A Night To Remember: Election 2015

Originally published at People’s Republic of Teesside, 17th May 2015

Seven days before the election last Thursday, I was out campaigning in one of the poorest areas of Billingham, my home town in the solidly Labour constituency of Stockton North.  It was just after the school run and I was walking towards a man in his thirties who was standing on the drive in front of his house, chatting with a friend who’d just collected his children from school.  Before I’d even approached them, the two men saw me coming and quite cheerfully let it be known what they thought of the Party I was campaigning for: “Who’s this coming, Labour?  No chance.  You wrecked the economy, mate — you spent all the money!  Well, not you personally … But now we’re all in debt! No chance.” 

 

The fact that he didn’t blame me personally for austerity was no consolation; instead I reflected once again on the spectacular achievements of propaganda, and how this particular myth had penetrated Labour’s heartlands to such an incredible degree.  What about the fact that the majority of economists, including some of the world’s leading economic thinkers, had comprehensively rejected the Tories’ austerity agenda?  Or that the former Governor of the Bank of England had acknowledged that Labour was not responsible for the crash and that its causes were “rooted in the financial sector”?  Or that even the IMF itself had advocated fiscal stimulus of the kind implemented by the previous government when the banks crashed?  Or that Cameron and Osborne had themselves once committed the Conservatives to matching Labour’s (supposedly reckless) public spending until at least 2010-11?  Of course none of this mattered, and later that night I watched through my hands as a bitterly hostile Question Time audience turned on Ed Miliband following his denial that the previous Labour government had overspent. It was stomach-churning, and former Labour minister Alan Johnson later wrote in the Guardian that from that moment on the die was cast.  How the hell had the Tories’ pulled it off?

 

To be fair, I think we all now appreciate that the die had been cast much earlier.  For some time it has been widely recognised that in the field of ideological warfare — one in which the Conservative Party has a natural advantage given itssupport in the press — the real damage was done over the summer of 2010, when during a prolonged bout of navel-gazing Labour failed to offer any resistance whatsoever to the Coalition’s attacks on its economic record, and in the words of historian and commentator Alwyn Turner “it was during that period that the narrative of the financial crash and crisis was firmly fixed in the public consciousness.”  From then on, the agenda was set, just as it had been for much of the late twentieth century: Labour was the party of profligacy and recklessness, while the Conservatives were the party of hard-headed realism and competency.

 

The Two Eds: a mixed response to the myth of profligacy 

 

By the time Ed Miliband was elected leader in the Autumn of 2010, the myth of Labour having brought the country to its knees was firmly established, and the party’s response over the course of the next four and a half years was at best half-hearted and at worst completely muddled.  On the one hand, Miliband condemned austerity at such labour movement mass gatherings as the 2011 TUC rally in Hyde Park and the Durham Miners Gala in 2012, using every opportunity to mock the self-serving millionaires of Cameron’s cabinet (sometimes highly effectively); and yet on the other hand, Miliband and Balls simultaneously committed Labour to continued spending restraint, welfare cuts and economic austerity into the next Parliament, admitting somewhat ambiguously that Labour had “made mistakes” on the economy.  It was, perhaps, a classic example of triangulation gone wrong; an attempt to square every circle by rhetorically outflanking the Conservatives in their lunatic attempt to shrink the state while at the same time retaining the possibility of a more sane, rational and indeed Keynesian approach to deficit-reduction such as the one advocated privately (and sometimes publicly) by the inimitable Ed Balls.   In this respect, Tim Bale’s recent account of Ed Miliband as a split personality encompassing ‘two Eds’ is one that resonates:

 

There is the Ed who genuinely thinks that Blue Labour was onto something, who really does want radical reforms to the governance and economy of the UK, who is absolutely convinced of the merits of an elected senate and a private sector more like Germany’s, who longs to unlock the elusive ‘progressive consensus’ supposedly denied us by short-sighted centre-left politicians and an outdated electoral system, who believes in standing up to Israel and even, on occasions, the United States itself, and whose belief in a more empathic, emollient style of leadership comes over as completely sincere to people who meet him, or see him speak, in person.  Then there is the Ed who was Gordon Brown’s apprentice, who, for all his denials, is as anxious as Brown about what the papers are saying, who almost relishes a crisis because that is when many people say he is at his best, who, if truth be told, really values the opinion of only insiders rather than outsiders, professionals rather than insurgents.

 

According to this view, Ed Number One wants to let a thousand flowers bloom and have IPPR write a grand, sweeping Condition of Britain report that recasts social democracy for the post-crash era.  Ed Number Two, however, wants to make sure it says nothing that he cannot defend in the Sun or on Marr. Like Brown, it is said, he tends to play for time, is reluctant to close down options lest he make the wrong choice, and so will always try to have his cake and eat it too (Bale 2015, p.263).

 

Throughout this time, though, I sympathised with the Labour leadership’s plight, as it found itself increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place: denounced inside the party and out, on one side for its “lurch to the left” and the other for its “lurch to the right”,  the dilemma Miliband and Balls faced was the same which had met every Labour leadership in times of global economic crisis since Ramsay McDonald in the 1920s: in an inherently conservative electoral system geared towards moderation and compromise, how could Labour appeal both to its core support and to those voters in a handful of swing constituencies who wielded such wildly disproportionate influence over the outcome of UK elections?  Its answer would need to address the harsh reality — abhorrent to people like me — that cuts to public spending commanded widespread support in the country regardless of what Labour said about them; and as the dearly departedStuart Hall once observed (with reference to the allure of Margaret Thatcher), the appeal of the Government’s austerity agenda was that it spoke to “something deep in the English psyche: its masochism.  The need which the English seem to have to be ticked off by Nanny and sent to bed without pudding. The calculus by which every good summer has to be paid for by twenty bad winters. The Dunkirk Spirit — the worse off we are, the better we behave.”   

 

Labour’s answer, as it happened, was a decent one: muddled and ineffective though its response to questions about spending cuts might be, the “cost of living” narrative it came up with to counter the “tough love” of the Tories’ austerity agenda seemed to be both popular and effective.  Whereas David Miliband might well have done the “counter-intuitive” thing and given his whole-hearted backing to ConDem austerity (bedroom tax and all) — no doubt making it a question of competency rather than principle, and cloaking it in the impenetrably wonkish and alienating jargon for which he was famous — at least his brother Ed made some attempt to think through and beyond the calamitous economic legacies of Thatcherism and New Labour, particularly in his under-discussed (and underdeveloped) ambition for a new and more corporatist German-style capitalism, and in his intellectual flirting with some of the ideas put forward by Blue Labour.

 

Labour’s commitment to freeze energy prices was widely seen as a shrewd move in terms of its appeal to a muchbroader constituency than core Labour voters, while a range of other pledges (albeit piecemeal) were sufficient to convince any sane observer that although it still occupied the centre-ground Miliband had indeed moved the Party moderately to the left: restoring the 10p rate of tax, reversing coalition cuts to corporation tax, repealing the bedroom tax, regulating rail and bus fares, introducing additional taxes on mansions, millionaires and bankers’ bonuses, and even a commitment to replacing the House of Lords with an elected senate.  He’d also rightly (and popularly) confronted News International and the Daily Mail to an extent unimaginable in the days of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, and as the election approached in May 2015 there was plenty of evidence that, despite his poor approval ratings, the more voters saw of Miliband, the more they liked him.

 

And so, despite history not being on our side, I personally awoke on 7th May full of cautious optimism, with polls predicting months (if not years) in advance that it would be, at the very least, a close run thing; that while the public had never warmed to Miliband as leader, neither had it warmed to the Coalition; and that while Labour still wasn’t trusted on the economy, nor were Cameron’s Conservatives seen to be sufficiently “in touch” with the electorate to carry them home — particularly in light of their continuing post-war decline.  How wrong I was

 

Meltdown and aftermath: bad polls and the election post-mortem

 

I spent the last few hours before polls closed campaigning in neighbouring Stockton South, the eighth tightest Tory marginal in the country, where James Wharton had scraped home to unseat Labour’s Dari Taylor by a margin of just 332 votes in 2010.  It was a gorgeous, sunny Spring evening and having pounded the streets for an hour or so, I paid a flying visit to my parents’ home in Billingham.  We tuned into the election coverage at 10pm and were duly gobsmacked when the results of the exit poll came through: Tories on course for a majority.

 

I’m not even sure why I was surprised.  This was, after all, the Conservative Party of 2015: a well-funded, well-oiled, cunning, ruthless and calculating electoral machine which is not only Britain’s natural party of government but also the most successful political party in the democratic world.  Miliband had never been popular, even among Labour voters, and we all knew (to our immense frustration) that over the previous five years the Tories had been allowed to win the economic argument almost by default.  In the end, the relentlessly cynical but devastatingly clinical campaign masterminded by Lynton Crosby and Jim Messina saw Cameron’s Tories romp home to victory, and in marginal Stockton South — where the most recent Ashcroft poll had put Labour five points ahead, and where the BBC’s Jeremy Vine was still predicting a Labour victory at 1am — James Wharton actually increased his majority from 332 to more than 5,000.

 

And so it proved to be a truly terrible night, much worse than even the exit polls had predicted.  Though the big polling companies had got it disastrously wrong, the superb Number Cruncher Politics had called it spot on, showing in fascinating detail on the eve of the election how previous polls had consistently overestimated Labour, ominouslyconcluding: “It’s perfectly plausible that the changes [in the political landscape since 2010] have broken these models, in which case we can expect the sort of inconclusive outcome that polls are indicating. But it is also quite possible that it’s the opinion polls (themselves models of public opinion) that they’ve broken. If the pattern in this particular model does hold, then the most likely outcome would be a Conservative victory with an overall majority.” 

 

Furthermore, we now know that Labour knew it was losing, and as Labour Uncut and the New Statesman reported just days before the election, the Tories’ scare-mongering about the ” chaos” of an SNP-backed Labour minority government seems to have been key in shifting millions of wavering voters — and, crucially, former Lib Dem voters — into the Tory camp.   As Labour pollster James Morris this week explained:

 

A four point Labour lead in early Sept, turned into a tie in October, followed by small Tory leads; prompting the party to put reassurance on fiscal policy and immigration at the heart of the campaign launch before Christmas. This plan worked through the opening weeks of the short campaign, with Labour pulling ahead in the English marginals following Ed Miliband’s strong debate performances and the non-doms row.

 

Our final poll, in late April, told a different story. As focus groups showed the SNP attacks landing, we had Labour behind in the marginal seats among likely voters. A public poll in a similar set of seats at the same time showed a 3 point Labour lead.

 

The campaign strongly toughened our stance on the SNP before the final Question Time, but it was not enough. The Tories successfully used the fear of Scottish influence as a way of catalyzing pre-existing doubts about Labour in a way that had not been possible earlier in the campaign.

 

One area where we were wrong was the belief that the Tories were facing even deeper structural problems than Labour. Their surge against the Lib Dems in the west country was invisible to us. Labour’s collapse in Scotland gave the Tories an unexpected weapon with which to squeeze Ukip. Labour’s relative inability to reach into the Tory vote proved even more costly than expected.

 

Andrew Marr is probably on the money in writing that it was a “combination of the thought of a relatively weak government, which would have to negotiate its way through its programme, with the anti-Trident and anti-austerity messages of the SNP, that spooked much of Middle England.” The president of YouGov, Peter Kellner, made a related point in the Sunday Times: “They are ‘shy Tories’ not because they are unwilling to admit their choice of party to a stranger but because they really would like to support someone else but, faced with a ballot paper in the privacy of a polling both, simply can’t.”  And so, as the Lib Dem vote collapsed, former Lib Dems up and down the country simply flocked to the Conservative Party — and so too did many Labour voters, especially in the Midlands and Home Counties.  Sadly for us, things were no different in Stockton South.

 

The air war and the ground war: micro-targeting and getting out the vote

 

Elsewhere, the predictions of academic observers such as Rob Ford were confirmed, as “UKIP surged in seats with large concentrations of poorer, white working-class English nationalists [parts of Thornaby spring to mind], many of whom sympathised with Labour’s economic message but not the people delivering it.”  And Labour’s fate was further sealed by its overly optimistic interpretations not only of who would vote for it, but also who would vote at all, for as ComRes bluntly put it, who votes, wins: older people in greater numbers than younger people, wealthy people in greater numbers than poorer people, home owners more than renters, etc. As one academic blogger commented in the election aftermath:  “Basically, and very provisionally, we suspect that had young people voted in the same numbers that older people did, Labour’s vote would have held up much better. They didn’t, they don’t usually, and they’re unlikely to in the future. Get used to it. But many of them said that they would, and turnout levels as projected from polls were much higher than than they turned out to be in reality.”

 

Unfortunately this proved to be another flaw in a Labour “ground operation” that many of us thought was vastly superior to the Tories’.  Peter Kellner reported in late April that the latter were “losing both the air war and the ground war. Voters are warming to the idea of an Ed Miliband-led government, and Labour is contacting more voters in local constituencies … in person, by phone, via leaflets and by email.”  In Stockton South, Labour activists apparently knocked on 35,000 doors in the last five years, a figure I can well believe knowing several of the activists who went out day after day, all year round, come wind, snow, hail or sleet.  Yet speaking to the Daily Telegraph this weekend, Tory strategist Lynton Crosby opined: “Labour were always trying to talk up how clever they were… How they were having 4 million conversations across the country. Well, we had more than that — but you don’t talk about it.”

 

Whatever else the Tories were doing, it worked.  In Stockton South, where James Wharton was lavished with donations from big business, letter boxes were flooded with Conservative leaflets, newsletters and target mail on a regular basis in the years leading up to the election, and come April 2015 billboards bearing the image of Alex Salmond “grabbing cash” could be seen in several locations across the constituency.  It is also likely that the money spent by the Conservative Party on number-crunching — masterminded by American strategist Jim Messina — played as crucial a role in Wharton’s resounding victory as it did in the Tories’ resurgence elsewhere, particularly its raids into formerly Lib Dem territory in areas of Stockton South like Eaglescliffe and Elm Tree.

 

Speaking to the Spectator last week, Messina commented that he and Crosby were always confident of victory, and that their polls had the Tories on 312 seats on the morning of the election: “CTF [Crosby Textor Group], Lynton’s firm, was doing daily tracking stuff and we were doing a bunch of analytics and modelling every day as well.  Both of us had the same data so we were very sure.”  The fact that Wharton was incumbent clearly helped, while the ability to draw on CCHQ’s data to engage in micro-targeting — a recent American innovation particularly associated with Messina — may well have influenced the multifarious messages delivered to voters in different areas of Stockton.  As impressive asLabour’s data-based operation might be, it probably wasn’t as sophisticated as whatever the Tories were up to, with the result on the day itself being that many of those coveted “Labour promises” simply evaporated.

 

The future: from despair to… where?

 

So where do we go from here?  From the earliest hours of 8th May, the Blairites were out in force with suggestions aplenty.  Lord Mandleson was out of the blocks early, as was Lord Hutton, who somehow arrived at the incredible conclusion that Labour lost the election because its manifesto amounted to an “old school socialist menu”.  This was followed by Labour-minister-turned-Tory-advisor Alan Milburn insisting that Miliband was wrong to think the public had moved “massively to the left”, and also by the Times’ aptly-named Phil Collins (former investment banker and speech-writer for Tony Blair) baying for a return to dyed-in-the-wool New Labourism — including continued calls for the trade union link to be severed.  The usual chorus of voices (Rentoul, Ganesh, Aaronovitch etc.) weren’t far behind either.

 

Contemptible as some of these people are (and just as dogmatic as those on the left they constantly vilify), they are right about the political importance of “aspiration”, and I am inclined to agree with one left-wing writer that “it should be possible on the one hand to talk to those on the periphery of society — the low paid on zero hours contracts etc — whilst simultaneously understanding that most people don’t want to be where they are now in five or 10 years’ time.”  Indeed,Owen Jones has made a similar point.

 

What the Blairites fail to appreciate, however, is how different the world really is from the one they inhabited in their glorious heyday from 1997-2007.  Phil Collins complains that Miliband’s Labour “talked incessantly about the top 1 per cent of the country and often about the bottom 10 per cent but hardly ever about anyone else in between” and “gave the impression either of not caring about wealth generation or of being actively hostile to it.”  But people like him just cannot comprehend the fact that it was New Labour’s awe-stricken fixation with wealth creation — particularly in the City of London and the wider financial services sector, on which Blair and Brown depended for the boom which sustained their entire political project — that blinded it to the disaster of impending global financial meltdown in 2007, and (simultaneously) to declining support for the party in Scotland, where a left-wing social democratic competitor would one day capitalise on Labour’s long-term ambivalence towards the “bottom 10 per cent”.

 

One academic observer has already noted that “the challenge Labour (and its next leader) faces is to address the defection of ‘aspirational’ voters in southern England and the Midlands, the drift to UKIP in the North, and the collapse of the Labour vote to the SNP in Scotland. This will be a difficult balancing-act.  There is no off-the-shelf political strategy, either Michael Foot circa 1983 or Tony Blair circa 1997 that would produce guaranteed political success in 2020.”  He is spot on.  It will require something new, and it will require aspects of Ed Miliband’s legacy being built upon, not scrapped altogether as some of the walking dead of New Labour maintain.  Electoral politics in the UK necessitates coalition-building and of all the analyses of Labour’s predicament to have emerged since 8th May, those of John Harris and Jon Cruddas are perhaps the most enlightening in terms of what Labour needs to do if it hopes to form a government at any time in the next two decades.

 

The necessity of coalition-building may look like a new thing, which was hardly necessary when Labour was a genuine movement. But it is not. Indeed, if any wannabe Labour leader is minded to actually read anything right now, they should start with The Road to 1945, Paul Addison’s brilliant account (first published in the mid-70s) of what lay behind Labour’s most seismic victory. It is the story not just of how Britain’s experience of war set the stage, but decades of work, way beyond the party and the unions. Campaigning for child benefit, for example, began in 1917, thanks to Eleanor Rathbone, an independent MP from Liverpool. A semi-independent offshoot of the board of education began lobbying for the raising of the school leaving age to 15 in 1926. Meanwhile, John Maynard Keynes was blazing a trail away from austerity, and there was a cacophony about a whole range of other subjects, from nutrition to new towns.

 

I can just about imagine some latter day version of all this – it might encompass everything from Mumsnet through Britain’s churches, what remains of progressive academia, and out into single-issue campaigns that can these days acquire momentum at speed. It would also push the centre-left’s lamentably economistic agenda into places in which it is too uncomfortable: loneliness, family breakdown, an obvious crisis in masculinity, the return of hunger to our towns and cities, and more. The trouble is, I cannot imagine most of the Labour elite having either the wit or humility to get involved.

 

Of course, minus the collectivizing experience of Total War, it might be a tad ambitious to hope for the kind of all-embracing electoral coalition that saw overwhelming numbers of working, middle and upper class people ‘go socialist’ in 1945.  But I think Harris is broadly on the right track, and it is clear from Cruddas’s comments that much of the relevant policy work in these areas was being done under the Miliband regime — unfortunately, though, it was ditched before it could come into fruition.  If, however, we can avoid the regressive disaster of a Labour party led by the likes of Liz Kendall, Tristam Hunt and Caroline Flint, then perhaps it’s not too late for such thinking to play a role in the historic rejuvenation of the party which is now needed.

 

As for what the rest of us do as we head back to normal, everyday life under the tyranny of a Conservative majority government, I think Rebecca Winson is right: what else can we do but keep on keepin’ on?