Bitter Lesson



At the special conference in 2010 when Ed Miliband became Labour's new leader Neil Kinnock famously declared '"We've got our party back", yet how hollow and foolish those words look now as the People's Party crashed to a spectacular election defeat. 

Last time round Labour moved decisively to the left as trade union bosses overturned the will of individual party members, by handing the top job to Ed rather than his older brother, David Miliband.

Five years on that decision has come back to haunt Labour, but even so it won't stop many figures in the party including the likes of Len McCluskey that the answer to the election of a centre right government is to push Labour even further to the left.

Dumb or what?     

Ed’s bitter lesson: you can’t win from the left

By Philip Collins - The Times

Despite having a unconvincing leader and being poor on the economy, Labour thought it could defy the laws of politics

The rules, it turns out, were rules after all. The law of gravity has not been repealed. The second law of thermodynamics remains in place. The law of diminishing returns is as much a law as it ever was and, last night, it worked its negative magic on the Labour party. A new dawn broke, did it not, and the Labour party learnt that the rules of politics are impossible to defy.

Or, rather, this was the lesson it was taught. There is a wonderful Charlie Brown comic strip in which Snoopy complains that Charlie Brown had not, as promised, taught him how to read. Charlie Brown replies: “I only said I’d teach you. I didn’t say you’d learn.” There is no end of ways in which Labour might not learn from an election so disastrous that even Douglas Alexander, the campaign chief, lost his seat. The raucous, indeed lamentable, press will provide the obvious easy excuse. But in the fullness of time, when the numbers congeal on the page, Labour will have to understand that politics is conducted according to certain axioms that cannot be blithely ignored.

The first law of politics that was upheld was that, if you run 20 points behind on your reputation for economic management, then you lose. The Labour party’s end was in its beginning. I can confirm, as the author of the words, that, had he won the Labour leadership, David Miliband would have confirmed that Labour was foolish to have declared an end to the economic cycle. It was a coded way of saying: “Sorry, we spent a little too much.” The next leader of the Labour party will have to say these words and they might as well be their first. It’s a rule.

The second law of politics that turns out not to have been repealed after all is the one which states that you cannot win if your party is led by a man whom the voters do not regard as a credible prime minister. The sub-clause to this law is that this judgment is made mercilessly quickly. If the public find a leader out, there is no way back. Labour knew this really. If Alan Johnson, like Barkis, had been willing, Ed Miliband might not have fought the election. He was a fatal weakness and the proof is in.

Leadership is never about a leader in isolation from the direction led. Mr Miliband might conceivably have been a viable Labour leader if he had sought to place his party in a position from which victory is possible. But he fell foul, through an excessively intellectual approach, of laws three and four of British politics.

The third law is that it is never true that a victory for a right-of-centre government is really a disguised popular wish for a left-wing government. Mr Miliband drew the conclusion that the 2008 banking crisis marked a new period in politics, which sanctioned a more left-of-centre approach. He convinced himself, as people in politics so often do, that the world had spun in his direction. Suddenly, by some strange alchemy and a happy coincidence, the world had become hospitable to the fight over inequality that is Mr Miliband’s animating passion. “This election”, said Sadiq Khan, the Labour shadow minister, “was about reducing inequality.” No, it wasn’t. It’s a law that politics isn’t as easy as that. When you lose an election there is no sense in which you secretly win.

This third law can be generalised into a fourth, which needs to be carved into a limestone obelisk 8ft 6in high and planted in Labour party headquarters in Brewer’s Green in London. You cannot win an election in Britain, even in a fractured landscape, as the beneficiaries of a defunct electoral system on an avowedly left-wing prospectus. Neil Kinnock told David Dimbleby that people were deluded, helped into that state by the newspapers. Well, Mr Kinnock has certainly got his party back now.

The truth is so much simpler. There is no genuine appetite in this country for rent controls and price commands. If you scare business you frighten the people who work for businesses. If you make it plain that you relish high taxation, do not be surprised if people look elsewhere. Tony Blair used to win big majorities. He always maintained that this is, in its heart, a conservative country. You cannot pretend this law has been repealed. It hasn’t.

The fifth and final law is that there is nothing you can do, even with a good operation to get out the vote, that will begin to counteract the first four laws. Labour went into this election in open defiance of the axioms of politics and, throughout the campaign, kidded itself that its leader was performing well and that its excellent organisation and fine army of volunteers were enough to overcome the party’s massive structural and ideological defects. It can’t. Campaigns don’t matter that much. The result was visible long ago if you knew where to look. The place to look was in all the conventional notions of politics. They all held, which is more than Labour did.

There are bigger questions in this election than the future of the Labour party. No doubt the legacy of the 2015 general election will be the demise of the union of Great Britain. Scotland has drifted off into the North Sea. It has declared a plague on Labour, which might yet turn into a plague on England. But that is a question that the British government will have to resolve and Labour is a long way from assuming that position. Labour, on the programme set out by Mr Miliband, was more or less swearing at the south of England. It was all predicated on winning a vintage Labour victory, for Labour people, like a useless Labour version of the League of Gentlemen.

Mr Miliband cannot survive this carnage. Even if the Tories struggle to assemble a government, which they may, no leader can be permitted a disaster on this scale. To suffer a swing against Labour to the Tories and to lose ground even to the dismal performance managed by Gordon Brown in 2010 is an extraordinary act of negative capability. It is a failure almost beyond conceiving.

Only it wasn’t remotely beyond conceiving because, unfortunately and alas, there were those among us who saw it coming. For all the talk that the rules had been repealed, for all the vain hopes that British politics had changed in some fundamental way, it turns out that it hadn’t. It turns out that, though some things glacially change, most things stay the same. Economic competence counts, leadership matters and you cannot win from the left. These things are rules in politics, carved in stone.

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