The candidates for the next leader of the Opposition have been focused on internal debates. But they need to regain the trust of the public soon
Labour’s leadership contest has turned its back on the public. The endless hustings events around the country have been criticised for being formalised, static and unattractive. As the candidates have had to appeal to party members, MPs and trades unionists (that is, the voters in this particular election), they have inevitably focused on them rather than on the general public.
Many Labour members were always suspicious of former prime minister Tony Blair, so all the candidates have distanced themselves to some degree from the party’s 13 years in government. Blair attracted huge swathes of aspirational voters (particularly floating Conservatives) but he repelled many Left-leaning party members.
However, this effort to escape the recent past points to a problem for Labour. In terms of elections won, Tony Blair is the most successful Labour leader ever. Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson managed only one big electoral majority each (1945 and 1966 respectively). Attlee was defeated outright in 1951 and Wilson managed only minority government or wafer-slim majorities on three occasions out of four. Blair, by contrast, managed majorities of 179, 167 and 66. In 1997, Labour won 419 seats, its largest-ever total.
The publication this week of Blair’s autobiography, A Journey, has rekindled many of the arguments about his time as party leader. Despite his electoral successes, Labour members often felt he governed despite them rather than for them. Party activists were alienated by issues such as the Iraq war, his closeness to former US president George W Bush, his acceptance of wide income disparities, the Private Finance Initiative and his ‘scars on my back’ remark about resistance to public sector reforms.
Losing a general election almost always induces a bout of introspection. Indeed, it should do so. Labour will have to learn from its experience in government. But it needs to remember the lessons of the wilderness years from 1979 to 1997. Too much navel-glazing and a sense that the party is focused on its activists would not be good. Both Blair and Prime Minister David Cameron won elections by moderating their party’s basic instincts.
But, for the time being, there is an auction for the votes of the Labour faithful. The campaign has produced commitments to: slow down the pace of deficit reduction (Ed Balls); raise taxes for top earners and rethink grammar school policy (Ed Miliband); partly remove the NHS spending ring-fence (Andy Burnham); raise taxes generally (Diane Abbott); and adopt the Liberal Democrats’ abandoned mansion tax (David Miliband). But there is a lack of an alternative coherent economic strategy to the government’s, either individually or collectively.
Mostly, candidates want to protect existing expenditure and raise the taxes of the super-rich only, which is not a solution to the nation’s problems. The next Labour leader will have to develop a convincing way of reducing the deficit – presumably by proposing to raise taxes significantly faster than George Osborne intends, so spending can be protected. But if such a policy were to work, it would require higher income tax bills for average-income earners, which is a policy almost no frontline politician is willing to promote – and none has suggested in the recent campaigning.
Despite the largest increase in public expenditure in modern times, Labour failed to tackle many of the country’s underlying problems and left new ones. For example, why is it that many parts of the country failed to develop a strong private sector economy during the Labour years? Why were comprehensive metro-style rail networks not built in Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds? Many hospitals and councils must cope with the costs of centrally imposed PFI deals: how will a future Labour government develop such infrastructure?
The new leader will have to answer these questions and more. After 13 years of centralisation and obsessive target-setting, can the next leader respond to Tory-LibDem decentralisation policies? Like it or not, the government has been bold in its approach to the public sector. This suggests a confidence that Labour – wedded to jargon, endlessly researched policy, ‘pilots’ and dozens of tiny funding streams – never managed. If the Labour Party is to win the next general election, it will soon have to address the public, not itself.
Tony Travers is the director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics
