Two months after a disastrous election defeat, Labour is mired in a lengthy, inwardly focused leadership election. The debates are of micro-politics, not existential crisis. There is an assumption of relevance, just as the party is stalked by irrelevance. It is as though the election never happened. Maybe Labour needs reminding what happened on 7 May. It not only lost but was routed in many heartlands, crushed in marginals and rendered virtually invisible in the south. To paraphrase the now infamous foreign football commentator who relished an England defeat, “Labour, your boys took one hell of a beating.”

If a leaked poll is any guide, then a growing number of the Labour party membership now seem to view Jeremy Corbyn as the answer to that drubbing. This is like a pupil who, on being told they answered incorrectly, repeats the same answer shouting ever more forcefully. It’s still the wrong answer. The party faces a choice. It can strive to get re-elected and thereby have an impact on those it purports to represent. Or it can sink in to a warm bath of delusion and face an even larger wipeout in 2020.

The problem isn’t just Corbyn, since none in the leadership election inspires real confidence. The personalities and the debates show just how far Labour has to go to make the journey from opposition to government-in-waiting. The most important takeaway from Tony Blair’s leadership is not a ready-made policy handbook to lead the party again to electoral victory: the questions facing the country have evolved too fundamentally in the last 20 years. Rather, the crucial insight is that an opposition leader hoping to become prime minister must locate themselves in the centre of public opinion and, from that vantage point, try to influence and have an impact on behalf of those they represent. The lessons of Ed Miliband’s leadership is that it is impossible to conjure a winning position if you are too far from the centre. Fun, insurgent, energising, comforting maybe – but not winning.

New research published today in the Observer shows a devastatingly large gap between Labour and British voters. The research, carried out with groups of voters in marginal constituencies who voted Labour in 2010 but deserted the party in 2015, shows how and why these people emphatically rejected Miliband’s party. The party membership could choose to ignore this and blame the electorate for not getting the message or its friends in the media for obscuring it – that way oblivion lies. As the report says: “Labour is staring down the barrel of a gun. ‘One more heave’ is not even an option… it has to completely overhaul itself…”

These voters didn’t trust Labour to run the economy, some even saying they would only consider voting for Labour again once the party had proved its credibility in government.

Liz Kendal speaks as the other candidates to be Labour leader look on during a hustings in Glasgow. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

They considered Labour to be a party of punitive taxation for the very richest, used to pay welfare handouts for the poorest – with little to offer the majority of voters in between. They couldn’t understand why Labour didn’t have anything convincing to say to them about the impacts of immigration on jobs and public services. And they were wholly sceptical of what they saw as attempts to buy off middle Britain with a narrow retail offer, such as its pledge to increase free childcare, on which Labour ended up being outbid by the Tories. For these voters (and remember they were Labour voters in 2010), Miliband’s party was seen as too narrowly focused on the welfare state and the public sector, not a party of those trying to make ends meet; a party that understood how to borrow money but not make it. They saw Labour as obsessed with the very rich and the very poor, but with nothing to say to those who just “wanted to get on in life”. These views will be familiar to any Labour activist knocking on doors in swing seats. What’s surprising, though, is that these opinions are voiced not by swing voters who deserted the party in 2010, but Labour voters who stuck with the party back then.

Labour’s terrible disconnect with voters was disguised by pre-election polling. But the shocking election result must wake up the party to this disconnect: Labour has to avoid making the same mistakes as it did after the 2010 election or it will sleepwalk to another defeat. Only a couple of voices on the frontbench – Tristram Hunt, Chuka Umunna – seem fully to grasp the scale of the challenge. There is a fundamental truth about winning elections: parties only win if they convince voters they have the answers to questions at the forefront of the voters’ minds. Parties can help shape those questions, but they can’t tell voters what they should be and certainly can’t ignore the ones that they don’t like.



The most important question for voters in 2015 was whether they could trust Labour with the economy. And it will be the same in 2020, in 2025 and 2030. It is a question that never goes away for parties of the centre-left, in good economic times or bad.

Miliband’s approach to economic credibility was to treat it as a side project: the odd symbolic announcement immediately drowned out by opposition to spending cuts. There was a mistaken belief that credibility could be attained simply by costing out new spending commitments. The lesson from 2015 – and 2010, and 1992 – is that without economic credibility, Labour is consigned to perennial opposition. But a Labour party about economic credibility and nothing else is equally pointless. Far from being a sideshow, economic credibility needs to frame the whole centre-left project. Labour needs to craft a new agenda for 2020 that is clearly differentiated from that of the right, but which does not rely on spending pledges – costed or not – at its heart. It needs a new reason to be.

Re-establishing economic credibility also means addressing the perception that Labour is again a party of welfare handouts. Voters have an intuitively British notion of fairness – of reciprocity and reward for contribution. Labour needs to speak more to this alongside the redistributive notion of fairness found in university seminar rooms. Central to the notion of fairness is immigration. Nothing better crystallises Labour’s problem with this than Gordon Brown’s comments about Gillian Duffy in 2010. Labour has never shaken off its image as a party of the London liberal elite that simply doesn’t get the stresses and strains – economic, but also cultural – that have come with globalisation, the changing structure of our labour market and immigration. The centre-left should embrace the idea that governments owe a degree of protection to their citizens. But a modern form of protectionism cannot simply be about introducing immigration controls.

Ed Miliband campaigning in the lead up to the general election in May. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

As Patrick Diamond notes, writing on theguardian.com, Labour is not alone in being confused in how to respond, just as social democrats across Europe find the sands shifting under their feet. “That predicament, a deep underlying confusion about basic political objectives, is afflicting social democratic parties across Europe: torn between being traditional communitarian parties with a distinctive connection to the working class and liberal cosmopolitan parties that embrace the diversity of modern society but don’t fulfil their historic role of providing a bulwark against global capitalism.

“It isn’t untenable for a political party to retain both liberal and communitarian instincts (as Labour did under Attlee, Wilson and Blair), but there has to be honesty about where the tensions lie.”

Centre-left parties need to find convincing solutions to some of the hardest questions of our time: what do you do about stagnating wages in the middle? Given public spending constraints and the limitations of tax credits, what do you do about the fact too many people in work can’t earn enough to support their families? How do you become as interested in making money, as borrowing and spending it? What is the proper relationship between state and business? How will technology fundamentally reshape our world – and what role does a centre-left party have in shaping or harnessing those changes?

Labour needs to find enthusiasm for utilitarian, not sectarian, solutions. People don’t care if services are top down, or decentralised, run by the public sector or the private sector, so long as they work and neither should Labour. Labour’s debate about the public sector is lazy: too much reactionary instinct that any reform agenda spells privatisation, too much reliance on one-size-fits-all paradigms such as decentralisation.

Miliband put his finger on something important when he identified a growing concern that things will be harder for this generation of young people compared to their parents. Here is where Labour must be brave enough to signpost: it needs to craft a tough message that if we want young people to get on, the older generation may need to pay a price: for example, the stagnating house prices that are an inevitable consequence of achieving greater affordability. And it must show much more creativity in thinking about how we prepare young people for the world: why throw money at universities to reduce tuition fees instead of getting them to deliver more for our young people innovative – and cheaper – ways? Why compete with the Conservatives on expanding poor-quality, watered-down apprenticeships, instead of asking more fundamental questions about what a 21st-century school-to-work transition should look like for young people forging a career not in German manufacturing, but in the British service sector?

The questions Labour must answer now are harder than the ones it faced in the mid-1990s. But this leadership contest has barely focused on even asking the questions, let alone trying to answer them. In retrospect, the party was naive to think Miliband’s reforms to the leadership election process would make it more open. In reality, only the unions have had the machinery to sign up supporters. Labour’s increasingly difficult relationship with recalcitrant, deeply conservative and male-dominated unions needs to be rethought. They are rapidly becoming a redoubt of people working in the public sector and have virtually no appeal to those who work in the private sector. Labour cannot afford to be dragged on to their increasingly narrow patch.

Even as the Conservatives are masterfully shaping the territory on which the 2020 election battle will be fought, Labour is focused on an introspective conversation with its members, not a dialogue with the country.

Miliband spent five years trying to show he could win with a centre-left agenda that tacked on economic credibility as an afterthought. We gave that agenda qualified support. But that agenda failed. He fractured his party’s connection to the British people. As Hunt noted last week, for Labour to shape the country’s political centre of gravity it must wield political power, and to do this, it must convince the centre ground. That’s politics, not ideology. Labour needs to decide which it is more interested in.