Uncut « Labour Uncut

Sleepwalking to irrelvance, part 1

13/05/2011, 12:00:03 PM

by Lisa Ansell

After a year in which Labour believed it could be all things to all people, last week’s election result brought home the pickle the party is in. Gleeful delight over a Liberal Democrat implosion, and debates about a voting system many didn’t want or care about are fun, but Labour’s results show the British political map is being redrawn. David Cameron faced taunts that with deep seated anger at a Labour government, he couldn’t achieve a convincing lead. Labour’s problems are much much deeper.

With ‘Cleggmania’ long forgotten, the assumption that everyone fed up with the Labour party would duly return home out of anger with Tory-Lib Dem government were misguided. This should have been no surprise. Support in Scotland collapsed, and with it the support that would have facilitated the move to the left that many within the party yearn for. Those precious southern swing voters successfully poached by Blair have left Labour, travelled through the Lib Dems, and, dependent on which side of the fence they were on to begin with, have settled back home as Conservatives, or are cast adrift. Any gains to be made from anger at the government have already been made. Conservative support has consolidated, the Liberal Democrats have rendered themselves unnecessary. Cameron has a clear message, solid support, funds to fight an election.

Labour’s most secure support came from the north of England, where the perception of Labour as opposition to the cuts was the driver for campaigns. Towns like Barnsley and Oldham, where hordes of Islingtonites had failed to suppress dismay at the lack of facilities, while they informed residents that Labour was the only option for them. Towns where the inequality that Labour was comfortable with is demonstrated clearly, where Labour’s cuts are already hitting hard.

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Labour’s plan B: concede and move on, and more

13/05/2011, 07:00:33 AM

by Atul Hatwal

These are conflicted times for the Labour party. As the impact of last week’s election results has sunk in, two opposing camps have emerged.

On one side is the leadership and its loyalists. The official line is that the current strategy is working. In this interpretation, last week’s results were pretty good. 800 odd new councillors, an 8% increase in the national share of the vote and a Labour administration in Wales are indeed positives.

Not everything is perfect, ahem, Scotland, but things are basically going to plan.

On the other side are those unhappy with the current strategy. This is a big tent. In it, among many others, are Dan Hodges, Sunny Hundal and Rob Marchant and, based on his speech to Progress, Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary.

For this camp, last week was a disaster. At a time of unprecedented government cuts, Labour managed to lose the popular vote in both England and Scotland and virtually no Tory voters from the general election switched to Labour.

Plan A is failing and unless something is done soon, Labour faces a dismal return to the 1980s.

Cards on the table, I’m no fan of plan A. My own post last week puts me slap bang in the middle of the unhappy tent. But over the past week, reading the different despairing takes on Labour’s performance, one thing has leapt out.

There’s no plan B.

Not in the sense that we are doomed and nothing can save the party, but that the focus of analysis has been on why it went wrong rather than what can put it right.

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We must learn to make hard choices, or fail

12/05/2011, 05:42:56 PM

by Rob Marchant

There are four types of election result. Ones that are undeniably good. Ones that are undeniably bad. Ones that are on balance good, but look otherwise. And those that are on balance bad, but look otherwise.

The most dangerous, obviously, are the last. There is a risk that, like an alcoholic, you don’t notice, or don’t accept, that there’s a problem.

And, excluding Scotland, we had a night that looked good. We won back a bunch of seats in the English local elections and scraped home in Wales. A mixed bag, perhaps, but respectable.

Now, Scotland was clearly a disaster and deserves a separate post all to itself (let’s be fair, it seems a problem all its own, unconnected to Labour’s national strategy). Wales, again, is a separate case. As for the positive results in England, three possible explanations come to mind.

One: a vindication of Labour policies. It’s not. This one’s straightforward: we don’t yet, by common consent, have defined policies. Ergo, it can’t be a vindication of them.

Two: the first electoral vindication of Ed Miliband as leader. It’s not. That’s not because he’s not a popular leader: it’s just too early to say. And that’s for the simple reason that most of the population, outside the Westminster and party bubbles, will still have no idea who he is and what he stands for. That’s the reality of having a relatively unknown figure suddenly come to prominence. Therefore, this cannot be reasonably seen as a vindication of his leadership.

Three: discontent with the Coalition. The only reasonable explanation: discontent was manifested with the Lib Dems in particular, Nick Clegg reprising his now-familiar role of lightning conductor for the Tories.

However, we also need to be aware of the difference between, on the one hand, giving the Coalition a bloody nose; and, on the other, giving it its marching orders. (more…)

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The NHS doesn’t need Tory reorganisation, but it does need reform

12/05/2011, 07:00:43 AM

by Peter Watt

I am furious about the Lansley NHS reforms, but not just because of their well documented failures. We all know the arguments against them: another top down reorganisation, competition on price not outcome, cherry picking by the private sector and all that. The Tory-Lib Dem government is, of course, engaging in post-May 5 good cop, bad cop role playing in an attempt to dig themselves out of their hole. I have no doubt that their instinct for survival will lead them to deal with the worst excesses. The Tories, in particular, are rightly terrified of an NHS-led electoral backlash.

But right now, that is not what’s making me so angry. What is making me angry is the real danger that this row will set back the cause of vital NHS reform for years.

Under Labour, the NHS made some significant progress. We introduced choice for patients and gave them statutory rights about what they could expect from the NHS. A variety of suppliers were introduced into the health market and improved commissioning lead to reduced unit costs, greater numbers of treatments, improving health outcomes and shorter waiting times.

And budgets were increased considerably. In fact, you could argue that budgets were increased faster than the reforms could cope with. The result is that there is undoubtedly room for significant efficiency savings.

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Everybody is ignoring us, because we are weird

11/05/2011, 02:30:54 PM

by Anthony Painter

As Kevin Meagher noted on Uncut this morning, the canvas on which Labour is currently painting by numbers is wearing rather thin. A bit of blue, a bit of purple, some red, something of a strange colour called ‘new’, finish it off with a bit of a flourish. Stand back and marvel at the complete, er, mess.

In the meantime, the Conservatives emerge largely unscathed from their first electoral test since the general election. OK, they emerged completely unscathed. And Labour has spent the year talking to itself and in the seminar room (in fact, the last four years). Now the results of the experiment are about to be unleashed. There will be a deafening silence across the land.

There is a narrative of failure that has come to dominate: Labour became too statist, technocratic, detached, captured by the market; it lost its soul. All of this is true. But it’s not why Labour lost. The cause of defeat is much simpler than that. People didn’t trust Labour anymore. They’d seen enough and decided enough was enough. They wanted a new government and new prime minister. They just weren’t over-enamoured with the alternative.

But we are very educated people on the left. We read social history. We have consumed the political classics from Aristotle to Rawls and beyond. We have framed and conceptualised every single action of every human on this planet. We inhale public policy as if it were shisha. And you know what? We’re weird.

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Time for Labour to stand up for the hardest hit

11/05/2011, 11:30:38 AM

by Julianne Marriott

10,000 people are marching past Parliament now. If you were here, though, it would not be the march’s size that would catch your attention. Nor the distance; it will only really be a few hundred metres. Yet for many of those marching today, that short journey is more like a marathon.

And this march looks different too. It is slow. It includes lots of wheelchair users, people walking with sticks and others with guide dogs. Many are living with constant pain, on gruelling medication regimes, distressed by being in a crowd.

Scores of the walkers have fluctuating conditions, including cancer, dementia, arthritis and MS. Which means that many marchers can only be here because they are “having a good day”. Lots of people have a carer with them and wouldn’t have been able to come alone. They may have had to pay their carer, or they may be a family member, who’s had to take a day off work.

These 10,000 people are the hardest hit. Their incomes, independence and integrity are being systematically undermined. And today, a year to the day since that seven page initial agreement was signed, they have made a difficult and exhausting journey to Westminster to tell their story.

After the march, over a thousand people will queue for two hours to make their way into Westminster Hall. They hope that their MP will give them 15 minutes. And in that quarter of an hour they need to paint a picture of their lives now, and what effect of the welfare bill will have on them.

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Beware Labour’s rainbow warriors

11/05/2011, 07:15:41 AM

by Kevin Meagher

SO let’s get this straight. New Old Labour, in the shape of so-called Blue Labour, wants the party to return to its rosy red roots while new New Labour, in the shape of the soon-to-be Purple Bookers, wants the party to mix red and blue (but that’s old blue, not new Old Labour’s new Blue Labour blue).

Meanwhile, some of the old New Labourites remain green with envy at last year’s leadership result, hoping that Ed Miliband ends up in the brown stuff.

At the same time, old Old Labour sees things in black and white and simply wants to put clear red water between the party and the true blue Tories and their yellow Lib Dem sidekicks.

Have I got that right?

Labour’s efforts at renewal are starting to resemble a Jackson Pollack painting, with tins of political ideas hurled across the canvass.

But beware. The abiding lesson of Labour’s fraught history is that internal groupings have always been little more than artillery to support the militias fighting the party’s periodic civil wars (an oxymoron, to be sure, given the incivility of Labour’s periodic bloodletting). Their very existence is evidence of competing groupthink within the party, usually wrapped around titanic egos grappling for control.

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False choices about Labour’s recovery

10/05/2011, 03:00:41 PM

by Sunder Katwala

If there has been one thing that has been symptomatic of Labour’s struggle to find a viable future strategy for electoral success, it is the penchant of too many in the party for daft debates about which voters the party does not want.

New Labour began by building the biggest tent British politics had ever seen, and ended by worrying endlessly about whether appealing too strongly to traditional Labour voters or Guardian readers would kill the project off. Meanwhile, the party’s left flank fretted about whether the support of marginal swing voters stopped Labour being Labour in government. If those were the problems, 29% of the vote would have been a solution. Neither Labour’s traditional base nor New Labour switchers saw the point of having Labour in government at all.

Well, here we go again.

The latest daft question: if Ed Miliband and the Labour party want to win the next election, should they seek to win votes from the Liberal Democrats, or from the Conservatives?

Uncut’s own Dan Hodges set up this choice at the New Statesman.

On the one hand, there is the compass analysis. The compass crystal ball has not proved infallible in the aftermath of the last election, but it now seems to mean pessimistically admitting that Labour will probably never ever win again under first past the post, so must negotiate a way to power with the Liberal Democrats.

On the other, we keep the New Labour flag flying by treating the collapsing Liberal Democrat vote as a distraction to be ignored entirely, because the only votes that count are those won from the Conservatives.
Another senior Labour insider put it this way:

“Ed has a clear choice. He can chase after a non-existent progressive majority, or he can try to bring middle and working class Tory voters home to Labour. Or, to put it another way, he can try to win on his own, or lose with Chris Huhne.”

It would be difficult to imagine a sillier debate about “electoral strategy”.

Perhaps the one thing that everybody serious about finding Labour’s path back to power could do is to refuse this framing, and to laugh at anybody who tries to start this debate. Neither Neal Lawson nor Dan Hodges are right about Labour’s route back to power. (more…)

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Unfortunately for Labour, the voters are never wrong

10/05/2011, 12:00:41 PM

by Tom Harris

The late Jimmy Allison, legendary Scottish organiser of the Labour party, addressed the Scottish reception at annual conference in 1990, just a couple of weeks after I had started work as a press officer. “We won 50 seats at the last election, despite the fact that, unlike England, we have a four-party system,” he proudly told approving and slightly drunk delegates.

That claim jarred with me at the time, and I contemplated it for some months afterwards. There was an error in Jimmy’s logic that, as a new arrival at Keir Hardie House, I didn’t have the confidence or the authority to challenge. Our landslide victory north of the border in 1987 was despite a four-way split in the vote? Or because of it?

Last week settled the argument conclusively. While a dominant party could win seats thanks to the three-way split of the opposition vote, that no longer holds when the multi-party system the proportional voting system for Holyrood was designed to enshrine gives way to a traditional two-party system.

And Labour found itself the victim of a huge tactical vote against it, as former LibDem voters, still reeling from the guilt of putting David Cameron into Number 10 last time, switched entirely en masse to Labour’s main challengers.

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How many times must we lose for the same reason?

10/05/2011, 07:00:49 AM

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.

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