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The leadership contest is a total disaster for Labour

13/07/2015, 06:01:30 PM

by Samuel Dale

The leadership election has been a disaster for Labour. It is painfully clear that we are not learning the right lessons from defeat.

The spectacle of Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, charging headlong into the tax credit trap set by George Osborne, giving him the opportunity to keep hammering Labour as the welfare party, shows how deep a hole we are in.

Let’s be clear.

We lost in 2015 because we had a desperately unpopular leader who was not trusted to manage the nation’s finances. That’s it.

To win in 2020 we need a more popular leader than the Tories have with our economic credibility rebuilt. If we do that then we have a chance.

We don’t need a big debate. We don’t need to talk to Jeremy Corbyn about his views on Greek debt and Hezbollah. It doesn’t matter whether Liz Kendall has no children. I am not bothered if Andy Burnham is a member of the metropolitan elite. Or whatever platitudes Yvette Cooper is pitching this week.

Instead of debating fringe issues we should be straining every sinew to prove we can be trusted in the Treasury again. We should be comparing the candidates against their potential Tory opponent in 2020.

Once you have the fundamentals right then you can try and win the election with a string of policies to attract key voter groups. But that is for another day because the only thing that matters in this leadership election is the fundamentals.

We should have had a new leader in place by June 1 after asking ourselves the simple, questions about how to win. The long drawn-out affair has proven just as damaging as it was in 2010 when Labour’s reputation was trashed by the coalition.

That’s our lesson from defeat and we are not learning it.

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Labour can avoid a rerun of the wilderness years, but only if it modernises

26/06/2015, 05:54:25 PM

by Gareth Williams

Possibly the only redeeming feature of the Ed Stone is that it provides an apt metaphor for the Old Testament level of righteous anger Labour activists should feel. The fact that greater efforts were expended by party elites on debating what to do with the 8ft monstrosity in the event of a defeat than on what they could do to avert one, speaks volumes.

There are of course fundamental differences between the exodus from Egypt and the party’s utterly unnecessary exodus from electability. Labour will have faced 10 years in the political wilderness by 2020, rather than 40 in its literal equivalent. In the meantime, members and activists should channel everything towards preventing a slow-motion rerun of the election train wreck.

Decisions made over the next few months have incredibly serious implications not only for 2020 but 2025 and 2030. The party must make the right calls right now.

The independent variable remains the leader. A leadership candidate who describes the manifesto which took the party to its worst defeat in a generation as one of its best should give anyone who truly wants a Labour PM on the steps of Downing Street in May 2020 pause.

Perceptions early on matter. The factory preset Tory attack will be to treat every Labour leader as Lenin incarnate; we can ill afford giving them further reasons to. Tony Blair won on a platform pledging a minimum wage and a windfall tax on energy company profits – both sizable interventions in the economy – largely due to the political capital he had accrued from Clause IV and the wider modernisation project.

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Moderation and competence – the building blocks of political credibility

02/06/2015, 09:43:42 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Asked to sum-up his personal credo, the late political theorist Bernard Crick described himself as a moderate socialist. “Small ‘m’ capital ‘S’. Clever and apt, especially as moderation has always been a useful ally for the democratic socialist.

All the more so given the sceptical British distrust political grandiosity and anything that sounds too fancy, which is why Lord Woolton, the post-war Conservative party chairman, insisted on referring to Labour as “the socialists” during the 1950s in order to make the party seem alien and doctrinaire.

Yet here we are again, with Labour cast as dirigiste meddlers with their price freezes, rent controls and nationalisation in an era where people are, broadly, comfortable with consumer choice and free enterprise. Tread softly if you are to venture into this field. Alas, clod-hopping Labour chose to insert its size 12s into the bear trap clearly marked “anti-business”. It is a crude charge for a party, which, on closer examination, is equally committed to “maintaining the most competitive Corporation Tax rate in the G7,” but such characterisations are the stuff of election campaigns and the party should have known better.

Allied with the desirability for political moderation is the need to be credible. If Labour has spent the past five years carelessly forfeiting its reputation for prudence and restraint, it was actively reckless in disregarding the need to be seen as basically competent and trustworthy.‘Don’t Do Stupid S***, warns Barack Obama, yet the party did. Repeatedly.

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Labour: on the verge of a historic victory, or partying like it’s 1992?

08/04/2015, 02:50:35 PM

by Rob Marchant

The short campaign has finally kicked off. Not that that usually makes much difference, and particularly not when we have all known the date of the election for the last four years. Perhaps fittingly, no party’s campaign has so far exactly knocked Britain off its feet.

In polling, Tories and Labour have been showing as neck and neck for some time, with each main party in turn delighted when a poll says it is a couple of points ahead. But within any measure of what statisticians call “standard error”, these polls tell us little.

In other words, any difference of this size – a few per cent – could just as easily be explained by the inaccuracy of polling as a predictor per se, as by a meaningful trend. In this strange, Alice-in-Wonderland world where the tossed coin seems to land on its side, we have to make our judgements using less obvious, but no less compelling, means.

Turn, for example, to that more traditional signal of electoral success, the bookies, and the story is a little different. It’s true that they are – by a rather small margin – predicting a Labour minority government as the most likely outcome from a number of difficult-to-predict outcomes, but now look at the party with most seats. It’s the Tories, odds on, by a mile. The next PM? Cameron, odds on, by a mile.

Now, on the back of the TV debates, Labour has had a welcome uptick in Miliband’s personal approval rating, it’s true. But this really needs to be seen in context: it is rather the difference between the cataclysmic (-46% a month ago) and the merely bad (-29%, against Cameron’s -2%).

And there has also been a positive story for Labour in the English marginals, according to Lord Ashcroft’s polling. But the story in Scotland is the opposite: even if it might not end up quite as badly as the Daily Mail might gleefully be predicting, it will certainly be bad.

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David Cameron has made a massive mistake but Labour’s picked the wrong line of attack

24/03/2015, 08:50:59 AM

by Atul Hatwal

If the Conservatives win the next election, David Cameron has turned himself into a bystander in his next government.

By pre-announcing his resignation he’s dissolved his future authority with backbenchers, who will be more interested in winning the favour of the next leader, and shifted the media lens onto his potential successors. The question of when he will resign – because he surely won’t last a full term – will dog him each day and ultimately he will struggle for relevance. He’s condemned himself to a living political death.

In the wake of such an extraordinary unforced error, Labour’s chosen line of attack is that Cameron is taking the electorate for granted by assuming he will win the next election. It fits with Labour’s broader critique of him and in that sense is logical, but it’s also wrong.

Two of David Cameron’s greatest political assets are his double digit lead over Ed Miliband as the public’s preference for PM and the extent to which he personally outpolls his party.

David Cameron’s telegraphed resignation is the very antithesis of leadership; it’s the epitome of weakness and raises the likelihood that any one of a gaggle of unappealing Tories could be prime minister in the next Parliament. Suddenly, there might be some hope for Labour.

Instead of talking about arrogance, Labour should be recasting the leadership choice at this election as one between Ed Miliband and the dangerous unknown.

There are two aspects to this.

First, the message should be hammered home that David Cameron is about to quit on the British people in the next Parliament.

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Labour’s strategic priority must be to demonstrate how it will lead

23/02/2015, 05:52:03 PM

by Jonathan Todd

At the end of last year, I wrote on three reasons for Labour victory in 2015: brand, economy, and leadership. Let’s revisit them.

Brand

The Good Right – Tim Montgomerie’s campaign – understands the Tories’ brand problems. There has been a 7 per cent rise over the past year to 85 per cent in the proportion of people that see the Tories as being close to the rich. By having the likes of Peter Stringfellow along to a black and white ball and allowing Lord Fink to mishandle Ed Miliband’s questioning of his tax affairs, the Tory campaign appears determined to win over the remaining 15 per cent.

Reckless decisions over this parliament – the bedroom tax, scrapping the 50p income tax rate, and NHS restructuring – wouldn’t have happened if the Tories had been the Good Right throughout. To use the reported language of Miliband, they are “running out of runway” to turn around the perception before the election that they are “the party of the rich”. Given the Tory leads on economy and leadership, we might wonder what keeps them flat-lining at 30 per cent in the polls and the failure to address this perception is a prime candidate.

Economy

What could happen between now and 7 May to eradicate the Tory poll lead on the economy? It’s not hard to imagine scenarios emanating from Greece, the Middle East and Ukraine that have serious negative economic shocks. But would the Tories be blamed? Or the nurse that is held more tightly for fear of something worse?

When looking toward Labour victory, I wrote that George Osborne “overplayed his hand in the Autumn Statement, leaving bombs, unexploded since the 1930s, beneath the Tory campaign”. Have they gone off? Do you discern a widespread anxiety about what Osborne portends for the size and capacities of the state?

If such anxiety were deep enough to overhaul the Tory lead on the economy, we might have expected it to have done so by now. There is an argument – which Uncut has been preeminent in advancing – that if Labour had been clearer about how we’d go far enough on the deficit, the way in which the Tories are going too far would become more apparent and more damaging for them.

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It’s still all about leadership

28/01/2015, 11:29:47 AM

by Rob Marchant

For the last few years, Labour Uncut has been repeating pretty much the same message: the Tories will mainly fight this election on two things: leadership and the economy.

They haven’t disappointed. So far, they seem to have been talking about little else.

Thing is, at this point the argument over the economy is a difficult one. To the politically-attuned, the Tories may just be perceived – even among their own supporters – as having called their last Budget badly and overdone austerity. But among ordinary folk, the reality is that Labour is still not trusted on the economy and that this would tend to trump unease with the Tories.

The logic is not exactly complex: “Labour will borrow more” is the Tory attack line. Labour’s strategy is to reply with the economically correct, and yet politically inept, response that we will leave the door open to borrow, but only to invest.

As if the average voter is likely to distinguish between leaving the door open and doing, or between capital and expense accounting in their feelings about the two main parties.

As if.

No, it is largely too late to try to unscramble that particular omelette. Our economic polling is what it is.

So we turn from economics to leadership. Some things here, too, we can no longer do anything about. It is too late to play the statesman-in-waiting, or gain the support of those world leaders who are both politically like-minded and credible (a category for which François Hollande would clearly struggle to qualify).

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Some gloomy general election predictions

06/01/2015, 08:55:06 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The next election is not too close to call. Neither is it a contest where the current party system is under threat nor one where voter volatility renders meaningful predictions impossible.

There are excuses wheeled out by pundits and pollsters who are frit. Here are my predictions.

The Conservatives are going to repeat their 2010 performance and secure 36% of the vote while suffering a small fall in their number of seats to the range 290 to 300.

Labour will struggle to 32%, boosting its seats by 20-25 to the high 270s or low 280s and the Lib Dems will exceed their current polling to get to 16% with seats in the high 30s or very low 40s.

Ukip will under-perform their current poll rating to achieve 7% with one seat (Douglas Carswell) while the SNP will lose to Labour in Scotland. However, they will make some progress, boosting their representation by taking 6-10 Labour seats and reducing the majorities for most of Labour’s Scottish MPs.

This is why.

As May 7^th draws near, three shifts will take place in the way that the voting public go about their choice that will move the current polling.

These changes happen in every electoral cycle and are the reason that decades of forecasts of new settlements, moulds being broken and unprecedented uncertainty are usually wrong.

They relate to the nature of the decision that voters are making, the criteria they use to make it and how they judge the parties meet that criteria.

First, the way most voters perceive their choice fundamentally changes in the run up to a general election.

For the majority of the parliament, when pollsters (or indeed friends and family) ask about voting preference, the question is taken as a referendum on the government.

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Three reasons for Labour victory in 2015

31/12/2014, 08:28:22 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Tony Blair might be despondent about Labour’s prospects but all is not lost, there are three reasons for Labour victory in 2015: leadership, economy and brand.

Uncut has consistently warned about the dangers attaching to Labour’s poor polling on leadership and economy. The own goals and gaffes of Conservatives, however, open the door to these improving. Labour enjoys an advantage on brand, which is similarly assisted by Tory missteps.

If David Cameron’s party were a character on Thomas the Tank engine, the Fat Controller would be bellowing at them that they have caused confusion and delay. He’d be saying the same to Labour. Labour is not as popular or convincing as we would like. But Tory error is giving Labour the opportunity, should we seize it, to be marginally and decisively less unpopular and unconvincing.

Labour would be the least unpopular in the unpopularity contest that is this general election. Arriving in government in such circumstances would bring its own challenges. Not least as precipitous demands will be placed on whoever forms the next government by the UK’s fiscal position, underperforming economy and ageing society, as well as looming questions involved with everything from Vladimir Putin’s intentions to Nigel Farage’s staying power about our place in the world.

Someone will have a Labour plan for all of this. Charlie Falconer, perhaps. I think he leads Labour’s preparation for government work. If so, noting his chapter on delivery in the Uncut book, he should call Paul Crowe. The Hollande scenario that troubles Crowe must be averted. One way in which it might become existential for Labour is if UKIP establishes itself as the second party in much of northern England at the general election and then use the frustrations of an administration as disappointing as Hollande’s to further advance.

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Jim Murphy needs to be radical to revive Labour in Scotland

18/12/2014, 05:27:18 PM

by Daniel Charelston-Downes

Labour, according to the New Statesman, is now 20 points behind the SNP in Westminster voting intentions. This would see an almost virtual wipeout of Scottish seats for Labour and goes some way to explaining why Nicola Sturgeon was so keen to welcome the new Scottish Labour leadership with words of unity and collaboration. It seems SNP are preparing for, even expecting, coalition partnership.

Jim Murphy’s leadership has come at a crucial time for Scottish Labour. When Lamont talked of her despair at Scottish Labour being treated as a branch office, she hit close to home with all Scottish voters. London-centric politics is killing the main parties in Scotland and will take Labour down leaving the SNP the last man standing.

The moment Tony Blair’s name became sacrilegious in my household growing up was when he abandoned Clause IV. With Murphy using the language of the Clause, he is clearly trying to evoke memories of that kind of reform within the party and the wave of electoral success that brought with it. A rehashed statement of intent for Scotland is an attempt to move Labour into a ‘reformer’ platform.

However what Scottish voters liked about Salmond and continue to appreciate in Sturgeon is their lack of political machinery.

Where Murphy will struggle, and where his use of Blairite language displays a complete lack of understanding, is that he is viewed as the worst kind of career politician. He is straight out of Westminster. He has bounced from education, to the National Union of Students presidency, to think tanks and policy groups and now parliament. He has always seen Scotland through Labour eyes.

If Labour is ever to win a majority again they are going to need to gain Scotland back. The SNP are a much greater threat to the Labour party than UKIP are to anyone, they are doing a much more successful job of converting anti-Westminster sentiment into seats than any other British party.

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