis. But the problem for the party is that not only are we being blamed for the deficit, we also seem totally oblivious to the need to reduce it.

“We’re planning a long term strategy”, said a source. “What people have to understand is that at the next election the deficit will no longer be an issue. We’re planning for the post-cuts narrative”.

Great. But if we don’t demonstrate that we have a coherent strategy for dealing with the fundamental economic issues today, we have absolutely zero chance of receiving a hearing tomorrow.

Labour looks like it may escape the progressive cul de sac. But it now needs a plan for escaping the deficit denial cul de sac as well.

Potentially, it has one. It’s called Ed Balls. Labour’s shadow chancellor is the only person who can bring about the shift in economic strategy required to change the terms of the debate.

“Ed would like a more flexible strategy, and he’d like to be more open about our past economic failings”, said a shadow cabinet source, “but Balls won’t countenance it. He thinks it’s a betrayal of Gordon’s legacy, and by extension, a betrayal of his own”.

He’s wrong. If Ed Balls were to acknowledge Labour’s mistakes in tackling, as opposed to creating, the deficit, it would not destroy him. Far from it. It would be the making of him.

Ed Balls is currently the most skilful and powerful politician in the Labour party. But he remains trapped by his past. Every attack on Gordon Brown is viewed as a coded assault. Any  criticism of Labour’s economic record taken as a personal affront.

Ed Balls can no longer afford to be so precious. And neither can his party. We cannot continue to bang our heads against the wall of the treasury in the hope that eventually people will realise that we were right and they were wrong.

We have made the argument the coalition is cutting too far and too fast. And we have lost it. Twice.

Now we need to construct a new one. Ed Miliband appears ready to show the courage to move away from the progressive majority strategy he held dear. And, frankly, he has neither the network, nor support, nor political capital enjoyed by his shadow chancellor.

Ed Balls, we know, has courage. He has loyalty in abundance. And a deft political touch. But does he possess the pragmatism to help steer his party through dangerous political waters?

If he does, last Thursday could prove a watershed. If he does not, it is no longer inevitable that night will follow day.

Dan Hodges is contributing editor of Labour Uncut.


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51 Responses to “How many times must we lose for the same reason?”

  1. Graham Day says:

    Morning Dan.

    The Tory vote held up because even more Tories than usual came out to vote, to kill the AV bill. Surely??

  2. Scott says:

    Did anyone see Polly Toynbee’s hilarious performance on Newsnight? She was on with some Tory Boy but managed to make him look good by comparison because she kept asserting that the ‘poorest’ parts of London voted Yes.

    Is she duplicitous or merely mad? The six boroughs that voted Yes – Camden, Islington, Hackney, Haringey, Southwark and Lambeth – contain areas of severe social deprivation but it wasn’t the council estates of Stockwell or Tottenham that turned out to support AV.

    We all know that it was the liberal professionals and young middle class urban colonisers who proliferate in the nicer parts of these boroughs who were enthused.
    Places like Hampstead, Primrose Hill, Highbury Fields, Barnsbury, Canonbury, Stoke Newington, De Beauvior Town, Crouch End, Dulwich Village and Clapham are stuffed with such people, as are the other four parts of Britain that voted Yes: Oxford; Cambridge; Edinburgh Central; and Glasgow Kelvin.

    Oh yes, and where was the place that missed out on a Yes vote by a whisker? Brighton.

  3. Simon says:

    “But though the complacency may be gone, one simple fact remains. When the party says that the Conservatives are cutting too far and too fast, people don’t agree with them.”

    Not true at all. The Yougov poll cited by Atul which finds the public think the cuts are “necessary” also finds:

    – 50% think the cuts are too deep (compared to 34% who think they are about right or too shallow)

    – 57% think the cuts are too fast (compared to 33% who think they are at the right pace or not fast enough)

    – and, while we’re at it: 59% think they’re being done unfairly.

    I think what Atul (and you) have done is to misinterpret the question on the necessity of the cuts as meaning that the public support the scale and depth of the cuts. The supplementary questions in the same poll clearly find this not to be true.

  4. Forlornehope says:

    Ah, we have principles, and if you don’t like our principles, well we’ve got some other ones. The only serious difference in UK politics is about the level of public spending. Labour needs to come clean and make the case for higher levels of public spending than the coalition is planning. Unfortunately that will mean higher taxes on everybody on or above median income. There are plenty of people on the left who like to think that there is a magic pot of revenue somewhere. If there was Brown and Balls would have found it and the didn’t. Let’s have the guts to make the case for a responsible policy of tax and spend. The country needs and deserves it; everything else is just hot air.

  5. simon b says:

    Balls has loyalty. is that why his drinking buddy damien laughably became ‘Mr McBride’ overnight when his hideous activities were exposed?

    balls is loyal to his own ambition. nothing more or less.
    and the chances of him admitting he was the major architect of many of the borrow till the credit card explodes policies that led us to the fiscal train wreck we have is the same as brown coming out and admitting teaching car mechanics at a technical school is not the best preparation for running a national economy.

  6. Andrew says:

    Dan Hodges sounds like he is in the wrong party – as in fact does Ed Balls.

  7. Jim says:

    Hmm. Shadow Chancellor gets up and says ‘Everything my predecessor did was wrong, and the reason we are in the deep doo-doo today. Despite the fact that I was right behind him at the time, and indeed was the author of some of the policies, you should all now regard my super duper new economic policy and be amazed.’

    A reputation for economic incompetence is not easily forgotten. Ask Norman Lamont.

  8. FrankFisher says:

    Dan, congratulations, you are close to getting it. I have yet to read in the mainstream press that these votes are disasterous for Labour as a national party. Without Scotland, Labour can never again win a UK general election. I expect the pressure now will be for breakup of the union asap, and for labour to focus on merely surviving.

  9. dave says:

    Don’t forget that in 2015 the 40 Labour MPs from Scotland aren’t going to be there. Either they’ll be independence or a lot of seats are going to be SNP. Getting a majority in 2015 is going to be difficult with them no longer counting.

  10. geekparent says:

    Everything about this article is a major LOL.

  11. oldpolitics says:

    It’s really very simple. At this point in time, most Tory voters still believe that they have got what they wanted. They’re not angry with the Government yet, because they expected cuts. A few are angry that the Lib Dems are involved, but they’ll come to UKIP.

    Lib Dem voters are furious, and their return home to Labour meant a rising tide for both parties – so while Labour gained 350 seats from the Tories, they in turn gained almost as many from the Lib Dems as we did – about 450 – giving them an overall gain for the night.

    The Leadership strategy is quite correct; focus on making it clear that Labour are the only credible alternative, and attack the Tories on their weakest point. Must like “the squeezed middle” was a narrative ahead of events, the “too far, too fast” resonates with a majority of voters, but will only attract Tory swing voters when the cuts become something real happening to their services and their communities, not something being talked about in Parliament and on the TV.

    That happens from approximately now.

  12. Hampshire voter says:

    If Ed Balls is considered a key part of Labour’s answer to its current difficulties then I fear the Labour Party has seriously misunderstood the question.

    Ed Balls has two liabilities – 1) His history in government 2) His personality. Simply put, he is not a nice man and the voters know this.

  13. John Moss says:

    “There is a legitimate case to be made for running up a deficit in the wake of the banking crisis”.

    There is, but not for running it up in the six years prior. Wheras Lawson had a surplus budget in 1987/8 before the crisis which followed the Stock Market crash of October ’87 and its aftermath, Brown had his in 00/01 and 01/02. Then went on the spending spree. Six years of decifit budgets followed, adding £200bn to the national debt and £10bn a year to the interest bill. And that was before even Norther Rock, let alone Lehman’s collapsed. In the next two years the defict rocketted even further.

    In all, over 8 years Brown added over £450 billion to the National Debt, and over £20 billion to the annual interest bill. He ran up the Government’s overdraft, but he’s transferred it to all our mortgages!

  14. Ethan says:

    Well this reads like a council of despair. My opinion is that the Public want to see a lot more Labour contrition and apology for the Brown era mistakes, before they will take a risk on Labour again.
    As one leader said or should have said ‘Go back to your constituencies and prepare for a decade of opposition’.

    Secondly opposition. There are two kinds. Negative destructive ill considered tribal opposition (see Ed Balls) and you have that in abundance. But you should realise there’s another kind. Offering genuine costed well thought out practical alternatives -ie CONSTRUCTIVE opposition. I have yet to see ANY of that.

    I’d vote for the party of Frank Fields’ never ever for a party of Ed Balls’.

  15. john baily says:

    I think this an excellent and almost totally correct analysis of the situation.I am only sceptical of what is said about Balls.He certainly has skills as an attack dog but he can hardly attack his own legacy and I am not convinced that the word ” loyal” can realistically be used about him.

  16. Lola says:

    I understand the economic logic behind our approach. I also understand the political rationale. But the country doesn’t. Nope. The country ‘understands your [economic logic] far too well’.

  17. Scott says:

    I’m not trying to be perverse but in fact I’m less worried by Scotland than I am by England.

    1) Scotland is not rushing to independence; certainly not by 2015 and probably never. Check the polling data on this.

    2) Scottish voters thought, possibly correctly, that an SNP administration in Edinburgh will be a more effective bulwark against Cameron than we would be. They also thought, certainly correctly, that Salmond is a much stronger leader than Gray.

    3) Come 2015 (or whenever), Scots will have a straight choice for Westminster government. They are very likely to vote Labour (note: not ‘return to the fold’; that world has gone).

    4) Many places in England where Labour needs to win to come anywhere close to a majority stayed stubbornly Tory last week. Parts of Lancashire, the West Mids and SE England saw little sign of Labour advance. Gravesham, Ipswich and Gedling were excellent results but many others were, frankly, crap.

    5) The Thatcher-style good housekeeping narrative resonates with a lot of swing voters – lower middle class strivers who have been variously cast as Mondeo Men and Worcester women. To them, Labour now = incompetent spendthrifts. This must be turned around before we can win again.

    6) Redrawn boundaries will make out task harder. So will individual voter registration which will drive some poorer and more marginal people off the electoral roll. Most of them don’t vote but some do – and they tend to vote Labour.

    7) Ed. Sorry, but if you’ve been out on the doorstep you know he has not connected yet. The public are making up their minds and, well, fingers crossed.

  18. iain ker says:

    ‘Ed Balls, we know, has courage. He has loyalty in abundance. And a deft political touch’.

    *****************************************************

    Oh the comedy, the comedy, the comedy. Be still my beating heart.

    Speaking as a Tory, please keep Tubby Balls there, please keep Middle England Ed there, and please keep Mrs Balls there.

    And while you’re at it recruit Captain Insensible back to the Shadow Cabinet, bring back Damian Mcbride, and perhaps find something for Kevin Maguire (sp?) and Bob Crowe (sp?).

    And don’t forget to keep reminding the voters that the entire Cabinet are toffs.

    The UK could really do with a generation or two with TUCLabour nowhere near power.

  19. Jeremy Poynton says:

    The “progressive majority” exists only in the fevered minds of the remnants of the Left. They they can even claim to be progressive (after what Labour did to the the UK) is hilarious – that they claim to be a “majority” is pathetic.

    Lets have some evidence for this “progressive majority” please? Next you’ll be claiming that Laurie Penny isn’t a made-up stereotype…

  20. Jeremy Poynton says:

    “Ed Balls can no longer afford to be so precious.”

    Do you really think he is going to suss that NOW? He’s built himself a bunker, and pops his head up out of it now and again gibbering the same old nonsense he has been gibbering since he and the ArchCretin Brown blew the economy up.

    FFS. Get real. You need to talk to some folk who are fuck all to do with politics. Then you might realise New New Labour was stillborn, with a nonsense useless student politico “leader” to follow the nasty misfit you all just waved into Number 10.

  21. Mr Keith Majors says:

    Dan, you are seeing more and more why people are turned off by labour. They repeatedly say one thing, then when it finally sinks in that they were wrong saying that all along, they lie and claim that they never said it, then blame someone else.

    The AV campaign was a classic example of labour arrogance, childishness and wilful ignorance. Ed took the leading role in the Yes campaign, even to the point of excluding Nick Clegg from it. Then he childishly refused to share a platform with Clegg. Then when the Yes vote was overwhelmingly defeated, Ed’s people claim Ed was never really involved with the Yes campaign at all and the loss was all Clegg’s fault.

    All the reasonable and capable people who helped Blair win three terms have left front-line politics. Even they knew that there was no progressive majority and could only win by pretending to be tory.

    Debating with the left over rump of the failed and discredited labour party is like arguing with a six year old.

  22. Jules Wright says:

    There’s no such thing a “progressive majority” in the UK, waiting to be mobilised – it’s a left-wing fantasy given undeserved heft through the entrenched bias of organisations like the BBC and C4 News. However there is a “progressive” portion within the left; typically those that voted yes to AV – party activists, students, readers of The Guardian and The Independent, the liberal “urban colonisers” identified above, the Greens and most LibDems.

    Realistically, it is just a noisy “progressive minority.” In the real world, people just want things to work, see some reliable political and economic grip, be taxed as low as is needed to make the country tick efficiently and compassionately, for those taxes they do pay to be spent responsibly and accountably – and not hosed down the drain. And a lot of people would like a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty; not a referendum on an irrelevant, pointless and doomed constitutional tickle.

    Labour’s big problem is that the Blair experiment failed to stick; undone by overspend, the banking crash and Brown’s risible coda of incompetence. Miliband’s Labour – now in default setting – only cares about its own tribal core and cannot engage outside of its dogmatic comfort zone. Like it or not, it is in the same state as the Tories found themselves in 1997; out of office, disliked, untrusted; ignored; annoying; irrelevant, toxic in all but its heartlands. And in denial.

    It’ll be a long road back and should Scotland become lost to the SNP – a very clear and present danger if the wily Salmond plays his cards smartly – one that becomes impassable for generations.

  23. Jules Wright says:

    @Jeremy Poynton

    Spot on.

  24. Chris says:

    Yawn, tory sock puppets are so boring.

    @Dan

    You know we did actually increase our share of the vote from 29% to 37% in the space of a year. Voters who switched from Labour to tory at the GE aren’t going to immediately turn round and vote Labour in the locals, they’re giving Cameron a chance before making their minds up.

  25. Chris says:

    @keith majors

    “you are seeing more and more why people are turned off by labour.”

    Yeh, we went from 29% to 37% in the space of a year.

    “The AV campaign was a classic example of labour arrogance, childishness and wilful ignorance.”

    The AV campaign was run by the libdems.

    “Ed took the leading role in the Yes campaign, even to the point of excluding Nick Clegg from it. Then he childishly refused to share a platform with Clegg.”

    Hardly the leading role, he appeared a couple of times on Yes platforms. Ed didn’t exclude Clegg from the Yes campaign, he excluded himself when he thought he’d made a deal with Cameron for the both of them to keep a low profile – too bad Cameron thought different. The Yes campaign didn’t want much to do with Clegg either, he is a hate figure to Labour voters who made up the swing vote. Why do you think Dan championed the strategy of President Clegg?

    “Then when the Yes vote was overwhelmingly defeated, Ed’s people claim Ed was never really involved with the Yes campaign at all and the loss was all Clegg’s fault.”

    It was all Clegg’s fault. The whole referendum was his baby, his concession from the tories for joining the coalition, it was Clegg’s strategy to hold the vote on the same day as the locals within a year of joining the coalition when he would certainly be unpopular.

    “All the reasonable and capable people who helped Blair win three terms have left front-line politics.”

    Like who?

    ” Even they knew that there was no progressive majority and could only win by pretending to be tory.”

    Labour lost 2 million votes to the libdems, without them Labour can’t win a GE.

  26. Mr Keith Majors says:

    “Ed Balls, we know, has courage. He has loyalty in abundance. And a deft political touch. But does he possess the pragmatism to help steer his party through dangerous political waters?”

    Well he certainly is totally ruthless. The way he stabbed his own brother in the back and sacked the chief whip showed that. But he is not adept, nor is he in touch with the will of the people. He is also utterly devoid of policies or an alternative. He is also entirely negative in opposition and does not present the public with an attractive, or even slightly palatable alternative to Cameron, who is becoming more statesmanlike and stronger with every success.

    Ed Miliband, to his credit, was one of the very very few labour MPs to really understand how bad a thrashing labour took at the election. Protected by very generous constituency boundaries, many failed to spot that Brown won a million FEWER votes than John Major’s disastrous election of 1997. Labour were lucky that grotesquely unfair and unequal boundaries gifted labour an additional 93 seats, from a million fewer votes than John Major had in Major’s disastrous result.

    Had the constituencies favoured the tories to the same extent that they had favoured labour, then labour would have been lucky to finish the night with 100 seats.

    This should be a chilling wake up call to the tories to rebalance the constituency boundaries back to a fair and equal situation. Although I would not blame Cameron in the least if the boundaries are changed to actually favour the tories. They have been on the wrong end of a massively biased system for 15 years now. However, the plan at this stage is to re-introduce fairness and equality into the system, rather than turn the system into a pro-tory one.

    The scary thought that demonstrates how massive the pro-labour bias in the system is, is the fact that if Brown actually had got as many votes and a share of the vote the same size as John Major’s in 1997, then it is possible that he could still be prime minister in a labour/liberal coalition.

    Will labour stifle their instincts to lie and scream and shout about this “changing the boundaries to favour the tories” and prove themselves to be wholly against fairness and equality in favour of bias and unfairness and rigged boundaries?

    I look forward to them trying to argue that a system that gives labour almost a hundred more seats from a million fewer votes as being fair. That’ll drive even more of mumsnet into the tory fold.

  27. Chris says:

    @jules wright

    “There’s no such thing a “progressive majority” in the UK, waiting to be mobilised – it’s a left-wing fantasy given undeserved heft through the entrenched bias of organisations like the BBC and C4 News. ”

    You know, if you put tin foil fashioned into a hat on your head you can block out their malign and hypnotic influence. And didn’t guy in overall charge of the BBC’s 2010 GE coverage just leave the organisation to become the tories chief propagandist, or is that just another BBC/commie lie?

  28. Anon E Mouse says:

    Chris – Words like “Tory sock puppets” do the government’s job for them. Grow up.

    Dan Hodges – This article is bang on the money…

  29. Jules Wright says:

    @Chris

    You’re denial’s showing again old chap.

  30. Atul Hatwal says:

    The YouGov figures Dan cites and that I highlighted in my piece are the damning evidence here.

    Simon, without wanting to retread the brief discussion in the comments on my piece, Dan isn’t saying that “the public support the scale and depth of the cuts” with unalloyed enthusiasm.

    Politics is a choice between parties.

    Politically the key facts highlighted by the YouGov polling are that the public
    (a) believe the cuts to be necessary
    (b) blame us for forcing cuts like this through our profligate spending (note – I’m not saying this is factually the case, but where public perception is).

    On point b) no doubt most would also assign some responsibility to the crash and recession for the deficit, but when it comes down to the political choice people face in the voting booth, the fault for the deficit lies with Labour.

    Because we are blamed for running up the debt, we are not trusted to do what is necessary to fix the problem. So while the Tories are seen as unfair and over zealous, they are still preferable to Labour because they will fix the problem at hand – the deficit.

    That is why in polling across several thousand people by YouGov this year, support for the government’s approach to cutting the deficit has risen by 11 points – way beyond the margin of error.

    If the public were indeed closer to our position than the Tories, this would not have happened and Labour would not have lost on the popular vote in England last week.

  31. justice 4 rinka says:

    Balls is a gift to the Tories. As long as he’s in post, the Labour Party will never be able to admit it wrecked the UK economy, and until it does so, it won’t be able to apologise for it. Without a sincere apology there’ll be no hearing for Labour on the doorsteps.

    By the way, I loved the cynicism of “What people have to understand is that at the next election the deficit will no longer be an issue. We’re planning for the post-cuts narrative”.

    I take this to mean that Labour thinks the economy will be fixed by 2015, so they can get back in and wreck it again? Nice people!

  32. Dr Pangloss says:

    If Labour wants to rebuild itself, there are several words that it needs to jettison and “progressive” must be close to top of the list. It is “progressive” that got the country into this mess. The vast majority of Labour’s core sympathisers are not progressive, they are conservative. Hence Lord Glassman’s “Blue Labour” makes a great deal of sense in that it is trying to re-connect the party to things that people actually care about.

    P.S. I thought that Ed Milliband’s problem (apart from being “progressive”) was his charisma bypass. What kind of party leader campaigns against 80 per cent of his own supporters?

  33. Fubar Saunders says:

    Wise words Dan. You know what needs to be done. Really, they ought to be listening to you. Does the party have a death wish or is there really a smug “we dont need to ask anyone, we dont need to test the water, we know what we’re doing is right, we know what we’re doing is going to chime with the electorate”?

    Unfortunately though, as you rightly assert, some egos are far too precious.

    ……..And thats coming from a UKIP voter.

  34. Jeremy Poynton says:

    @Jules Wright says: May 10, 2011 at 12:23 pm
    @Jeremy Poynton

    Spot on.
    //

    ta 🙂

    @Chris says: May 10, 2011 at 12:25 pm
    Yawn, tory sock puppets are so boring.
    //
    Oh Lordy. How many times? You don’t have to be Tory to LOATHE Labour (though I will admit to voting Labour from 1970 until Iraq. Never again. Something very nasty happened in 1997, and I was fool enough to fall for it.

    Won’t get fooled again. Nor, it seems, will the electorate.

  35. This article looks about right, but its incomplete.

    Perhaps the deficit will be less of an issue by 2015, but debt won’t be. Since the public spending reductions planned will be far less than the headlines suggest the threat of paying of the Brown debt will still hang like a millstone round the county’s neck.

    The inbalance between public sector and those who pay for it has just grown and grown and is at breaking point. ( Just higher taxes don’t address this. ) Also the wider rebalancing of the economy will be an issue. ( Remember its Labour who were the close friends of London finance and the Scottish Banks – just look where the knighthoods went and the prawn cocktails disappeared. )

    At some point you have to face up to the fact that you were wrong. Very wrong. Perhaps even reflect on what allowed you to ignore reality for so long and just deny economic facts of life.

    What is the point of the Labour party anyway ? To ensure that everyone is broke in a country with a soviet set of public services that are there for those employed in them not for who they serve and run by Union barons who choose your leader ?

    Ed keeps changing his mind because he has no idea. You need to figure out if you have anyone who does and replace Ed Miliband as quickly as possible. As a Tory I’m of course praying you’ll chose Ed Balls.

  36. Jeremy Poynton says:

    A reminder on the word “progressive”. It is neutral in meaning. For example, who wlecomes Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. The Left have purloined the word, in the best traditions of Orwell’s Newspeak, and pretend that it makes them in some way “better” than all other parties. Indeed, it would seem to me that Labour have got progressively out of touch with the electorate, and progressively angrier with the electorate for not hearing their “message” (actually, we heard it loud and clear, hence the current status quo).

  37. Kirk Sloane says:

    What a surprise. Get a kicking, lose seats in Scotland to a centre left party and the response is that you’re not Tory enough. Can you even imagine a situation where the solution isn’t “lurch to the right”?

  38. Henrik says:

    I think I’ve just volunteered to become a Tory sock puppet. Odd feeling, that, the only political party I’ve ever been a member of is Labour – as a trade unionist and elected official in the NUR and NUPE back in the day and for a few years as an individual, until it was made clear to me by a local party that they thought Regular soldiers were baby-murdering Fascists who did not deserve to be Labour Party members. Don’t know if I resigned, stormed off in a huff, was expelled or just didn’t renew the DDM; in any case, I ceased being a member in around 1989, having been a member since 1972.

    Dan’s stuff is obviously very unpalatable to many around here, notably, I’d guess, to those heavily engaged in the theoretical side of politics, polling gurus and the like – Labour Stattos, as a more offensive person might call them.

    I think he has the right of it, though. The following statements, to my mind, represent pretty well the national mood:

    a. Labour are managerially incompetent.
    b. Labour are dominated by middle-class professional politicians who’ve always sucked at the public teat and have never worked for a living.
    c. Cameron seems like a nice bloke and he and George Osborne seem to have some clear ideas of what they want to do.
    d. Cameron thinks again when sensible, strong arguments are put to him and has changed his mind on occasion. We like this, it’s what we do all the time.
    e. Ed Milliband reminds us of the clever kid when we were in the Fifth Form. Bright, but somehow… odd.
    f. Ed Balls comes across as a pretty nasty piece of work. We don’t trust him, we’re worried by his association with Gordon Brown, who was a weirdo of the ocean-going class.
    g. We seem to be in a financial crisis and, as Labour had been in charge for 11 years when it started, it pretty much has to be their fault. Brown and Blair between them seemed to spend a lot of our money, but things somehow didn’t get better.
    h. Given g. above, it makes sense to get out of the crisis as quickly as possible. That’s how we run our finances, seems obvious that’s how the country should run its.
    i. AV? Seriously, man, who gives a fuck? Vote No and let’s all just get back to doing something interesting.
    j. Parliament? News? Nah, never watch it. too much shouting and smirking.

    I’ll bang my drum again. Will you people, for the love of God, please stop whining about stuff which has happened and start to generate some good reason why anyone should want to vote for you? Note here that ‘we’re not the Tories’ and ‘we’re not the Lib Dems’ do not count as good reasons.

  39. Simon says:

    “Dan isn’t saying that “the public support the scale and depth of the cuts” with unalloyed enthusiasm.”

    You’re right. He’s saying that “when the party says that the Conservatives are cutting too far and too fast, people don’t agree with them”, and cites a Yougov poll in support which turns out to say the exact opposite – that clear majorities think the government’s cuts are both too far and too fast.

    You can insert caveats to the polling, explain why you think other questions are more important, put them in the wider context of support for Labour’s economic policies, or last week’s council results – that’s all fine, and we can have that discussion. What you can’t do is cite a poll in support of a specific statement of fact, when the actual poll says the opposite of what you are claiming.

  40. Jeremy Poynton says:

    http://thecommentator.com/article/148/there_never_was_a_progressive_majority_polly_toynbee_is_queen_of_an_empty_realm

    What he said…

    Excerpt…

    One thing is for certain though, the “Progressive Majority” did not show up last Thursday to sweep away first-past-the-post and usher in a new era of politics. Thirteen million people, three million more than voted for Cameron, united to reject AV.

    What was telling was the areas that did say Yes: Oxford, Cambridge, Islington, Camden. Bastions of the liberal “intelligentsia”. These are the sort of places that you hear people use the word “progressive” with a straight face, but what does it really mean?

    People like Polly Toynbee use the word “progressive” to describe their peers who genuinely think that they are the good guys.

    Yet it is a fig leaf that thinly disguises the prejudices of a wannabee ruling elite and their desire to preach, nanny and raise taxes. They wander through the political desert trying to convince the Labour Party, or once upon a time the Liberal Democrats, to house them.

    Those who live in these bastions of liberalism, with their £1.5 million houses, second homes in Tuscany, friends with super-injunctions, double media incomes and kids at private school, think everyone must be as “clever” and “right-on” about everything as they presume to think they are. But if that is the case, why did this “Progressive Majority” not show up anywhere else in the country last Thursday?

    The obvious response is that these people are totally out of touch. If anything, there is a “common sense majority” in this country favouring lower tax, more freedom from the state, less interference in their private lives and fewer state busybodies: the progressives’ idea of hell.

  41. El Sid says:

    @Henrik – that was beautifully put, everyone in the Westminster village should read it and think hard about its implications for their political worldview. The next GE will be decided by which party reaches out best to the kind of people you describe so pithily.

    I’m sure plenty of people have seen this, but it’s worth including this reflection on what happens when you get Guardian readers aiming a campaign at other Guardian readers, and ignoring the readers of the Sun and Mail :

    http://www.liberal-vision.org/2011/05/08/the-humiliation-of-the-yes-campaign/

    @Chris
    I really don’t see anything to get too excited about in the move from 29% to 37%. That 8% came all from the LibDems. You’d expect to gain several points just because people tend to use local elections more as protest votes against the incumbent government, particularly one that is not exactly dishing out sweeties. More importantly, you have the the permanent protest voters changing sides after the seismic event of the usual protest party becoming part of the government, and the major opposition parties halving in number. Plus specific stuff like a party that’s always been strong among students, trying its hardest to upset that constituency. Student towns would have voted for Osama Bin Laden if he was wearing a red rosette.

    Like it or not, the Tories increasing their seats was a stunning result, and damning for Labour. Sure, the Tories will have benefited a bit from anti-LibDem sentiment, but you can’t argue that voting Tory is an anti-government protest vote. The firmness of the Tory vote suggests that the anti-cuts narrative just didn’t really work for Labour, what success they did have was solely the result of LibDem hari-kiri.

  42. Chas says:

    “Balls is currently the most skilful and powerful politician in the Labour party.”

    Really? Are you serious?

    Well if that creepy little cunt is the best you have, the Tories will be in power for a generation.

  43. Chris says:

    @jules wright

    Make sure you use extra thick tin foil, sometimes those sneaky commies at the BBC increase the signal strength – which can burn through the thin stuff.

    @Henrik

    No, except for j they are the mood of someone with a big anti-Labour axe to grind who reads the tory press and believes it.

    @El Sid

    “I really don’t see anything to get too excited about in the move from 29% to 37%.”

    LOL! If Cameron had managed that in 2010 he wouldn’t have needed Clegg. Going back to 2007 the last time many of these wards were up labour got a 27% share of the vote.

    “That 8% came all from the LibDems.”

    Yeh and from 97 to 10 we lost *more* votes to the libdems than we did to the tories, in many cases it was the lab-lib swing that won the seat for the tories rather than the lab-tory swing.

    “More importantly, you have the the permanent protest voters changing sides after the seismic event of the usual protest party becoming part of the government, and the major opposition parties halving in number.”

    Permanent protest voters? They’re the ones who draw nobs on the ballot paper.

    “Like it or not, the Tories increasing their seats was a stunning result, and damning for Labour.”

    It was a good result for them but their gains came from libdems as progressive voters switched to Labour gifting wards to them. Winning in places where Labour were third isn’t going to happen within a year.

    “Sure, the Tories will have benefited a bit from anti-LibDem sentiment, but you can’t argue that voting Tory is an anti-government protest vote.”

    Who is arguing that?

    “The firmness of the Tory vote suggests that the anti-cuts narrative just didn’t really work for Labour.”

    Labour aren’t running an “anti-cuts” narrative.

  44. Henrik says:

    @Chris: it doesn’t really matter who the public are listening to, from your perspective, if they’re not listening to you – and they’re not. Labour’s having a long and detailed conversation with itself, developing some amazing groupthink and being extremely nervous, for some reason, about starting a wider conversation with the electorate.

  45. SoryTockPuppet says:

    I agree Henrik is 100% right. It’s the Chris’ and their attitude’s that are turning your voters away.

  46. Aron Lippe says:

    Chardonnay swiggers! You don’t get it do you?
    Joe Voter didn’t go to Oxford. Joe Voter doesn’t live in Islington. Joe Voter cannot spell “progressive”.
    It shouldn’t matter that Milliband is Jewish, it shouldn’t matter that he speaks like someone with a nylon stocking stuck in his throat, it shouldn’t matter that he has all of the charisma of used Kleenex–but in the real world, outside of the narrow trendyville, it does matter.
    Joe Voter remembers the weedy wimp from his schooldays personified by Milliband and remembers the spiteful little bully who would steal from blazers in the changing room portrayed by Balls.
    Get real–people DON’T LIKE the current crop of Labour politicos.

  47. 45Minutes2Launch says:

    I left the Labour Party at the time of the Iraq war; didn’t vote for them last week and see the comments from Chris as pretty well indicative of the lack of coherent ideas from the Left. Can’t see myself returning to the fold anytime soon.

  48. BenM says:

    Labour made grievous economic mistakes but the Tories made much worse ones and are compounding them right now.

    Osborne hasn’t a hope in hell of closing down the deficit by 2015, that much is becoming certain.

    And millions of lives will be blighted in this fantastical rightwing attempt at overturning 100 years of economic history by trying to cut your way out of a depression when only stimulus will do.

    Labour needs to keep pointing this out. For every quarter’s growth target that is missed by Osborne is several billion on top of the deficit and the national debt.

    The noose around the Tories’ electoral chances is tightening and Labur must not let go.

  49. Amber Star says:

    @ Dan Hodges

    Politics isn’t a game. It isn’t about winning for the sake of it. Labour will never be in government again, if you & those who think like you, fail to learn that lesson.
    😎

  50. Amber Star says:

    BTW, Dan

    Since March, David Cameron has had all the luck.

    Libya gave him an external bogeyman to stand up to.

    AV was dramatically against the public’s idea of fair voting & David Cameron surfed that wave with aplomb.

    And the Royal wedding gave a splash of glamour & a further opportunity to call for everybody to rally around the flag.

    The economy, cuts & the NHS reforms have been pushed firmly onto the back burner.

    Everything has been in the Tories’ favour & they have just about drawn level with Labour in the polls. That must be very exciting for them &, apparently, for you.

    It opens the door to you having another go at Ed M’s team. Why not come out of the closet & tell us who you’d like to have as leader? Because, if it’s David M, that ship sank already.
    😎

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