Ditch the focus-grouped-to-death, weird and meaningless phrases to re-connect with Labour’s lost voters

Labour’s resounding defeat last week was all the more painful because the scale of it had not been anticipated. We endured a total political and strategic failure.

Worse still, we must expect that many of the people we came into politics to protect will now bear the brunt of what is to come. We have a Tory majority government albeit with a small overall majority, committed to dismantling what is left of the post war settlement, destroying workplace rights and protections and visiting massive hardship on those who will be least able to cope with it.

We must chart a clear way back as a viable party of Government. This begins by ensuring that a feisty, fiery and active Parliamentary Labour Party uses all the opportunities which exist to fight this Government at Westminster. It also necessitates a no holds barred open and honest debate about the way forward for our Party both politically and organisationally. This must be followed by robust action to learn the hard lessons and ensure that we are fit to win the many battles which lie ahead.

This isn’t only about who the leader or deputy leader will be important though that is. It is also about how we can change to provide compelling answers to the challenges our country faces in a rapidly changing age.

Of course we have to make clear we are the Party of aspiration best suited to help shape a civilised secure and fair society.

So we have to challenge current economic orthodoxies and trickle-down economics head on. We must never be against wealth creation but we can be against tax evasion and we can insist on fair rules for those at the top as well as those at the bottom of the income scale. Labour must also be at the forefront of building a new economic settlement rooted in rewarding innovation and skills. This new economy needs to be based on developing opportunities for all our people.

We must be the answer to a prosperous and successful economy in a twenty first century world where past success is no guarantee of future wellbeing. This means the whole country being rich with opportunity north and south, east and west.

We must also look long and hard at our party organisation. Make no mistake, we have a mountain to climb and that is before the Tories unleash their boundary changes.

Analysis of the results show that 93 of the absurdly large 106 seats which we targeted to win were in England. Labour won in 21 of them and decreased the Tory majority in just 12. That means that in 57 of these 88 seats the Tory incumbents actually increased their majorities. This is without the catastrophe which overwhelmed our Party in Scotland which also presents us with a profound existential challenge.

We fell into the trap of focusing to much on our ‘ground game’ without ensuring that the messages we were taking to the doorstep were robust and aspirational enough. Nor were they expressed in everyday language but rather in phrases which managed to be focus grouped to death and often sounding weird and meaningless to most. No wonder we failed to connect with millions of voters. We might have derided the Tories as a virtual party with few active members but they were rich enough to micro target individual voters through the post with a tsunami of razor-sharp, persuasive advertising techniques we were never able to counter.

This is never going to be easy to counter but we have to do so if we are to get our voices and ideas about the future listened to again. I believe we can and we will do it. The result last week was bad, it is now time to debate, take stock, and then pick ourselves up to become the formidable team we can be to win in 2020.

Angela Eagle is Shadow Leader of the House of Commons and Chair of the National Policy Forum