Why Labour lost

by Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848

We have had a couple of weeks now to sit back and reflect. We know that it is hard to defend a third term government and the scale of the loss could, in all honesty, have been worse. We know that Gordon Brown could have won an election shortly after he came to office on a radical agenda including ending the overseas wars. We would all have been the better for it as well. But that is water under the bridge and now we have to look upstream and rethink. So, what happened?

First off, Labour got disconnected from the electorate. The evidence lies in the collapse of the popular vote. People stopped trusting the party and they didn’t believe what it said about foreign wars, the state of the economy, reform of Parliament and public spending. Faced with the right-wing newspapers and a BBC which was determined to take revenge on Labour for its loss of face over Iraq, Downing Street set out to manage the agenda and thereby, perhaps by mistake, the voters. In the end, a large proportion of the electorate didn’t believe that Gordon Brown had done a really good job in the international banking crisis or that he would clean up politics. That is a pity because he did what was necessary and would have gone on to do more.

Second, Labour lost sight of its core values. The evidence was there throughout the election campaign. People did not know what Labour stood for any more and, quite possibly, neither did the party. Sound candidates with a firm grounding in the beliefs of the party took to the hustings and defended purposeless interventions in the affairs of other countries. Along the way, they defended universal tagging through identity cards and got involved in the blame culture. From social worker castigation to the takeover of Cadbury’s, someone else was to blame. When Gordon Brown stood up in the last days of the campaign and said what he stood for, the party breathed a collective sigh of affirming relief but it was too late.

Three, Labour tried to micromanage and lost the big picture. The evidence can be found across government. Downing Street found itself telling people what to eat and nagging them for being too fat or for not taking enough exercise. Sometimes it was telling someone else to run the trains and then a bit further down the line it took the train set back. It was always too centralist and bureaucratic. As a government, it was not good at finding people who knew stuff and then empowering them to get jobs done.

Four, Labour played to a centralist group in the electorate which turned out not to exist. The evidence is clear in immigration and education. Sometimes you got the impression that Downing Street was running everything past a couple called Rosemary and Alan who had lived somewhere in Bucks in the same house for twenty years. This was in the mistaken belief that they voted Labour in 1997 because they liked Tony Blair. Labour has constantly fudged on immigration where there are no good arguments except those relating universally to border security and economic growth and we could never be quite honest about whether we lived in Europe or just to the left of it. In education, Labour was frightened about standards and determined to do nothing that the right-wing press could relate to falling standards. They persisted with SAT testing that didn’t work and a damaging school inspection service which failed to quality assure the system and, instead, damaged it.

Five, Labour stopped defending individual freedom. The evidence can be found all over the place. Detention without trial, courts without juries, increased police and social welfare powers, camera monitoring, the expansion of GCHQ and, of course, identity cards. This is a tricky area for Labour which has always been to some extent a paternalistic party in setting out to support the disadvantaged and the oppressed. Tony Blair didn’t always help because, occasionally, his moral convictions conflicted with everyone else’s personal freedoms. Labour party workers are libertarians at heart; they don’t want to be told what they can and cannot do, see or say. They support the power of personal judgement but they were not sure that the government did.

Six, Labour stopped celebrating. The evidence lies in Northern Ireland, school transformation and the expansion of the health service. Bringing a sort of peace to Northern Ireland will be seen as Tony Blair’s greatest achievement by history. The school rebuilding and refurbishment programme has had as much impact as any number of major architect designed Academy openings. The teacher workforce agreements, Sure Start nurseries, the provision of free nursery education and the introduction of teaching assistants into schools have improved education enormously. The health service at the point of delivery is universally admired by over 80% of the clients and waiting times really have been reduced. Sometimes it looks as if Labour was so used to massaging the facts that it couldn’t see the achievements and talk directly to the electorate about them. It couldn’t seem to reach the school gate mothers and the cured patients because celebration was confused with image and fluff.

Patrick Lencioni, an American business consultant and guru, wrote a book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team back in 2002. The five dysfunctions are shown in the triangle below (from John McElhenney) and alongside them are the symptoms that dysfunctional teams exhibit. You can take as much of this on board as you like but in the past five years the electorate has seen a lot of invulnerability (extending detention), artificial harmony (weapons of mass destruction), ambiguity (arguments for ID cards), low standards (in political life) and complications involving status and ego where an unkind bracket might include Peter Mandelson or Alistair Campbell. In some ways, Labour has become a dysfunctional team but Lencioni also shows how to put things right, through the power of trust, a willingness to debate and argue, a strong commitment to core values and a willingness to be accountable and to be judged by outcomes. And, that is the way to build the next bridge with the voters.