How Labour Can Win The Next Election - @Damian_From Guest Post

In this article I explain why Labour lost the last four general elections and how the party can learn from those defeats to win the next election. 

From John Smith to Tony Blair

John Smith became the leader of the Labour party in 1992 and set up the Social Justice Commission in the same year to formulate socialist policies for a Labour government. Those policies were, in the words of the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, the “bedrock for the radicalism of the first Labour term after 1997”. The Commission’s report, which was published after John Smith’s death, sought to end poverty and disadvantage and create an economy that worked for “every citizen, in every community”. One of the poverty reducing policies in the report was the national minimum wage, a headline policy adopted by Tony Blair’s government.

As a result of John Smith’s leadership and policies, and aided by events, notably the collapse of the pound on Black Wednesday which badly damaged the Tories’ reputation for economic competence, Labour achieved a commanding lead in the polls and became a government in waiting. Sadly, John Smith died on 12th May 1994. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were the main beneficiaries of his political legacy. Thanks largely to a combination of Smith's legacy and people being sick of the Tories, Labour won a landslide victory in 1997, winning 418 seats, the most it had ever won.

The period between John Smith’s death and the 1997 general election is worth studying and is covered in depth in Lewis Minkin’s book the Blair Supremacy. During most of that time Blair focussed on party management and identifying and gaining central control over all power bases in the party. 

Who damaged the Labour Party?

Having gained total control of the party and benefiting from the electoral dividend provided by the legacy of John Smith, Tony Blair had an opportunity to transform the country and make Labour the natural party of government in the UK. It was not to be, the opportunity was wasted. While Labour did win the next two elections, in 2001 and 2005, victory came at a very high price. Between 1997-2010, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown lost Labour a total of 5 million votes and 160 seats, squandering Smith’s legacy. Brown won just 8.6 million votes in 2010 and lost 97 seats in that election alone. By 2010 the public was as sick of New Labour as it had been of the Tories in 1997. Even Labour voters were sick of New Labour.

Blair and Brown lost 5 million votes and 160 seats for a number of reasons. One was that Blair led the country into a war of aggression against Iraq and this precipitated a clamp down on civil liberties in an attempt to prevent blowback from that illegal war, an example of this were the repeated attempts to impose ID cards on an unwilling public. New Labour's authoritarianism jarred against the party’s positive policies such as increasing rights for minority groups, increased funding for pupils, Sure Start centres for children and paternity rights for fathers. The consequences of New Labour's foreign policy shifted the party right and detached it from the socialist based platform that had helped it win a landslide. The party also shifted right on domestic policy by embracing neoliberal policies like private finance initiatives (PFI), an extortionately expensive way of funding public services.

The contradictions caused by shifting the party right and disengaging from John Smith’s socialist bedrock led to New Labour becoming incoherent and unstable as a political party. No amount of spinning could hide the dichotomy or repair the breach of trust with the public caused by the Iraq war. This combination of factors ultimately led to a heavy defeat in 2010. The electorate simply did not understand what the Labour party stood for. It was bemused by a left-wing party being right wing. If people wanted a right-wing party they already had the option of voting Tory.

Repairing the damage

Ed Miliband made modest gains in 2015 but lost 26 seats and made no real progress. It was not until a socialist was elected leader and presented voters with a socialist manifesto that the Labour party made sense to the electorate again and they understood exactly what the party represented. There were no mixed messages. That clear understanding and the party’s socialist policies were self-evidently welcomed by the electorate. Under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn the party won 12.9m votes and recorded its highest vote share increase since 1945. It is a rarely reported fact that Corbyn, a socialist, won more votes and gained more seats than any other Labour leader this century.

The vote share increase under Corbyn’s leadership was highly problematic for people in Labour who call themselves centrists. The term centrist is misleading, centrists do in fact hold mostly right-wing positions. Since 1997, despite the party winning a landslide on the bedrock of John Smith’s socialist programme, centrists had insisted the party could only be successful from the centre and not from the left. Corbyn proved their orthodoxy to be false. Corbyn won more votes in England and 3.3 million more votes in 2017 than Blair won in 2005. The election results of this century clearly show Labour loses votes when it shifts right and wins votes when it shifts left. The result of the 2019 election being the exception. That election was about one issue: Brexit.

How Labour was sabotaged

Rather than accept their centrist orthodoxy was false and obsolete, Labour centrists, incited by Tony Blair, sabotaged the election of a socialist Labour government in 2017. Corbyn needed just 2,227 votes across 13 constituencies to be invited by the Queen to form his government. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that if Blair and his supporters had not persistently briefed against the party and discouraged people from voting for Labour then Jeremy Corbyn would be prime minister today.

It is now generally accepted that the main contributory factor of the defeat at the 2019 general election was the current leader Keir Starmer insisting the party support a second referendum and campaign to remain in the EU. By doing so he cast Boris Johnson as a defender of democracy and allowed him to leverage the 17.4 million leave votes from the 2016 referendum. It was always obvious that defying the 65% of constituencies which voted to leave the EU would guarantee defeat for Labour.

How Labour can win the next election

Having reviewed the period between 1992-2005 and having also examined the results of the four most recent general elections, it is clear that Labour loses votes when it shifts right and gains votes when it runs on a left-wing platform and its messaging is coherent and clear. Keir Starmer is shifting the party right and, like New Labour in its latter stages, is delivering contradictory and incoherent messages to the public as a result. His shift to the right is probably an attempt to win back leave voters he alienated by trying to stop Brexit.  This problem is caused by his own political opportunism, it is not in Labour’s electoral interests for Keir Starmer’s problem to become the party’s problem. Having changed his position on Brexit three times in four years, he now supports the Tory deal and by doing so has also alienated remain voters. It is not credible to suggest that a leader who has effectively double crossed both leave and remain voters can win power.

There still exists in the party the problem of excessive party management, a legacy of Blair’s leadership. As the Labour Report revealed, this culture of right-wing members of the party and members of staff sabotaging any attempt at the party shifting left still exists. This must be addressed because until it is the election of a Labour government will not be possible, and even if Labour did win power its socialist programme of government would be undermined and blocked by the right wing of the party. Keir Starmer is actively fostering and encouraging the continuation of a top down central command system, which, for the reasons given, diminishes the probability of a Labour government being elected. 

If Labour wants to win power it must remove these obstacles. In practical terms that means replacing Keir Starmer with a socialist leader who will adopt and build upon the policies in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos, increase democracy within the party and introduce the open selection of parliamentary candidates so local members can choose who will be their MP candidate and replace incumbent MPs who are hostile to socialist policies.

If the party carries out those actions it is highly probable it will win the next general election. If those actions are not taken a Tory victory will be inevitable. 

@Damian_From