Election night: Nowhere to hide

These are volatile times for established political parties, politicians and politics itself. Wherever we look; the old elites are creaking, the new elites are largely untested and political fragility looms large. To compound the difficulty, interest and participation in politics continues to decline.

Binding these old and emerging political traditions together, like the tendrils of death, is a political culture dominated not by fact, not necessarily by opinion or belief, but by the invention of new truths. These new truths justify ever more unconventional political opinions. No longer a feature of the fringes, the culture of the conspiracy theory is now entrenched across the mainstream of right and left. From Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and before them, the outlandish birther movement to Ken Livingstone’s assertion that Hitler was a Zionist “before he went mad” the tectonic plates of politics are shifting in unusual and uncomfortable ways.

As a Labour MP, I want every Labour candidate to win every electoral contest in which they take part, everywhere at every level. This means that I want the party to do whatever it has to do to win and this means being honest about what the party needs to do to be able to win. Without this honesty, there will not be – there cannot be – any recovery. Addressing the party’s weaknesses – this must be done in a public, candid manner in order to have any value – is not an act of ‘disloyalty’. On the contrary, failure to address the party’s weaknesses, or worse, pretending that they don’t exist (a new truth) is not only self-deluding but also profoundly disloyal.

Whoever became Leader of the Labour Party in September 2015 was bound to face tough tests. Whoever won the crown was always going to be faced with an unprecedented task of heavy intellectual lifting. What is Labour for, who is Labour for and how does Labour win again? These are just some of the questions the eventual victor was always going to be faced with and remain precisely the questions that the party dodged between the bookend defeats of 2010 and 2015.

The only possible way in which to measure whether or not the Party is beginning to answer these questions successfully is through electoral success. One year on from the 2015 tragedy, simple improvement, not landslide electoral triumphs would demonstrate tangible progress.

So when ambitions for the Labour Party to succeed are characterised as disloyal, then the scale of the problems within the party are laid bare.

Worried about gender equality in the shadow cabinet? Disloyal. Worried about the stain of anti-Semitism? Disloyal. Worried about our ability to remove the Tories from office? Disloyal. Worried about the policy platform we need to articulate in order to win again? Disloyal. New truths.

There is nothing disloyal in wanting Labour to win.

The polls have closed. The counting has begun. We should win and win well in London: London MPs lead the Party and the Shadow Cabinet. Sadiq has fought an excellent campaign; he deserves to win. We will not win in Scotland but we should hold second place as nationalism continues to tighten its grip. For the sake of accuracy, we must recognise that we will only recover in Scotland when it looks like we can win in England. We should win in Wales and it will be catastrophic if we do not. And in England – not to be confused with London in any political sense – we should be gaining, not losing significant numbers of seats.

As the dust begins to settle in the coming hours, the Labour Party should jettison invented truths in favour of actual facts. To remove the Tories in 2020 we need to demonstrate real progress tonight. I passionately hope that this will happen. If it does, we should build upon it. If it does not, we must not hide from what the electorate is telling us: about policy, about leadership, about professionalism. In the coming days, as we absorb whatever judgment the electorate gives over the coming hours, should we choose to ignore it, this will represent one of the greatest political betrayals of all time.

The principal loyalty for any Labour MP must be to Labour voters and to those people for whom the Party exists to serve. It is an established truth amongst political parties that want to win elections that when you choose to ignore the views of the electorate, you choose to lose at the ballot box. When the electorate passes judgment, there is nowhere to hide.

Jamie Reed is MP for Copeland