Rebuilding with integrity

By Matthew Dear

BREAKING NEWS: Labour lost the 2010 general election. If I hear one more person claim that a “left-wing/progressive/anti-Tory majority” actually won, and the rotten Tories filched it, I might just go and eat worms.

Because, as I’m told that from the other side of the fence, the 59.1% achieved by what is now the coalition looks like a pretty tasty anti-Labour majority. To put the Tories beyond the proverbial pale, and claim that everybody else is somehow ethereally united against them is both unfair (some Tories are genuinely well-meaning people who don’t eat babies) and inaccurate (for a host of reasons better suited to the pages of Private Eye; if my Labour vote was anti-anything, it was anti-Liberal Democrat. Oh they’re progressive all right. But then so is dry rot.)

We lost. It’s unpalatable, but incontrovertible. But what will define the Labour Party is how it accepts that reality, dusts itself down, and starts all over again. St John the Evangelist puts it in rather more sophisticated language when he suggests that “unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels – a plentiful harvest of new lives.” For new lives, read ‘new governments’, yet to come.

This is something to believe in. It promises renewal, new growth, life after electoral death. What must we bring to the deal to make it a reality? I would suggest that first and foremost comes integrity. Personal attacks, smears and bitterness should be shunned as if they were radioactive. We should fully expect the coalition to knock Labour’s years in government, and, in due course it will start knocking itself into the many fragments from which it is bodged together. We must take criticism on the chin. Stand tall. Make the case. Refuse to be provoked. Just remind people what life was like in 1997, especially for the vulnerable, and the low-paid.

The moral case for the next Labour government will be compelling, once the cuts begin to bleed and the casualty stories start to emerge. That case must now be pressed with resolve and with integrity; with gravitas, and with intellectual rigour. The new politics belongs not to the new government, but to the new opposition, who will once again be in the spotlight as the leadership contest unfolds, and must make the most of the opportunity. So we need to fight hard. But fight cleanly.