54 tough months: We have to face up to some tough facts

By Chris Bryant / @ChrisBryantMP

We’ve had two polls now putting us on level pegging with the Tories and already our hearts are aflutter. But I suspect we have 54 tough months ahead of us before the next election and we have to face up to some tough facts.

One, there is no such thing as a ‘safe’ seat any more. More and more people say not ‘I am Labour’ but ‘I vote Labour’ or even ‘I’m voting Labour this time’. What is more, that pick-and-mix approach to voting is going to become more, not less prevalent.

Two, we lost a whole swathe of the electorate this year, quite simply because they thought we were out of touch with their hopes and ambitions. There was a fracture in the bedrock of the Labour vote, between the working working class and those who depended on the State, with many becoming deeply resentful of their neighbours who they thought of as ‘scroungers’, while those on the lowest incomes felt we had done nothing for them.

Three, an increasing number of working-class C2 voters have seen their outlook on life radically transformed. They take foreign holidays, they eat out, they buy designer clothes – things their parents didn’t even think of aspiring to. Often aspiration far outstrips opportunity (this is as true for politicians as it is for working-class voters) but Labour has to face the fact that an increasing number of those whom it historically relied on for support undoubtedly see themselves as part of an aspirational class, whatever their income or their job. They want to get on in life. They want to do better, be better off than their parents and they dream of their children doing better even than them. They work hard and hope for a comfortable retirement. They don’t look to the state to provide everything for them, indeed they often aspire to enough financial independence to be able to opt out of state provided services and ‘go private’, not just for their gym, their golf club or their transport to work, but even their doctor, their dentist and their children’s school. When we are seen or perceived to undervalue or curtail those hopes and ambitions they have understandably abandoned us. In some cases voters have expressly felt that, having succeeded in life, Labour quite simply isn’t for someone like them.

Four, we should not allow any one election victory or defeat overly to determine our strategy for the future. The shock of losing in 1992 made us learn our lessons too well. Aware that we had seemed too anti-success and dogmatic in our advocacy of state-based solutions in opposition in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in government we leant over backwards to be seen as pro-business and not anti-city. It meant we were too reluctant to regulate the city against its own market failures, too hesitant about tackling grossly over-optimistic lending. It meant that when it came to the credit crunch we were too hesitant to criticise the banks or crack down on the city’s excesses. It also made us too slow to deal properly with the issue of posted workers, often working under oppressive conditions and undermining British workers’ terms and conditions. That does not mean that we should abandon the key precept that social justice and prosperity, a strong and a fair economy are not mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent. Nor does it mean we should ditch a commitment to wealth creation and economic growth as the powerhouse of regeneration, but it should point us towards a more active strategy for growth, including export driven growth that requires a manufacturing regeneration.

Five, although voters dislike parties that appear out-of-touch or dogmatic, they also seem increasingly reluctant to support parties whose platform is entirely confectioned to fit the pollsters’ analysis of the voters’ prejudices. Principles and policies that appear consistent with those principles are not the icing, but the cake itself. Without self-evident principles no party can expect to weather the storm of traditional or internet media analysis. All too often a ‘popular’ policy is sustained by little other than warm air and when it cools the politician is left holding a very deflated balloon. We constantly need to explain how our historic values match modern concerns, but there is no better platform Labour can adopt than that which it holds to be true.

Chris Bryant sets out his analysis of where Labour stands with aspirational working class voters in our safe seats and beyond in The Politics of Tidy Britain published in partnership with the Smith Institute today and available here.