Why did Labour Lose – and How Do We Win Again? Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP Progress is an organisation of Labour party members which aims to promote a radical and progressive politics for the 21st century. We seek to discuss, develop and advance the means to create a more free, equal and democratic Britain, which plays an active role in Europe and the wider the world. Diverse and inclusive, we work to improve the level and quality of debate both within the Labour party, and between the party and the wider progressive communnity. Honorary President Rt Hon Alan Milburn MP Chair Stephen Twigg MP Vice Chairs Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP, Chris Leslie MP, Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, Baroness Morgan of Drefelin, Meg Munn MP Patrons Rt Hon Douglas Alexander MP, Wendy Alexander MSP, Ian Austin MP, Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP,Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP, Rt Hon John Denham MP, Parmjit Dhanda, Natascha Engel MP, Lorna Fitzsimons, Rt Hon Peter Hain MP, Rt Hon John Healey MP, Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MP, Rt Hon Beverley Hughes, Rt Hon John Hutton, Rt Hon Baroness Jay, Baroness Jones, Rt Hon Sadiq Khan MP, Oona King, Rt Hon Baroness Kinnock, Rt Hon David Lammy MP, Cllr Richard Leese, Rt Hon Lord Mandelson, Rt Hon Pat McFadden MP, Rt Hon David Miliband MP, Trevor Phillips, Baroness Prosser, Rt Hon James Purnell, Jane Roberts, Lord Triesman, Kitty Ussher Secretary Cllr Patrick Diamond Director Robert Philpot Deputy Director Richard Angell Editorial and Website Manager Adam Harrison Events and Membership Manager Mark Harrison Published by Progress 83 Victoria Street, London SW1H 0HW Tel: 020 3008 8180 Fax: 020 3008 8181 Email: [email protected] www.progressonline.org.uk p. 1 Why did Labour Lose – and How Do We Win Again? Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP www.progressonline.org.uk p. 2 Contents 1. Introduction 3 2. What happened? 6 3. What next? 17 4. Conclusion 27 Appendix 30 www.progressonline.org.uk p. 3 1. Introduction Why did Labour lose? What is the fastest path back to office? As Labour asks 4 million citizens to decide our next leader, candidates will need to prove they can work fast to learn the lessons of why we lost and what Labour must do next to win. In the election campaign, we said that we won on substance and lost on style. But the truth is on the doorstep it felt very different. Having talked to dozens of MPs who won and lost, a common theme is clear; our agenda was not good enough. The deep and wide Labour coalition of 1997 may not have crumbled. But it has cracked. For some, the Guardian said it all. We were too slow to transform Britain’s creaking constitution. We let the Lib Dems steal our mantle of radical reform. But for me the real fracture was lit up with spotlights in the PM’s brief encounter in Rochdale. Not for what Gordon Brown said to Mrs Duffy. But what Mrs Duffy said about Britain. When Gordon Brown and Tony Blair set out New Labour’s principles, they put work, opportunity and aspiration centre-stage. We said: play by the rules and you’ll get your reward. But today, too many families – working in retail, manufacturing, the service sector and construction – feel they’re working as hard as ever and just not getting on. They’re not wrong. My research shows workers on between £20-30,000 a year have now faced huge forces in our economy squeezing pay packets and the cost of living for at least five years. That’s why so many are so frustrated with welfare reform and immigration. www.progressonline.org.uk p. 4 These voters are the bedrock of our coalition. But their support for Labour has fallen off a cliff. In 2005, 43 per cent of C2s were Labour. Now MORI says it’s down 20 per cent – to just 23 per cent. This loss cost us seats. The group marketeers call ‘Blue Collar Enterprise’ makes up one in six of the residents in half the seats we lost. But, Labour also lost support amongst maturing families on mid-range incomes too. These are the voters that are vital to winning across southern and eastern England. Today, we confront a major challenge across the south of our country, redolent of the early 1990s. There are now just 10 Labour MPs in the east, south east and south west. Today, we confront a major They are sustained in office “challenge across the south of our by a combined majority of around 35,000 votes. country, redolent of the early 1990s. ” So the new leader’s first test is can he or she begin the job of pinpointing answers to how aspirational ‘modest-income Britain’ gets ahead in life in the decade to come? Powerful forces in the global economy plus fiscal consolidation will mean it is harder than ever before. But without a plan that renews Labour as the party of aspiration, with a new approach to jobs, tax and benefits, the minimum wage, welfare reform, skills and higher education, university funding, child care, social care, social housing and pensions, we will not again become the party of the majority, of the many not the few. We should take a leaf out of President Obama’s book. To tackle the same challenge for American workers, he created last year the Middle- Class taskforce to look, in the round, at the range of policy reforms needed to reconnect hard-working families better with economic growth. Labour needs something similar. www.progressonline.org.uk p. 5 The new leader’s second test is not policy – it is organisation. In Birmingham, we did well fending off a Tory attack. Gisela Stuart’s extraordinary triumph in Edgbaston will be one of the great memories of election night. In my own seat, we managed to put up the Labour majority. These results were not delivered by direct mail from on high – but by community campaigning on the ground. Not many of Gisela’s – or my – volunteers were paid-up Labour members. But they delivered a Labour victory. So, we urgently need a style of campaigning-led politics in our communities, led by local Labour politicians. We should see this renewal not just as a re-invention of organisation but as a bold statement of our determination to be the party of community and responsibility in modern Britain. Success will demand reaching out to the civic activists and social entrepreneurs who share our appetite to make a difference on the ground. Canvassing is not enough any more. Community campaigning means bringing progressive people together to battle for local change, in some of the ways the Local Action Network (www.localactionnetwork.org.uk) is trying to showcase. That means going back to the organising traditions that gave birth to the Labour party over a century ago, where the ballot box was only one of the ways we made change happen. It is a recognition that stronger sinews of community life are essential not only to winning office, but to changing modern society for the better. Every MP I’ve spoken to found no love for the Tories on the doorstep. Lots of people knew what Labour had done for them: low interest rates, tax credits, better pensions, decent schools and a transformed NHS. But voters want to know what’s next. This country is immeasurably fairer and stronger for Gordon Brown’s extraordinary political life. Our tribute must be to learn lessons fast and get back out there and win again. www.progressonline.org.uk p. 6 2. What Happened? The headline results in 2010 were sobering enough. We lost almost a million votes on our 2005 performance; 97 seats fell. Just 258 Labour MPs won – 13 less than in 1992. Perhaps the bluntest way of inspecting the damage is to assess what happened to the wide and deep coalition that powered New Labour to victory in 1997. The 1997 coalition The coalition of 1997 was not easily assembled. It was a long time coming. In a series of pamphlets between 1992-1994 called Southern Discomfort, Giles Radice and others,1 set out just how much Labour needed to change after its fourth election defeat in 1992. The conclusions were stark; ‘Labour’, wrote Giles Radice in 1992, ‘suffers from a crippling political weakness.’ Labour was behind amongst the critical C1 and C2 sections which made up 51 per 1. Southern Discomfort (1992); More Southern cent of the population, who saw themselves as ‘upwardly mobile’ Discomfort: A Year On – Taxing and Spending (1993); and who, despite the growing recession, felt ‘let down by the Tories Any Southern Comfort (1994) 2 2. Giles Radice and Stephen but do not yet trust Labour’ – a party they felt didn’t ‘believe in Pollard, More Southern Discomfort, Fabian pamphlet go-getters’ and which, when asked, they associated with words like 560, (1993), p18. 3. Giles Radice, Southern ‘high tax’, followed by extremism, NHS, ‘working class’, ‘of the past’ Discomfort, Fabian Society 3 pamphlet 555 (1992), p10 and ‘economic mismanagement’. The south east had become ‘one www.progressonline.org.uk p. 7 huge Tory safe seat’ while in southern England’4 Labour held just 10 seats out of 177 outside London, of which just three were in the south east (compared to 80 in 1974). This, as Radice wrote, was a problem; not just in the south where Labour needed to transform its performance because of its huge bloc of 177 seats, but because winning the south would entail crafting an electoral appeal that would carry the ‘key seats’ needed for victory across the country.