Our ‘brand’ is toxic – but is the party?

By Sue Marsh / @suey2y

Peter Watt wrote a fascinating post on Detoxifying the Labour Brand yesterday. It’s certainly true that, currently, the “brand” is toxic – but is the party?

Our biggest failing during the election campaign was forgetting to defend our record. I’ll say it loud and proud – Record! Record! Record! The Murdoch press and other right wing outlets like Sky, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail hammered our failings home every minute of every day and controlled the narrative almost entirely. We just sniped at our opposition in response, allowing them to call the shots, always responding to criticism.

By the time people went the polls, they voted on immigration, civil liberties, the economy and past failures like Iraq.

* They believed immigration was out of control and harming their communities and livelihoods.
* They believed Labour had been heavy handed with our civil liberties and overbearing through our legislature.
* They believed Labour were largely to blame for the economic mess the country was in and were overspending.
* They believed that failures such as going to war with Iraq were unforgivable.

How just were those beliefs? I’d say 2 and 4 were justified. 1 and 3 I could forensically de-bunk, but that is for another post.

As I phoned voters and, when able, knocked on their doors, I played “remember the achievement.” Invariably, few remembered that any of the things I valued most had anything to do with Labour. If we start to de-toxify anywhere, I would always start by reminding the country of the following list :

Free admission to National Museums
500,000 fewer children in poverty
900,000 fewer pensioners in poverty
Cancelled 100% debt for poorest countries
Child Trust Funds
Minimum Wage
89,000 more nurses
44,000 more doctors
42,000 more teachers
More than doubled investment in the NHS
Banned Fox Hunting
100s of schools and hospitals re-built and modernised
Winter Fuel Payments
NHS Waiting Lists down to 18 weeks
2 week cancer guarantee
Tax credits
Pension Credit
Doubled International Aid
Free TV licences & bus passes for pensioners
Sure Start centres
Scrapped Section 28
16,000 more Police Officers
Crime down by over 33%
Peace in Northern Ireland
Low inflation & low interest rates
Lowest debt as % of GDP in G7 before the credit crunch
Low unemployment

Anyone older than 30 will remember how desperately these things needed to be done. We were screaming for them to be done. And they were done. People were unwilling to ever trust the Tories again with our public services. If we think back to 97, I find it hard to believe that I’m hearing all the same stories from the Tories all over again – like the 80s but worse. NHS privatisation, “Free Schools” (handy pseudonym for Grammar Schools?) cutting nurses, cutting police, soaring unemployment, slash and burn – on and on until we remember with vivid clarity that it’s exactly what they did last time. By 97, we finally realised that we would all need a hospital one day, we finally realised that all our kids needed to be educated. We realised that some people really were sick and needed our compassion.

Anyone could compile a similar list of our failings, rip these achievements apart and ohhhhhhh they will – they’ve been very well documented, but how soon will it be before ordinary people, working people, sick and disabled people, public sector workers, old people, students and families ask themselves which list they hold most dear at the ballot box? If we’d done a better job of reminding people of the good things we achieved, the right would have gained much less traction as they tried to highlight what we undoubtedly did wrong.

Now, as the Conservatives dismantle every improvement we made, people might have listened when we urged them to stop. If we hadn’t entirely lost our vision and self-belief, we could have confidently defended our economic and socially democratic achievements.