by John Braggins
Back in the day if you were bored you could go to the pictures at 3pm for the first showing and stay there until they turned the lights off after the last showing. The projectionist just kept running the films one after the other on a loop. These days politics is beginning to feel like it’s on a loop as well. The arguments Labour faced in the 1980s – Europe, unemployment, benefits, tax and spend and even leadership – are being rehearsed again.
This week, writing in the Guardian’s Comment is Free, Ellie Mae O’Hagan urged Ed Miliband to take Labour back to the time when ‘ordinary people’ voted Labour in the knowledge that Labour was on their side. Suggesting that people who no longer vote Labour would come back into the fold if only it was more left wing is surely to fall into the trap Labour faced in the 1980s.
Ms O’Hagan’s argument is based on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report which states that ‘attitudes of the British public towards poverty have hardened and that the most marked shift has been among Labour voters. These days only 27% of Labour supporters cite social injustice as the main cause of poverty, down from 41% in 1986. Conversely, Labour supporters identifying laziness and lack of willpower as the main cause of poverty rose from 13% to 22% in the same period’.
Her take on it was that ‘perhaps some of those surveyed by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, who would have at one time classed themselves as Labour supporters, have been repelled by the party’s decidedly un-leftwing behaviour.’
Perhaps. Or perhaps not.
The 1983 general election defeat where Labour secured just 27.6% of the national vote – a mere 2.2% ahead of the Liberal/SDP vote and 14.8% behind the Tories – traumatised Labour and put an end to the fierce arguments that raged in 1981 about which direction Labour should go, symbolised by the election of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley as leader and deputy at the Party’s 1983 conference.
Labour began its long journey back to power, but it took another general election defeat in 1987 before any serious research was undertaken to find out what it was Labour would have to do to get elected again.
There were two lines of thought: one, let’s put together a ‘rainbow coalition’ only comprising of those that still vote Labour, ethnic minorities, environmentalists and trade unionists and target our policies towards them, or two, let’s find out why those who had deserted Labour had done so and build a bigger coalition to include them.
It didn’t take a genius to work out that the first option was, in effect, double counting – a Labour voter concerned about the environment who happened to be black and a trade unionist, only had one vote and however that coalition was put together it could never get past 35%.
I was in the camp of ‘let’s find out why people had deserted Labour and see if we could get them back’ and despite reservations, I persuaded the London Labour party to pay for focus group research in Battersea to find out why popular local MP Alf Dubbs had lost his seat in 1987. The startling news in the report was that whilst everyone in the focus groups had either been helped by Alf Dubbs or knew someone who had, none of them had voted for him.
When asked ‘whose side is Labour on’ they said that Labour was on the side of the poor, the sick, the vulnerable and the old, but that Labour wasn’t on their side.
This tied in with much of the early research undertaken by Deborah Mattinson and Philip Gould for the NEC who also reported that swathes of ex-Labour voters no longer thought that Labour spoke for them or understood their aspirations.
The choice quite simply then was either to do what Labour had done since 1951 and blame the voters for not understanding or once again to become the party that looked after the poor and understood the aspirations of those who were moving slowly up the social ladder.
People were becoming more and more socially mobile and wanted a party that would look after them as well as providing a traditional safety net for those less able to look after themselves. However tempting it might be to become once again the party of the poor and dispossessed, the lesson of the past is that there are never enough votes there to win. And unless Labour can win, there is very little it can do to help those that need its help the most.
In understanding the desires of an electorate that want to better themselves, Labour has to accept that the patience of these voters with those who appear to accept a life on benefits is wearing thin. Certainly Channel Four’s recent programme ‘Skint’ did nothing to allay those feelings, featuring people who cared little beyond their immediate family and believed the state owed them a living.
Ms O’Hagan concludes that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report shows that Tony Blair’s Labour Party changed its supporters’ minds about poverty and that Ed Miliband’s Labour Party must change them back.
Just how mad is that?
Tony Blair and New Labour did more to attack poverty than any government since 1945 and that only happened because Labour won, not because it changed supporters’ minds about poverty. So here’s my advice to Ed: ignore people who want to take Labour back to the 1980s and instead appeal to a broader majority of voters that make up the working class and the squeezed middle so we can win once again.
John Braggins worked for the Labour Party for 37 years. He was the first head-office staff member to take charge of by-elections for the party, running all by-elections for the party between 1988 and 2001. Now he and his by-election sidekick, Alan Barnard, have set up their own company, bbm campaigns, to take the techniques, principles and attitudes of electioneering into the corporate and not-for-profit sectors