Learning the lessons of the election

As explained in more than one previous posts, I have been following with interest the inquests into why the pollsters and most political parties did so badly in the May 2015 election. Not from  schadenfreude, at least mostly, but out of a wish to learn lessons.

As an old stoic saying, often quoted in a form attributed to Otto von Bismarck, points out

"Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others."

One of the main mistakes common to politicians and generals is that they all too often try to fight the previous election or war. Well, as I said in the previous post, whatever my involvement in politics may be in the 2020 General Election, I want to be fighting that election and not trying to rerun the tactics of 2015. The election of 2020 will be different in a number of ways to the last few elections

* We will have had a referendum on Europe

* There will have been further changes to the welfare state and the pattern of benefits

* Both the Conservatives and Labour will have new leaders

* there will probably be new electoral boundaries

* Other events which we cannot even guess at today will have happened and changed politics in unpredictable ways.

What won't change is that those who listen to voters and address the issues which they are bothered about at the time of the election will tend to do better than those who are determined to re-fight old battles. I read today that in one meeting, Labour's campaign chief Douglas Alexander supposedly said that

“the party had to stop fighting the 2010 election and start fighting the 2015 election”.

That is a quote from a magnum opus by Patrick Wintour published in today's Guardian which is a massive analysis on what went wrong for Labour:

"The undoing of Ed Miliband and how Labour lost the election."

The baffling thing about this article is that Labour appears to have considered and in some cases even agreed strategies which would have worked better at containing the damage they took on issues like the economic record of the last government than what they actually said or did.

They had agreed, for instance, a far more realistic line on what Ed Miliband should say if asked on Newsnight whether the last Labour government had spent too much than the response he actually uttered when that question was indeed asked, an flat denial which lost the sympathy of most of the audience and was torn to shreds in the press.

Other pieces in the Guardian on why Labour lost:

Rafael Behr argues that Labour failed to make a coherent case on the economy or on Ed Miliband's leadership and therefore Labour lost the election before the campaign started."

There was a heartfelt (and 100% accurate) 'mea culpa' in which Liam Byrne apologised for his 'there's no money left' note and admitted it harmed Labour's campaign, which is worth reading as a very rare example of a politician admitting he got something totally wrong. As he wrote in the Observer,

“Party members ask me: what on earth were you thinking? But members of the public ask: how could you do something so crass? And so bloody offensive?

“I’ve asked myself that question every day for five years and, believe me, every day I have burnt with the shame of it, nowhere more than when standing on doorsteps with good comrades, listening to voters demanding to know what I thought I was playing at. It was always excruciating.”

“And for millions of people and businesses who have had to make such sacrifices over the last five years, there was nothing funny about the national debt when the national task of cutting it has brought them such pain in their everyday life.”

Peter Kellner, writing on the Progress ("Progressive Labour") website, argues that "Labour should not assume it has reached rock bottom."

His article finishes by asking Labour some difficult questions about what the party is for and why it should be invented if it did not exist, and the final paragraph is:

"If those questions do not provoke enough discomfort, here is the kicker. Why should we think that Labour has hit rock bottom? Perhaps the real surprise about this year’s election is not that Labour lost, but that it retained the support of one in three voters in England and Wales. Its vote could go lower. Indeed, without change, it probably will. Just look at what has happened in recent years to support for Labour’s sister parties in France, Germany, Greece and Spain. And look, now, at what has happened in Scotland. Labour has no automatic right to prosper, or even survive. We have been warned."

Well, here is another kicker from me: all the above articles is a warning to the Conservatives as well as to Labour. We could get arrogant too: we could, and in the past have, made most of the mistakes Labour has been described as making in the articles I have linked to here.

The last time we scored a surprise win and lots of people were writing that Labour might be out of it for a decade, things went horribly wrong for that government and Tony Blair scored a landslide win five years later.

The Conservatives have no more automatic right to prosper, or even survive, than Labour has.

Comments

Jim said…
Im not so sure that "things went so horribly wrong" for John Majors tory party so much as people were bored with it. Blair, for all his faults, was a pretty good showman. He managed to energise the labour party with his "New Labour" and he ran catchy campaign, I'm sure we can all remember his "Things can only get better" backing track (professor Brian Cox has a lot to answer for), but by comparison Majors torys looked tired and dull.

He did have to completely re invent the labour party to pull it off though, one of the big things was he had to convince the public that labour could be trusted with the economy, that was dificult to do but he done it somehow, and for the first term they did not really over spend so much (it was all stealth taxes like browns pension raid), it was from the second term onwards they took the election victory as "an order to deliver" which when translated from Labour gobbledy gook into English means "wreck the economy by overspending on rubbish"

Jim said…
but then the last election was far out, I mean no one, no one could have called that in advance.

or could they.............
Chris Whiteside said…
Yes, you were one of very few people who did indeed call that one in advance.

Another was Stephen Haraldsen, who bet Bill Kirkbride (now one of the newly elected Labour councillors) a few months ago that there would be Conservative majority.

He had forgotten the bet when Bill came up to him at the council election count and handed him his winnings. (Clearly, whatever else you may say about the Labour group in Copeland, it contains at least one man of his word!)

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