I was going to entitle this post along the lines that Labour is too London-centric.

However, that may not be true. I have a niggling doubt over Ken Livingstone winning the London Mayor race. I can’t put my finger on it. It possibly is due to a ‘feel good’ factor which might engulf London due to the London Olympics. It certainly isn’t due to the sheer volume of unproductive road works in London, reducing the number of workable road lanes to one or two in some hotspots (for example Regent Street).

I asked a London cabbie why he wouldn’t be voting for Ken. In fact, the cabbie alluded to the fact that it wasn’t actually in his opinion any refusal of Labour, it was just that ‘there must be fresh faces who should be given a chance instead of Ken’. Good point – is Ken the only man for the job? Labour would benefit greatly from having a presence in London at a senior political level – and my gut feeling is that it will lose this opportunity this time around.

Maybe it’s simply that Labour is Westminster-centric. This possibly may be true if Rachel Reeves MP is described as a ‘research assistant to Ed Balls’ on a primetime political programme, and they are both seen on a spontaneous photoshoot buying a pasty. I’m tempted to think that Bradford West is a ‘flash-in-the-pan’, though I agree with the Respect Party in that this election was not won by ‘The Muslim Vote’ in the ‘Bradford Spring’. There are good reasons mooted for why Labour lost it – namely, assumption of an agenda which appears to support cuts and austerity.

While Ed Balls can claim a Tory-lite ground of ‘cutting less deep less fast’, the issue is that I bet my life that he would embrace further cuts in 2015, when the deficit is probably two or three years away from being eliminated. So Ed Miliband has announced that he would like to govern for the whole nation. This runs into problems if Labour doesn’t make inroads in London.

It’s an even bigger problem if Labour doesn’t win Glasgow. This would be highly symbolic, particularly given the Scottish independence discussions, but also whether Labour still has not recovered from its long-lasting ‘Southern Discomfort’ problem.

Despite widespread “opposition” to library cuts, NHS Bill, tuition fees, withdrawal of the education support allowance and jobs fund, legal aid cutbacks, welfare reform, there is something still pathological with Labour. The evidence is not there yet that people trust Labour more with the economy, and this is despite the fact that the deficit nearly doubled in February 2012 due to decreased tax receipts and greater expenditure on unemployment benefit, for example.

Nobody can accuse Labour of peaking too soon, but it’s going to take a lot more than the Conservatives losing the 2015 election for Labour to win a majority.

Labour has failed to articulate a clear policy yet. It should now develop further the philosophy behind ethical socialism, and reject a society based entirely on shareholder dividends when there are so many clear market failures. In many senses, Labour is still like a multi-national company that has failed to go Glocal.