Hard lessons from the east – but time to love our activists

The front page headline on this weekend’s Cambridge News is “It’s not all blue,” recording Labour’s success in winning back the city from the Lib Dems. Amid the gloom and despondency of the prospect of five more years of Tory a Government, there are positive as well as negative lessons from the General Election campaign.

Across my own East of England region, sometimes considered a backwater for Labour in years past, the finely honed Labour electoral machine worked as well as anywhere. Not simply was that reflected in the number of front bench visits, the army of (mainly) young organisers who were drafted in and who performed superbly and in the best quality print materials I can remember.

It reflected the enthusiasm of activists to knock on doors and to deliver those materials, which saw voter contact rates in seats such as Stevenage, Ipswich and Waveney at phenomenal levels, and frequently at or near the top of league tables for the whole country.

It is crucial that the depression which defeat has brought in those constituencies and others, does not cause all that effort simply to be dissipated. They are still the constituencies which Labour needs to win. The party needs to show we love our activists and, even though we failed to persuade enough of the voters, that our values and convictions remain the right ones.

If there is one organisational lesson that we might reflect on, it is that our targeting methods are now so sophisticated that perhaps we didn’t talk enough to known Conservatives and others in the against column. It was us as much as the pollsters who missed the resurgence of the ‘shy Tory.’

Although even if we had adapted some of our campaigning accordingly, it is a moot point whether that could have significantly affected the outcome this time round.

We can’t pretend that excellent organisation on its own can ever be enough, but the organisation was excellent.  We should not forget that in a future election where the political runes are different, still it could be the difference between winning and losing.

And what are lessons for those runes from the East?

The political headline behind the headline is that the two Labour gains – in Norwich as well as Cambridge – were made at the expense of the Lib Dems. In the former case the Greens were also challengers, but in neither was it the Conservatives.

It reminds us that there is an anti-Conservative majority, if we can find ways of mobilising it. But it also demonstrated how the weeks (and years) or door-knocking had yielded precious few direct Tory to Labour switchers. To allow ourselves to accept the Tory attack that all this can be attributed to the personality of Ed Miliband would be dangerously facile and plain wrong.

However it is clear that Tory attacks on Labour over responsibility and competence bore fruit, and that no amount of invented names in Tory-inspired letters to the Daily Telegraph can shroud the fact that Labour was not sufficiently trusted on business.

Yet the two Labour gains in my region again provide a clear warning that this cannot and should not be solved by simply by lurching to the right.

What the two new MPs also have in common, Daniel Zeichner and Clive Lewis, is that they are thoughtful, independently-minded people from outside the mould. Both of them won support on their personal reputations for integrity and both fundamentally reject a return to the old language of ‘New Labour.’

Therefore the party must address issues of economic management, which we said were central to our message at this election, but where we have to accept too few believed us. But we must do so in a way that recognises the authenticity which we seek to project is not only on economics but for the whole of our politics.

It is possible to be both pro-business and advocate fair regulation, and we have to search again for the right mix.

I go along with all those who say Labour’s leadership election at that time saw us talk to ourselves rather than the electorate, and to delay rebutting the Tory claims until too late. Which is one more reason I regret Ed’s decision to stand down so quickly, and why the party must use the new leadership election to sharpen not blunt our external political message.

We may have had for million conversations in the run-up to this election, and we cannot allow ourselves to be silenced now.

Finally, as a Euro MP, we now have to come to terms with the prospect of fighting an EU referendum, and to making sure our voice is also heard on what sort of reforms would actually make Europe better.

Once again it will be the Tories who will want to advocate the case for a free market, and Labour has to make the case for a proper ‘mix’ on Social Europe too. And if the election wasn’t won or lost in the short campaign, neither will the referendum. But the election of 2015 was one in which the Europe issue didn’t bark.

Those of us who argued Labour should stick to its principles on an EU referendum were proven right. I spent much of the campaign in Thurrock which was one of two seats in which UKIP threw everything, and where our street stalls were physically attacked and where the throwing was of stones at our canvassing teams – both apparently by their party’s supporters. This is the raw ugliness of Eurosceptic politics.

The huge organisational effort from Labour was absolutist present in Thurrock and an incredible fight from our candidate Polly Billington does mean our narrow defeat to the Tories is also the cause of deep disappointment this weekend.

But if there is one more lesson of the campaign which doesn’t make me feel blue, it is the failure of UKIP to make any breakthrough – here or anywhere else.

Richard Howitt MEP is Labour Member of the European Parliament for the East of England and Chair of the European Parliamentary Labour Party.