Labour’s overdue wake-up call

By Ben Fox

Mulling over election results is largely a waste of time and ink and it’s about time we drew a line about the winners and losers from ‘Super Thursday’. The final verdict on Labour’s night has to be that the party overall took a small step forward. We won our first and easiest battle, routing the Lib Dems who are now probably tarred for as long as the coalition survives. The great northern cities all came back under Labour control while we govern alone in Wales.

However, while Luke Akehurst has rightly pointed out the gains that were made against the Tories, particularly in Southern England, we have to admit that, were the Tories to leave the coalition and go to the country for a mandate, the local elections point to a 1992-style general election result. The Tories can’t win in the northern cities, but we are still struggling in the south. As for the Lib Dems – well their only chance of avoiding oblivion lies in waiting like Dickens’ Mr Micawber for “something to turn up”.

As a result, some commentators have portrayed the result as a disaster for Labour and a huge boon to David Cameron. There’s no denying that the Tories had a decent night, but they are benefiting from the nature of coalition politics. Recent results in Germany are actually very similar. The Christian Democrat (CDU) vote share is holding up, but they are losing power in the regional ‘lander’ elections because of the collapse in support for their coalition partners the liberal Free Democrat party (FDP), which is haemorrhaging votes to the Greens. As with the Lib Dems, many Germans are wondering what the point of the FDP is.

So while the Lib Dems have come out talking tough on the NHS bill and on House of Lords reform, the truth is that they are hopelessly enfeebled. They need Cameron more than he needs them. The Lib Dems’ only real hope is some form of pact at the next election, where Conservatives do not field candidates in potential three-way marginals. In the unlikely event that the economy starts to turn around, the Lib Dems will get hardly any credit because that isn’t how coalition politics works. As ‘Super Thursday’ and the recent results in Germany have shown, the smaller partner invariably becomes the whipping boy.

Perhaps David Cameron and his team should be seriously considering the possibility of calling a snap election. Although the changes to the constituency boundaries will not take effect until 2013 the Conservatives, unlike Labour, could fund an election campaign quite easily. It is very difficult to see the Tories winning decisively because of their long-standing weakness in the north of England and Scotland, but a 1992-style result is quite conceivable. Thursday’s results show that the Tories would probably take at least 20 Lib Dem seats and hold off Labour just enough to take a slim majority. With the British economy lagging behind most European countries, and the cuts yet to really bite, Cameron may never have a better chance to claim the mandate he should have won last May.

As for Labour, I would describe the result (excepting the horror show in Scotland) as the first steps back in the right direction. Some have expressed concern that Labour and the Tories were in a virtual dead-heat, both polling around 37%. But we should not forget how toxically unpopular our party was from 2008-2010. To go from 29% to 37% in a year is a massive step forward. Those who expected Labour to match the 41-43% it has been hitting in opinion polls got the reminder they needed – Labour’s poll ratings are soft, and would probably be softer still in a general election. The local elections were the wake-up call we needed – we have a mountain to climb to win the next election and we can’t complacently wait for the coalition to foul everything up.

This is why Labour needs to get on with its policy review and start putting together a coherent alternative. Our economic lines, particularly on the speed and nature of deficit reduction are economically sound and gaining popularity – a recent poll put the economic plan proposed by Alistair Darling last May 10% ahead of Osborne’s austerity. But they need fleshing out, just as our policies do on the NHS and in response to Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms.

Secondly, Ed Miliband has succeeded in preventing the internal fighting that has followed every Labour election defeat since the Second World War, and in starting the process of re-building a shattered party. But he does not look Prime Ministerial yet. Having only been party leader for eight months that’s hardly surprising, but our leader still needs to up his game, because, while we might all loath him, Cameron is a class act.

So let’s not be despondent or joyful. Drubbing the Lib Dems may have brought a smile to our faces (I know it did to me in York where we took control from the Lib Dems), but beating them will not win the next election. Winning Bury, Bolton and Blackpool – largely at the expense of the Tories – were more important gains from a Westminster perspective, as was the win in Cardiff North against the Welsh Tories. But make no mistake, our task is massive. No party has ever gone from a 29% vote share to winning the next election. That is the scale of the electoral mountain Labour must climb.