How does Labour win again?

By Andy Slaughter MP

When Ed Miliband wrote in his Fabian essay that, to win again, we need to escape New Labour’s culture of ‘belittling any attempt to move on from past verities’, he more or less predicted the content of yesterday’s article by Joan Ryan on LabourList.

Joan was a fantastic MP and a symbol of our success in 1997. And she is right to say that we need win back C1C2 (middle income) voters – no one disputes that. But it is a real shame that she has joined the chorus of those nostalgic for New Labour, who dismiss the millions of working class voters who have switched to the Tories since 1997 as a “core vote”.

Take Enfield North, the seat Joan used to represent and now target seat number 30. Joan’s view that the mainstream of the party is putting too much emphasis on winning back DE voters (unskilled manual workers and the poor) ignores the electoral reality.

Even in a suburban seat like Enfield North, where around a third of residents are C1, a third are still DE. After allowing for differences in turnout, it is still the case that recovering our lost nineteen points of vote share amongst DEs does more for us than recovering the lost nine points amongst C1s. Based on a uniform swing by class, had Joan and her opponents achieved their 1997 share amongst C1 voters, she would still have lost by a handful of votes. If, instead, she had achieved our DE share, she would have a majority of around 2000. The landscape has changed.

Of course, no one is arguing that Labour should simply focus on winning these people back. But to dismiss them as a ‘core’ vote when they have left us in their millions and are the only class group that has shifted to the Tories, is a dangerous misjudgement. The truth is that, by 2010 New Labour’s approach had driven hundreds of thousands of people on low incomes into the arms of the Tories. The Tory vote share amongst the most affluent AB social group has fallen since 1997. Their share amongst DEs is up 10 points.

Just as importantly, we need to revisit our ideas about how to win back the more middle class voters that Joan is right to prize. Since 1997, it is not the Tories but the Lib Dems who have picked up the bulk of their votes. For every middle class vote the Tories have won since 1997, the Lib Dems have won two. In Enfield North, the Tory vote fell from 2005 to 2010, while the Lib Dem share grew.

Labour’s loss of working class voters to the Tories and middle class voters to the Lib Dems isn’t a fluke. It is the result of our refusal to change as Britain changed. We remained stuck in a New Labour comfort zone that forgot that aspiration is about time out of work and access to university without crippling debts, as well as ensuring people can get on in work. We let New Labour’s infatuation with maximum flexibility in the Labour market stop us improving pay and conditions for working people, creating an environment in which resentment of immigration was able to brew. We let the Liberal Democrats try and take the high ground, and succeed in taking 1.5 million voters, over issues like the Iraq War, civil liberties and tuition fees.

The solution to this has to be a decisive break with New Labour. That is why I agree with Ed Miliband when he says his rejection of the New Labour comfort zone makes him the moderniser at this election. Our party has to choose a candidate who will make decisive break from comfortable New Labour establishment views if we are to set a course to win the next election. Ed Miliband gets it.