Labour is on course to lose the next election, warns 2015 campaign chief

Labour has made “no progress” on the areas that caused the party to lose last year’s election, according to the man who ran the general election campaign.

Spencer Livermore, who was Labour’s General Election Campaign Director last year, and has been credited with devising the strategies for the 2001 and 2005 election campaigns, made the stark warning at the Progress Political Weekend today.

In a bleak assessment of the party’s fortunes, the Labour peer said: “If we continue on the present course, we will lose in 2020.”

And he even raised the possibility that Labour has moved backwards in the last 10 months. “I’m sorry to say that we now appear to be further away from power than we were even on May the 8th 2015,” he said.

Livermore said that “elections are determined by three fundamental issues: economic credibility; the relevance of your offer to voters’ concerns; and your leader being seen as a potential Prime Minister.” He added: “In 2015 Labour was in the wrong place on each of those issues.”

He claimed that the party had ducked “the tough decisions on the deficit” that were needed “to regain economic credibility”, that the offer to voters had been “far too narrow in its appeal”, and that Ed Miliband’s poor personal ratings against David Cameron had been costly.

In what appears to be a criticism of John McDonnell, Livermore said that the Shadow Chancellor’s major speech on the economy yesterday was simply “announcing this week the same policy that Labour had in 2015″.

“Announcing a policy that lacked credibility then is not going to suddenly give us credibility now,” Lord Livermore said.

While he accepted that the size of Jeremy Corbyn’s victory last September gave him a powerful mandate as Labour leader, Livermore also raised concerns about Corbyn’s leadership ratings.

“Can the British people now see our leader as a potential Prime Minister?” he asked. “It seems not, as Mr Corbyn currently has the lowest ratings of any new leader in history.

“He clearly has a strong internal mandate. He has the right to try and translate that into external support. But as Leader he also has a responsibility to do so.”

Labour has failed to recognise what issues had led to the defeat, he said. “So has Labour learnt the lessons from 2015? My concern is that we have not, and that we have made no progress on the great enduring weaknesses that hurt us last year.”

He added that Labour could not win until the leadership addressed the causes of the party’s problems: “I genuinely believe that it would be impossible to reflect on the 2015 election, to understand properly why we lost, in terms of the economy, leadership, and the breadth of our appeal, and then conclude that we can win from the position we are in today.

“If we continue on the present course, we will lose in 2020.

“That is why it is vital for the mainstream in today’s Labour Party – the real progressives – to keep making the case for why we lost.

“We must learn the lessons of our defeat. But until our leaders learn those lessons – and act on them – we will not win again.”