Progressive policies can help Labour win again

By Cat Smith / @cateysmith

Since the election last year, the party has quite rightly been engaging in an important debate about how it can win again.

This has seen the strand known as Blue Labour emerge, Progress becoming increasingly active with seminars and conferences and numerous other organisations engaging in policy debates both online and across the country.

Next Generation Labour has been established to contribute to this important discussion – from, at times, a different perspective.

It is essential that the correct lessons are drawn from the 2010 general election defeat.

The prize for getting this right is enormous – defeating the Tories at the earliest possible opportunity so that the destruction they are wreaking on people’s lives, communities and public services as well as the wider economy is limited to just one term.

This is a huge challenge. As Ed Miliband told a recent National Policy Forum meeting:

“To go from losing a majority at one election to regaining a majority at the next is something that no political party has achieved for a generation. And the challenge is greater because our starting point is the aftermath of one of our heaviest election defeats.”

To win again, we first need to assess where we went wrong.

The starting point has to be to acknowledge that it was under a New Labour policy agenda that we lost 5m votes from 1997 – with 4m of these under Tony Blair.

Furthermore, as Shadow Minister Jon Trickett showed in his analysis of the votes lost between 1997 and 2010:

“Labour’s support broke down among all social groups, but that the greatest levels of decline were among social classes C2, D and E. These groups – manual workers and welfare dependants – make up almost half of the population and a much greater element of Labour’s support. Their importance to the coalition of support Labour needs to win can be seen from the fact that 50 per cent or more of these groups backed us during our 1997 landslide.”

In short, Labour’s broad coalition of supporters was whittled away.

Importantly though, these voters did not, in the main, go to the right.

Whilst Labour lost 5m between 1997 and 2010, the Tories only won 1m from 1997.

More than 1.6m went to the Liberal Democrats who sought to reach out to progressive voters on issues such as Iraq, students fees, civil liberties and many other issues.

Whilst many other former Labour voters and Labour identifiers decided not to turn out and vote at all, no doubt feeling abandoned by our party.

Despite Labour’s falling support following the deepest recession in decades, the Tories could only win 36%, the lowest ever result for the Tories when they have then gone on to form the government.

Current polls show the Tories only attracting a similar level of support.

So there is a large section of the electorate who do not back the Tories from which Labour can forge a winning alliance.

But to reach out to these voters, we have to take the fight to the Tories showing the public that Labour offers a radically different alternative. Ceding ground to the Tories on cuts or on social issues as some in the party have advocated is clearly not the way forward.

Ed Miliband’s recent strong attack at PMQs against a flummoxed Cameron on how the Tory cuts will hit cancer sufferers was a clear example of how Labour will protect the majority, not punish the poorest.

Similarly, given that the economy is key issue on which Labour needs to win the debate, Ed Balls’ recent LSE speech was a huge step forward in shaping a clear economic alternative that can help shift the argument away from the Tories’ chosen ground that cuts are necessary. He exposed the Tory lie that there is no alternative by outlining a package – cutting VAT to stimulate the economy and investing in jobs and houses through a windfall tax on bankers – that would boost growth and employment and in turn tackle the deficit as government tax income would rise and benefits paid out would fall.

Such a head on rejection of the ideologically driven Tory agenda on health and the economy is certainly a refreshing alternative to those former Labour ministers chirping from the sidelines about how Labour should accept Tory reforms to the NHS (including from individuals now sitting on the boards of private health companies) or giving the Tories cover on public sector pensions.

Outlining clear progressive alternatives to the Tories reactionary polices is the key to Labour success over the next period.

Next Generation Labour’s blog site will be a forum to put forward such policies. Make sure you contribute.