Hunkering down to a ‘left’ vs ‘right’ battle won’t help Labour win in 2020

By Louise Haigh MP and Wes Streeting MP

53 new Labour MPs were elected on May 7th; we’re two of them.

One of us is from London, the other Sheffield. We’re openly backing different leadership and deputy leadership candidates. It’s safe to say that we could be categorised as inhabiting different wings of the Party (we’ll leave you guessing who goes where!) For both of us it would be easy to retreat to our perceived sides, dig our heels in and hunker down to continue an internal battle that has characterised our party since we were watching Saved by the Bell in our PJs.

But: we both want to win the next election. We want to help shape the future of our Party so that this first term we sit in opposition is our last one. That’s why it seems at best oddly nostalgic, at worst out of touch with the 2015 electorate, to define the policies and challenges of our era through brands and factions that fought it out before we even started secondary school.

Those old battles don’t tell people what we stand for now. They don’t speak to a vision for our Party or for the country, they speak to the past. And, crucially, they do nothing to rebuild our Party for a century when the challenges will be so vastly different from those of decades gone by.

Our challenge is to define our era in the same way New Labour did in the 1990s, not to relive it. That was an era of economic certainty which masked the stark inequalities which held our country back; and an era when the electorate trusted our party to deliver both economic competence and social justice.

The country isn’t the same, the solutions aren’t the same, campaigning certainly isn’t the same and quite frankly, the language can’t be the same either.

Our challenge is not to shrink within ourselves; to fight battles on an ever-diminishing field defined by the Tories, it is to redefine what the national mission of our great Party is; the Party of the NHS and the minimum wage, of equal pay and LGBT rights.

Put simply, how do we help create an environment where small-businesses and the self-employed can get on while tackling the inequality which is the central barrier to ambition in our constituencies. How do we do this while re-imagining the public services so they can support an ageing population but also a workforce so dramatically different from that which our predecessors found when they remade our country and it’s institutions in the aftermath of the war.

It’s a big task. But the only future for our Party is a future where we are back on the front foot, not defining ourselves for or against an agenda set by the Conservatives.

Blogs, newspapers and social media have been brimming with ‘reasons why we lost’ the election. And yes, we need to reflect on why we won in Ilford and Sheffield but couldn’t make inroads in the Midlands. We need to look at why certain urban areas seemed to come home to Labour but in some white working class areas of the north, the Tory vote increased or UKIP became the official opposition.

There is no simple answer, and as comforting as it would be, forcing outdated, anachronistic ideological agenda onto a very complex situation won’t help us win in 2020. That’s why we can’t allow our leadership debate to become a battle of factions rather than ideas. A battle of personalities rather than a clear sense of what our Party is for.

However, some things about the last election are clear and agreed on by many.  The myth that Labour ruined the economy was not sufficiently nailed either in 2010, in the five years since or in the last election.  We left a vacuum then accepted too much of the Tory rhetoric for fear of being seen too ‘red’, we let the Tories write the script and set the tone.

It’s great we’ve recognised that; but it’s not enough to know what went wrong, we need to make sure we don’t let history repeat itself. That means developing our own narrative, our own language, our own sense of what the Britain of this century will look like, a narrative which speaks directly to voters whether in Ilford, Exeter, Halesowen or Wansbeck, not to our own internal labels and feuds.

People don’t talk in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’, they talk in terms of real life and that’s exactly why we need to reach out of the Westminster bubble our Party has wrapped itself in.

So let’s have a debate.

One that is open, honest, where we disagree – God knows the two of us don’t agree on everything and neither of us are renowned wallflowers – but let that debate be hopeful, let it be about the future and let it be rooted in real life.