As we go into opposition, we need to learn to understand the bread and butter issues

The Paul Richards Column

There was a Freshers’ Fair feel to Portcullis House yesterday as new Members of Parliament attended briefings, photo-calls, and entered the Chamber for the first time. They clutched their induction packs, asked attendants where the toilets were, and looked anxiously at electronic diaries for fear of being late.

There were a few old timers too, such as Frank Dobson, who became an MP before some of his new colleagues were born. The youngest – Pamela Nash MP – was born in 1986. There were also those former MPs – mostly Labour – who had lost, clearing out their desks and contemplating a life beyond Westminster.

It is only one week since Britain went to the polls. This time last week we were pinning on rosettes, taking numbers, tearing off Reading sheets and getting out the vote. One week on, we have a new government chock-full of millionaires, public schoolboys, and Liberal Democrats, headed by a new Prime Minister, a new woman Leader of the Opposition (the first since since Margaret Beckett), and a Labour Party leadership contest in full flow. Harold Wilson was right.

We need to establish firmly and swiftly an analysis of how and why Labour lost the election last week. We must avoid easy answers (‘we weren’t left-wing enough’) or trite (‘the English will never vote for a Scottish Prime Minister’) or muddle-headed (‘it was because of Afghanistan and ID cards’) or just plain wrong (‘it was because of Tony Blair’). The last thing we need is six months of arguing with each other about reasons for our failure, whilst failing to properly scrutinise and oppose the ConDem emergency budget, Queen’s Speech, and first weeks in office. Cameron and Clegg will use their honeymoon to perform the most savage of cuts and dastardly of deeds in the hope Labour is looking the other way, and the media is too busy simpering and sucking up.

Former members of the cabinet met this week to trawl through the wreckage. From an analysis based on the Mosaic classification of voters, early indications are that Labour lost because sizeable chunks of hard-working poor people (classified as ‘blue-collar enterprise’) deserted us in England, and especially the south outside London. In February, Populus found that it was C2 (the ‘skilled manual workers’) voters who agreed most strongly with the proposition that ‘people who play by the rules always get a raw deal’. It was this section of society who deserted Labour on May 6th. It seems like our version of ‘fairness’ – more women in top jobs – and C2 voters’ version of fairness – my daughter being able to afford a house near me – were not the same thing.

The reason why Bigotgate was such a colossal disaster was not because the former Prime Minister was so spectacularly rude to a nice old lady, but because the issue she raised was immigration. For C2 voters, especially in the south of England and Midlands, immigration is the most salient issue – not because of racism (many of the immigrants are white, eastern European, and Roman Catholic) – but because of the transformatory scale of recent immigration. Like all waves of immigration, it makes settled communities feel threatened, creates mythologies about unfair access to welfare services, and provides an excuse for unemployed people to not take up physically demanding low-paid jobs like fruit-picking. So when Mrs Duffy mentioned specifically Eastern Europeans in Rochdale (avoiding any racist slang or name-calling), and was called a ‘bigoted woman’ it suggested that the Labour government believed even mentioning immigration was a political crime. A successful Labour candidate in the Midlands told me this week that it came up on doorsteps, translated as “we’re not even allowed to talk about it.” The toxicity of Bigotgate was not Brown’s slipped mask, but the dislocation of the political class from the working class on immigration.

It wasn’t just immigration. It was also what Hazel Blears (fresh from beating the ‘Blears Must Go’ candidate into fifth place, behind the BNP and UKIP) called “bread and butter issues” on the BBC’s Daily Politics this week. Job security, affordable housing, decent wages, good local schools, clean streets, and safe parks.

As we construct an effective opposition in Parliament, with shadow cabinet elections for the best team, rebuild effective local campaigning parties, and choose the best leader, it is these issues that need addressing. If we want to win back the hard-working, low-wage fifth of the population who mostly left us last Thursday in places such as Dover, Burton, Gloucester, Crawley and Dartford, it will take more than vague notions of ‘progress’ and a faint whiff of intellectualism.