Labour are forgetting why they lost the election and are now being punished for it
Joe Wright, 28 May 2014
Disaffection is becoming this year’s word in politics (put it into any newspaper’s online search and count the hits); perhaps inevitably given that last year’s word was omni-shambles. As Sunday’s results unequivocally demonstrated, frustration with our political patricians is fast giving way to complete antipathy. How much of Ukip’s success last week can be attributed to the appeal of the people’s ‘anti-politician’, Nigel Farage MEP, and how much is due to the collective inertia of Labour, the Lib Dems and Tories is hard to calculate.
Some of the electoral butchery (near-dismemberment in the case of Lib Dems) is part of the ritual bruising of incumbents toward the end of their tenure. And for parties coming from a low base of support in 2010, plus a recession, there are exceptional factors in this electoral cycle. Nevertheless, for the first time in a century, an election has not been won by either Conservatives or Labour. That is pause for thought.
The most obvious question to ask is why has Labour not capitalised? As the opposition they had the breathing space to think about what happened during the UK’s biggest recession and come up with some answers to our current economic ails. In some ways they did. They decided the root cause of the problem was a financial sector-heavy economy, dominated by a banking sector that had become entirely removed from its key function in a society: funding business and people. They diagnosed the creation of new banks with a clean bill of health, confined to financing a particular region and isolated from the volatile global financial market. It was all part of a wider project to rebalance the way the UK makes its money, pushing it toward production and educating future generations to work in the sector.
It was a complex message to communicate and now it has become lost. Part of that is Labour’s own fault. They have allowed this critique of predatory capitalism – energy companies, rents, and most recently AstraZeneca – mutate into a backward attack on business. Aside from failing to be nuanced about the complexities each of these cases present, Labour has failed utterly to talk about non-predatory capitalism – the stuff we all depend on for our livelihoods. It is damaging their credibility and neglecting the root cause of the problems that led up to 2008.
Industrial and financial policy are hard sells, but voters, many of whom didn’t voice their opinion last week and won’t untill 2015, know Britain’s problems start here at home, not in Brussels (that’s where they go to be ignored). Economic issues will receive more attention once the European election debate has run its course, especially when Ukip has to provide some answers to them without blaming the EU. (There may be a glimpse of this in next week’s Newark by-election.) But Labour are forgetting why they lost the 2010 election and why the recession hit Britain so hard. The cost of living is about stable economic growth and better wages, not attacking businesses.