The magic formula? Building a winning majority

The Labour movement column

By Anthony Painter

In order for Labour to be in government it has to build a winning majority. There. That’s the magic formula. In this majority there will be working and middle class voters. It wins the working class voters by being real Labour and it wins the middle class voters by being New Labour. The way to win an election is to build motivated support on the left and attract swing voters at the same time.

Confused? You should be. For in the world of Labour political strategy there are only two groups of people – the working and middle classes. And there are only two strategies – target the core vote or target the median voter.

These strategies jockey for position as follows. Someone pops up and says Labour lost x million working class voters and needs to be true to its roots or values in order to win them back. See Ed Miliband for a variant of this.

Someone then comes back and says that Labour must not forget ‘aspirational voters’ – often expanding that such voters are to be found in the south east (apparently.) Step forward Joan Ryan.

And then someone pops up and says, no Labour must be a broad coalition of all classes. See David Miliband in the Telegraph at the weekend for this argument.

And then we go round again. The next loop has been started in The Independent today by Diane Abbott. Round and round we go. I could link to 100 similar articles of all three types: core, aspiration and broad church.

If this is the level of strategic thinking that Labour is now capable of then it is on a very long road back to power – assuming the coalition doesn’t implode. Where Ed Miliband has a point is that Labour did lose working class voters to the Conservatives. All the voters Labour lost didn’t vote Conservative but a significant portion did. His analysis stops short, however. The real question is why did Labour lose these votes to the Conservatives? If they were ‘real’ or ‘traditional’ Labour then why on earth would they vote Conservative?

David Miliband cautions against “crude marketing” and “transparent positioning” and he’s right. If you accept that is all New Labour was about – and I don’t though at its worst it could be – then that is an approach that is for the birds. What you gain by positioning in one direction you lose elsewhere. Essentially you find yourself on a seesaw of public opinion: what you gain in height to the right, you lose to the left and vice-versa. Into the bargain you seem capricious and vacillating. Instead you need credible answers to the multiple and great challenges that the UK is facing, a connection to people’s core values, and an understanding of the policies that can make an immediate and practical difference to people’s lives. Rather than chasing votes, it is better to provide convincing answers that address real concerns.

So the challenge is to find a way of expressing your values in a way that people understand but it is also to understand their concerns. Which brings us nicely back to those lost C2/D/E voters and why they were lost. The recent Demos research on the different value sets between the voters Labour kept from 2005 and those it lost is important here.

Some of the questions where there was the biggest difference between the two groups were to do with the state: its efficiency, its function, its form. A significant portion of the voters who deserted Labour – 35% – wanted more choice and control over public services and 55% thought the priority was to end top-down control and improve NHS efficiency rather than avoiding cuts (this compares to 31% of the voters Labour kept who thought the same.)

The point here is not to prescribe a particular set of policy solutions. The issue is that Labour no longer knows its ‘core vote’ – bear in mind Labour lost its C2/D/E voters disproportionately and many went to the Tories as Ed Miliband points out. The second issue is that the leadership contenders and Labour commentators have, so far, been reluctant to confront these inconvenient truths.

That changed this morning in a piece by David Miliband in The Times (paywall, sorry…) He writes:

“We are pigeonholed as profligate when we need to be prudent; we are seen as grabbing power for the State when our mission is to empower individuals, communities and businesses; and we are seen as the Establishment when we need to be the radicals.”

It’s not that Labour got everything else right but got its approach to the state wrong. In fact, it was also far too relaxed about letting the market do its worst and then dealing with the aftermath. But the country at large does not quite view the state as the benign force for fairness that the Labour Party does – all too often in an unquestioning manner.

None of this is about wooing this or that group of voters. It is not about core versus aspirational voters or whatever. It is not about New v Old Labour. It is about understanding the rich tapestry of complex concerns, needs, and instincts that cut across classes. Voters no longer congregate in blocks. Modern Britain is far more pluralistic and finely grained than that. But Labour sometimes still seems to think that Britain is rather more akin to the 1950s – hence the strategy merry-go-round.

Hopefully David Miliband’s intervention today will finally confront this lingering issue for Labour. That is not positioning. It is good sense to understand where people are and address their concerns in reflection of your values and with credible policies. There are many ways of doing so but just ignoring it is not the answer. There. A strategy.

Anthony Painter blogs at www.anthonypainter.co.uk. He is an Associate at Demos, leading on the Open Coalitions project within Open Left. These are his personal views.