Actually, on the morning of the election, I felt quite optimistic.
I had a feeling that many, like me, would want to vote this ‘rotten Government’ out. The weather was quite good – so surely the turnout would be good? Indeed, the turnout turned out to be very good.
As the day progressed, I made the occasional phone call. One Labour candidate was very positive about Labour’s chances; one veteran campaigner for Labour, not himself a candidate, was concentrating ‘on getting the vote out’.
Deride the polls as you want. And we kept on being told the disclaimers by those ‘in the thick of it’ about opinion polls – that they could be unreliable. Lord Ashcroft had converted the sephology pseudoscience into an accurate forecast, it appeared. We believed it was ‘neck and neck’, and, for all we know, it might have been until the end of the campaign.
Possibly there were two ‘turning points’.
One happened in the same TV election ‘debate’, one where David Cameron actually attended, and Ed Miliband nearly fell over in exiting the stage. Miliband refused to apologise for the spend under Labour. What would have been sensible was to explain how there was indeed a spend to improve public services, now in decay (arguably), but the Conservatives had pledged to match this spend; and the Conservative would have had to rescue the banks in an emergency way like Labour. Instead, it was perceived that Miliband ‘refused to apologise’. This was never an argument that Ed Miliband was likely to win, more than five years after it was originally lost.
Ghosts of New Labour past, Alan Johnson, John Reid, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and Alastair Campbell, have not wasted time in ‘offering advice’. Indeed they’ve been offering advice all throughout Miliband’s leadership. The latest advice converges on the notion that Ed Miliband did not promote ‘enterprise’ and ‘aspiration’ sufficiently. That Miliband hated the functioning of a small number of large providers in an oligopoly was clear to see. What voters saw at the first instance was Miliband hating big business; many, thanks to the right wing media too, were convinced he hated all business too. Whereas ‘the white van incident’ was not the deal breaker, the concern that Labour disliked business always festered on. Personally, I’ve never known many Labour voters to have liked Ed Balls. Balls, despite being a renowned Keynesian academic, was too intimately involved with the previous Brown government, and when it appeared he was advocating an ‘austerity-life’, he patently lost the confidence of many left wing sympathetic voters.
But Labour for a number of years made tragic mistakes. Its opposition to welfare reform, hitting hard disabled voters, was always lack lustre, not reflected in the ‘door knocking’ exercise of Labour activists. The position adopted by Rachel Reeves seemed to be much despised by many members of Labour, as not caring about the plight of disabled people who’d lost their benefits, but rather fixated on deficit reduction. In all the economic discussions about ‘there’s no money left’, no senior Labour figure, including Ed Miliband, had offered that national debt had gone through the roof. It is furthermore argued that Labour actually won in its traditional coal mining areas. Instead of opposing fracking, which would have been pertinent in Scotland, Labour simply sat on the fence.
The NHS ‘offer’ was synthetic, with “time to care”. People who knew the NHS narrative well knew this was entirely fraudulent, given the camaraderie in the main political parties in implementing ‘efficiency savings’, a form of austerity, aka cuts. Many also knew that many NHS Trusts were not able to ‘balance the books’ because of the crippling burden of PFI (manifest in a number of ways), exhibiting the attack on privatisation to be one of ‘methinks the lady doth protesteth too much’. Labour MPs were invariably unable to say why the policy constituted privatisation, with no semblance of an ‘initial public offering’ or ‘rights issue'; all that had to be said was it constituted transfer of resources from the public sector to the private sector. And, yet despite this, the reaction of campaigners was bitty, factional and took on a robust feeling of infighting. The Conservatives’ enemy on the NHS was sadly divided.
The second turning point was the lightbulb moment in people’s minds that Labour would be unable to form a majority in the absence of support from the SNP. Ed Miliband refusing to talk to the SNP, plainly ludicrous in the event that the arithmetic might have forced this, reinforced a feeling that Labour was ‘above the SNP’. It is still held Jim Murphy worked ‘incredibly hard’, but a landslide by the SNP was expected from the very start. Admittedly Jim Murphy, and Kezia Dugdale whose lack of political ability is in no dispute, would have found it hard to combat the tide of national feeling from the very start, but Murphy always appeared as Labour Westminster’s man; whilst it can be argued that many same issues affecting Scots are the same issues affecting English voters, such as Bedroom Tax or zero hours contracts, Jim Murphy appeared completely ineffective in exposing SNP’s lack of success in Scotland in key policy areas. Whenever opinion polls were presented in England, no mention was made of the SNP, leading to a totally artificial picture of the problems to come on voting day.
With ‘total wipeout’ in Scotland, there was no way a lean 35% strategy could have been expected to work. As it was Labour achieved far less proportion of the vote. The lack of resilience in this strategy was exposed to the hilt when Liberal Democrats transferred to the Tory Party, not wishing a Labour government of any sort; and Scottish Labour lost nearly all of their seats. There’s possibly a feeling of ‘things in the economy aren’t that bad’ (given that Ed Miliband had led people to focus on their quality of life), and some previous LibDem voters did want ‘the economic job to be finished’ but with the Conservative Party. Whatever you think of the LibDems’ economic proficiency under Danny Alexander, Danny Alexander successfully became a pantomime dame figure of this parliament; and his ‘alternative budget’ was one sign of delusion.
Another ‘magic moment’ was undeniably the pledge stone, a variant of the pledge card.
Most people can remember the pledge stone picture going around Twitter, but can’t remember what the exact pledges were. Twitter had the effect of making its activists feel good, rather than necessarily turning marginal voters around. Twitter also was very good for hosting meaningless conversations; such as Chris Leslie MP’s denial that the pledge stone would require planning permission, if the stone were installed in 10 Downing Street.
But some candidates did win – and well done to them! There were some equally good candidates who didn’t win – and back luck to them. Labour now finds itself yet again in the unenviable position of finding solutions, and will in no doubt award peerages to friends of the winning candidate. At the heart of Labour is an operational malaise of being completely obstructive to ideas which have not been generated or endorsed from the party machine, and a fixation on lots of gimmicks (like the millions of conversations). Conversely, I don’t expect the Conservatives to hold to many of their election promises, like not hiking up taxes in the next five years, or the NHS spend they offered. But there was a raw feeling amongst many that Ed Miliband was not ‘the chosen one’ from the public’s perspective, and, if candidates won on the doorstep with floating voters, it was despite of him because of him. There’s no doubt, however, David Cameron is an intensely disliked man from many on the left, which is what makes his strengthened majority so hard to swallow, along with a feeling of ‘impending doom’ such as further cuts, hospital closures and axing of the Human Rights Act (which will undoubtedly be ‘fixed’ by Michael Gove in the short term).
I think the attacks on Labour going back to the 1970s are hyperbolic, and Ed Miliband was definitely onto something in how markets can fail the customer. Ed Miliband was right to set his narrative, but possibly did lurch too much in one direction; Ed Miliband could have wooed small business as much as he appeared to dislike big business, but he chose not to. Ironically, that was partly the responsibility of one of the people tipped to take over Ed Miliband’s job, Chuka Umunna. Certainly, the attacks on Ed Miliband personally were nasty, for example that relentless picture of the bacon butty; but Ed Miliband ‘taking them on’ was perhaps bound to end in tears.
What this points to is that New Labour supporters want to return to New Labour, and people on the left don’t think he was ‘left enough’. This is some extent reflected in the fact Scotland voted SNP, and England (apart from London) voted Tory. But Ed Miliband always gave the impression of ‘trying to hard’, and a perfect storm of Scottish nationalism and economic incompetence might have led to his Party behind 90 seats behind the Conservatives. We waited for ages for policy nuggets to emerge from John Cruddas last time, and they were far too late anyway. Sadly, left wing voters have Twitter, petitions and protests to keep them occupied in the next five years, while the Labour Party machine do endless internal meetings for the in-crowd. And Labour will keep preaching to an ever dwindling converted. Anyway, it was a great election for Labour to lose.
