Faced with two options, Labour should look for a third

A great debate is getting under way inside the Labour Party, over what went wrong in the British General Election. It is boldly, unflinchingly and resolutely facing up to entirely the wrong question.

Which path to the light?
The high road? The low road? Left? Right?
Or should Labour turn around and look for something else entirely?

That question is posed in terms of whether Labour needs to go back to its winning ways under Tony Blair, as New Labour, or take a more Left-wing stance, as favoured, some suggest, by his successor Gordon Brown. The Blairite view is that Labour turned its back on people with aspirations, focusing exclusively on the poor and vulnerable.

Staunch Blairite Peter Mandelson, popularly nicknamed “the Prince of Darkness”, has bemoaned the fact that under the doomed leadership of Ed Miliband, the party was instructed to get out there with the message that “we are for the poor, we hate the rich – ignoring completely the vast swathes of the population who exist in between…”

Expressing essentially the same objection, he said that “we were sent out and told to wave our fists angrily at the nasty Tories and wait for the public to realise how much they had missed us. They weren’t missing us. They didn’t miss us.”

Mandelson isn’t entirely wrong: those fundamentally negative messages would damage Labour. But as someone who also went door to door a little for Labour, I can assure you no one told me to present that view. There will come a time when Ed Miliband, gallant loser and therefore a figure much loved by the English, will start to see the sympathy flow back towards him and I’m sure, when that happens, no one will pretend he was against aspiration.

Equally, I’m convinced that neither he nor Ed Balls who, as Shadow Chancellor (Finance spokesman), was with Miliband the main architect of Labour’s defeat and even lost his parliamentary seat as a result, were opposed to wealth creation. They wouldn’t deny the entrepreneurs responsible for it the right to become rich in the process. On the contrary, I think they saw themselves as committed to wealth creation, as the only way out of the difficulties the nation faces, and merely felt that there had to be some better regulation of just what was permitted in its name – and that the rewards people took should reflect real contribution. Huge bonuses for bankers operating their institutions at a loss ought, for instance, to be curtailed.

The Blairites are at least nominally committed to the same thing. At most, there’s probably a difference in degree between the two sides: should the top rate of tax be at 45%, 50% or 55%? Nobody’s proposing the rate of the sixties, 97.5%.

Sadly, however, the debate is going to be about backing “modernisers” (read Blairites) or “old Labour” (read those closer to Miliband). Whereas it should, in fact, be about entirely other matters.

It’s true that Tory economic policy is inequitable: the richest have doubled their wealth over the the last ten years, despite the crash, while those least able to bear it are suffering devastating hardship. But the real issue is that it doesn’t even work. Growth is stuttering. The debt is up, not down. The pain of constant cuts in government spending isn’t being rewarded by gain in economic recovery.

The answer isn’t simply to call the Tories nasty or hate the rich. It’s to offer an alternative to the constant cuts. We’ve known since Keynes that austerity doesn’t work. And yet Labour’s answer has been simply to offer the same with some mitigation of its worst effects.

We should be arguing for an alternative to austerity. We need to communicate the message that there’s no better time to borrow that when interest rates are just about zero. If the funds go into stimulating the economy, more people will find real jobs. They’ll pay more taxes, and they’ll buy more goods. A virtuous cycle will be kicked off, where the economy starts to fix itself, and the need for further government borrowing goes down as tax revenues go up. Without soaking the rich – simply by the sheer organic effect of relaunching the economy.

But what that means is denying the premisses of the Tory argument. It means saying “the problem isn’t about how much austerity we should have, or where it should be targeted, it’s about dropping the policy altogether.”

Sadly, it’s the SNP in Scotland, the true victors of the General Election, who pursued that line, and not Labour, who lost.

If you haven’t already seen the election night exchange between famously aggressive presenter Jeremy Paxman, and the former SNP leader Alex Salmond, then you should watch it now. It’s a master class in refusing to accept the premises of a hostile argument. Without being evasive, you just answer “no” and keep saying it as long as you need to. Which makes the clip also a great illustration of how to deal with hostile media, about which Labour also constantly complains – though with a predominantly right-wing press, Labour ought to be used to it by now, and have learned to see it off as Salmond did.

When Salmond ran rings round Paxman
A master class in handling hostile media and fighting the right battle

Paxman asked what lay behind the SNP success and, when Salmond answered that it was Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, tried to needle him.

“You’re a very modest man, aren’t you?” 

Salmond, unfazed, replied “modesty becomes me, yeah.”

Later, Paxman tried to get Salmond to deny the SNP’s earlier refusal ever to work with the Tories.

“Is there any possibility of any sort of deal between you and David Cameron if the Tories are just a little bit short of an overall majority?” he asked.

“No.” 

“None whatsoever?”

“Correct.” 

“If David Cameron offered you full fiscal autonomy, in other words control over taxes in Scotland, you’d still say no?”

“He won’t.”

“You’re guessing.”

“No, I’m not.”

Perhaps the most telling exchange came in the middle of the interview.

“I suppose you could take some of the credit for the Tory triumph in England, couldn’t you?” asked Paxman.

The reference was to the campaign whipped up by the Tories and their friends in the press about the possible election of a minority Labour government, dependent on SNP support. The SNP was presented as a bogey man, and Miliband only contributed to the damage by constantly denying he’d ever work with the SNP – in other words, he played into the lie that the SNP was dangerous.

Salmond stayed calm and told Paxman:

“No, I think Ed Miliband should take the credit for the Tory triumph in England. I think he should have fought a totally different sort of campaign. If he’d fought the sort of campaign that Nicola Sturgeon fought in Scotland, then he’d be in a much better position this morning.”

Now there’s the key issue for Labour. Not should we be more like Blair, or more like Brown. Instead, can we find a leader who doesn’t fall into the other side’s trap but fights the campaign we need and gets us elected?

In other words, can we find our own Nicola Sturgeon?

A very British spaghetti Western: the good, the sly and the downright inept

I spent the first couple of hours after the BBC exit poll for the UK General Election was announced at 10:00 last night doubting its accuracy. I wasn’t alone: former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown publicly swore to eat his hat on live TV if it were proved right. Fortunately for him the exit poll did indeed prove wrong. Unfortunately, things turned out to be even worse than it suggested.

What? What? The Tories on 316 seats?
I couldn't believe the scale of the victory

The next hour or so I spent trying to adjust my mindset to a completely different outcome from anything I’d been expecting. For weeks – months even – we’d all been forecasting a hung parliament (no party with an overall majority) and weeks of negotiations to put a coalition together to govern the country. That’s what the polls were telling us, after all.

Incidentally, I don’t believe the polls were wrong. What seems to happen is that a small but crucial number of people tell pollsters that they plan to vote Labour. They may not even be lying. That may be their intention when they say it. But then they go into the polling station and vote Tory.

In my mind, these so-called “shy Tories” are people who feel they really ought to vote Labour, perhaps because they know it represents their interests. So that’s what they tell the polling organisations.

But the Labour leaders are not unlike the Tories: educated at similar schools and universities, less wealthy perhaps but still far wealthier than anyone on the median wage or less. In the loneliness of the polling booth they think about these two sets of people, both representatives of what they may perceive as a kind of master class. If they are to choose one such person, why not make it the one born and bred to be a master – in other words, a Tory?

The final batch of polls had the following standings for the main parties on the eve of the election:

• Lord Ashcroft: Conservative 33%, Labour 33%
• Ipsos MORI: Conservative 36%, Labour 35%
• Populus: Conservative 33%, Labour 33%
• ICM: Conservative 34%, Labour 35%

All tight. And all of them adding up to a total, for the two main parties, of 66-71%.

The actual result was Conservative 38%, Labour 31%. A total of 69%, but a substantial lead to the Tories. All it takes, however, to get there from what the polls were showing is a switch by about 3-4% of the electorate. That’s probably about the extent of the “shy Tories” out there, and they determined the outcome last night.

It’s against that background that I set my British Spaghetti Western, The Good, the Sly, the Inept.

First, the good. That has to be the Scottish National Party, the SNP, and its leader Nicola Sturgeon who had an excellent campaign – rewarded by a near clean sweep of Scotland. There was a time that we in the Labour Party would laugh at the Tories for having only one Scottish seat. Now the laugh’s against us: as well as the Tories, we too, as well as the Liberal Democrats, only have a single Scottish seat.

The other 56 have been won by the SNP. It has even managed to win the election of the youngest MP for 350 years, Mhairi Black, a twenty-year old student who has to fit in finishing her degree in the next few weeks, around taking up her newly-won position at Westminster. She unseated Labour’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, Douglas Alexander, in Paisley and Renfrewshire South.

Next, the Sly. This is the only prediction I got remotely right. The Tories are like the Sandman: get too close and you’re likely to fall asleep. Back in 2010, when they didn’t have enough seats to form a government, they approached the Liberal Democrats who then had 57 seats, to join them in coalition. The Lib Dems said yes, much to the amazement of many of us who had regarded them as a party of the centre-left, much more naturally allied to Labour than to the Conservatives.

We predicted that the electorate would take a terrible vengeance on them, reducing their numbers to a level from which it would be impossible to recoer for a generation. Even so, again guided by polls, most of us felt that they might hang on to 20-30 seats. In fact, they now have just eight. Some of the party’s biggest hitters have gone, including David Laws, one of the main architects of the coalition. The leader Nick Clegg clung on, but he’s leader no more, having resigned this morning.

And finally, the Inept. My own party. Our arcane constitution allowed the Trade Unions to foist on us a leader, Ed Miliband, who is I’m sure immensely likeable, principled, honest, decent and lots of other great things. But a no leader. He appointed as his Finance spokesman Ed Balls, and together they crafted a message to the effect that they, like the Tories, would impose a policy of austerity, but they’d do it more nicely.

Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP pointed out that this stance presented the British electorate with the choice between Tory austerity, and Labour austerity-lite. Not exactly inspiring.

Working to get out the vote around Luton, I had someone tell me that she had voted Labour, but against her instincts – she felt little confidence in the party. One even said that she might not vote at all, because Labour hadn’t cleansed itself of the Blairite tendency that took us into war in Iraq.

As Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon’s predecessor as leader of the SNP, last night told TV presenter Jeremy Paxman in a master class on how to handle aggressive questioning, if Ed Miliband had “fought the sort of campaign that Nicola Sturgeon fought in Scotland, then he’d be in a much better position this morning.” Indeed. Though he might also have had to learn to handle the media the way Salmond and Sturgeon do.

Well, that’s all in the past now. Ed Miliband has also stepped down. And Ed Balls was defeated for re-election in his parliamentary seat.

Crafted the economic policy that contributed to Labour defeat
And paid by being beaten himself

They always say businesses should hire slow and fire fast. Labour elected Miliband to the leadership rather quickly. It became clear soon after that he wasn’t going to inspire enough of the electors he needed to reach. But we fired him slow. It took four years for him to go, and the price for the generosity which let him have a go at becoming Prime Minister is going to be paid by a lot of other people, during five years of continued Tory rule.

Italian spaghetti Westerns leave you feeling entertained. This British one, on the other hand, leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth. I suppose it’s like the contrast in weather between the two countries.