Time for Labour to wake up

By Ralph Ferrett / @ralphferrett

I have, over the last year, been getting increasingly worried about the way the political narrative has been set. Labour folk seemed to consider at best that the Liberal Democrats and the Tories were enemies of equal significanc and at worst that the Liberal Democrats were the real enemy and that we should be focussing all of our fire and ire on them.

In this narrative Labour are the only opposition to a ruinous and awful coalition. If we just attack the Lib Dems and turn up at the next election then we will win and win big. It’s complacent and sloppy thinking at its worst, and if Labour doesn’t wake up and start engaging some critical faculties then this decade is going to end up mirroring the 80s.

You see the big story of last night isn’t the Lib Dem collapse, it isn’t Labour doing well in Wales, it isn’t the remarkable performance of the SNP, it won’t even be a big No vote in the AV referendum.

The really big story last night is that the Tory vote held up so well in council elections. The Tories remain by some distance the party of government in both national and local terms, and they currently look set to win the next general election.

I don’t want to rehash any of the arguments about the AV referendum here, but one thing that I found most ridiculous when arguing with comrades supporting a “No” vote was the assertion that it would bring the coalition down and we would have the general election we desired.

For me this was massively flawed on two fronts, firstly given their poll ratings, (now allied with these disastrous election results) there ain’t no way on God’s green earth the Liberal Democrats are going to want a general election. But secondly, and most importantly, we are just not in a position to win a general election at the moment. If it happened tomorrow Cameron would in all probability be returned with an outright majority. It is an unpleasant truth, but one we shouldn’t shy away from.

When you are an activist you live in a bubble. Your friends and colleagues are often a self-selecting group, people who often share similar experiences, workplaces, political views etc. We tend to focus much of our campaigning activity in places where we are likely to do well, where in all honesty people are likely to be sympathetic toward us anyway. This means it is easy to get a jaundiced view of what “the man on the street” actually thinks.

What these election results are showing us is that what Labour is seen as now is not the party of government after the next general election. Cameron’s sorry lot have that accolade at the moment and we need to see these results as a massive wake up call. That isn’t to say there isn’t some good news – there is – but it isn’t going to be enough to win in 2015.

At the next election the gerrymandered constituency boundaries will be in place and favouring the Tories, and Osborne is going to be in the process of a massive tax giveaway that they both hope, and expect will return them to government with a healthy majority.

Labour needs to change the current political narrative to make sure this doesn’t happen. And that new winning narrative will not be one in which the Liberal Democrats are the villains of the piece. We are not going to with the next general election on the basis of picking up votes from disaffected Liberal Democrats.

We need to wake up. We need to win.