CN

This was the first election where I’ve been a candidate, which I found all quite surreal to be honest. I’m hoping that side of things gets easier in future elections! But I think the biggest difference I noticed was the mood on the doorstep. It wasn’t hostility, though there was pockets of that. But people really were frustrated with the entire political system and were opting out altogether. I’ve heard things like “all politicians are the same” before, but this was like: “I don’t think we live in a democracy anymore”. Apathy has turned into alienation, which is much more difficult to come back from.

I think it’s really important that we don’t rush to quick conclusions from a defeat this heavy, as the party’s future is in a pretty precarious place if we get it wrong. But there were some things that were clear, at least in my seat.

The biggest was the party’s Brexit position. Part of the issue is that we came to the conclusion we did too late and that what we were saying didn’t resonate with people. Too many people (and a majority of people I spoke to were lifelong Labour voters) thought that our position wasn’t about getting the best possible deal but about trying to frustrate the process of leaving because fundamentally we wanted to stay.

You can say the referendum may only have been an ‘advisory vote’, but it was advice Labour should have taken. The last three years should have been about articulating a vision for what a Labour Brexit and our future relationship with Europe would look like. We failed to do that and I think we paid the price for it.

The second was concerns around our leadership, and I spent far more time talking about things like the IRA than I ever expected to in 2019, as I don’t think we were good enough at rebutting a lot of that stuff. And finally, I think there was confusion over our manifesto. There wasn’t anything in there that was wrong per se, but I don’t think we laid out a vision and a narrative that encapsulated what we were trying to achieve. Announcements on additional spending commitments after the manifesto was launched undermined our claim that it was fully costed and damaged our credibility – we just weren’t trusted to deliver what we said we wanted to.

But I think the problems go deeper than all of that, and if we want to be serious about getting into government, we need to reflect not just on this election result but the last decade or so of our vote dropping away, the rise in right-wing populism globally, and how we can turn the tide there.