Being honest about why we lost, and remembering how to win again

By Mark Ferguson / @markferguson

There’s a fair amount of soul searching going on in the Labour Party at the moment. Of course this is inevitable following a humbling election defeat and while candidates attempt to marshall their USPs and pinpoint exactly where we went wrong.

Something which the party still needs to wrap its head around though is the difference between “what we’d like to change” and “what will make us win again”. Of course Labour Party members have a large and varied shopping list of measures that we’d like the party to adopt. Ask any member and their list will be different.

Yet it’s now spectacularly obvious that there’s a large yawning chasm between what party members think the problem is, and what the voting public at large believe. Recent polling conducted for both Open Left and Left Foot Forward tells us that the party is seen as out of touch, our brand is toxic and that our last leader was spectacularly unpopular with the public at large.

What we need to be doing is plotting a route back to power that appeals to the general populace, rather than developing a shopping list of policies that delight the party but which voters are nonplussed by.

That isn’t to say that we need to choose between our values and winning elections. The two should go hand in hand. Yet to consider the major talking points among party members and those of the general public is to see two completely seperate conversations playing out alongside each other and rarely converging. Not once outside of a Labour Party gathering have I heard anyone decry the spending on Trident or criticise the voting system. I’m not arguing that these issues aren’t important (I believe that both are), but until we’re speaking directly to the needs and concerns of a wider pool of voters, we can’t win again.

When friends and relatives do speak about politics, they talk of their aspirations and their fears. We need to mold our beliefs around the crucial policy decisions of the present and future, rather than crafting policies from our most widely or firmly held beliefs. Lets take on issues like immigration, not by lurching to the right and attacking immigrants, but by embracing the issue and our values together – building more homes, lowering unemployment and ensuring that all Brits can have a safe and comfortable life.

It has made me uncomfortable to hear one of the leadership campaign teams talk of the party chasing “what it wants, not what it needs”. Selling you candidate as some kind of essential medicine – somehow distasteful but necessary if the party is to get well again, seems a real mistake to me, and it’s not what the party or the country wants. Lets spend the time until September assessing what are priorities are, what our ideals must be, and what our party stands for.

But once we pass September 25th, lets focus on the matter at hand – the people who will decide the next government, and their concerns, rather than just our own.