#GE2015 - A Foot Soldier's Perspective

Labour’s campaign was supposed to be a ground war. A pavement pounding, door knocking, promise gathering army of volunteers was going to drive high turnout and sweep Ed Miliband to power on the core vote, disaffected Lib Dems and newly mobilised young voters. In the end thousands of tired, sore footed volunteers were left staring wide eyed as an impossible exit poll gradually becoming undeniable reality. The party’s message found no traction outside of London and a handful of other gains, was swept from its Scottish heartlands and bafflingly suffered losses in traditionally safe seats like Morley and Gower.

Labour has a significant volunteer and man power advantage over the Conservatives, the membership is larger, younger, and more active. It should translate into a powerful tool for getting out the vote and creating a personal connection between voters and the party. Instead strong local campaigns floundered in marginal constituencies, with Labour frequently going backwards as in Hastings and Nuneaton. The Labour party had 5 million conversations but what did they talk about? From my experience, efforts focussed on gathering commitments to vote Labour in stronghold areas with a view to driving election day turnout. This had built on the core vote strategy for the party, a strategy built around a belief that Lib Dem losses would slide to red and UKIP would mainly damage the Conservative vote. Both assumptions were brutally wrong but focussing on Labour promises drove a party group think that expected gains and ignored the frequent doorstep criticisms of Ed Miliband as a leader and the party’s stances on immigration and the EU. In the end there was simply not enough vote to turnout as traditional Labour demographics switched to UKIP in significant numbers and too many don’t knows turned into won’t votes or incumbent votes by default.

From the limited interaction I’ve had, the technology that forms the bedrock of Labour’s ground campaign does not help. Its simplistic reporting of preference does not translate to the complexities of voting decisions, it encourages an overly optimistic reporting of Labour vote and it is not accessible enough to produce analysis of voting preference or switches in mood. Perhaps it is notable that when it was lauded in the Guardian, it was in reference to Southampton Itchen one of several Conservative gains from Labour. Any use of the tool also relies on consistent contact with huge numbers of voters. Due to relying on volunteers, the low answer rate for door knockers and people’s common refusal to discuss preferences the required level of contact is only possible for designated battleground seats where help is bussed in. Given the huge amount of preference data in the system and the demographic data available elsewhere it should be more than possible for campaigns to be run smarter as well as just harder. It is also an issue where access to the system is only allowed after training but the data collection itself is not as controlled. The data will only be useful if it is gathered consistently, not just entered consistently.

A huge amount of effort and physical work from volunteers went into a huge number of campaigns that went nowhere and amongst the disappointment and deflation of defeat there is a real danger of those volunteers drifting away from politics in general and Labour specifically. If the party is to mount a more successful ground war in the future those volunteers need to be maintained and engaged. Community events, issue campaigns and local level casework will help build a foundation of local support for any future campaign.

But all this work will be for nothing if the national message from Labour fails again. The campaign, and the last 5 years of opposition, simply did not communicate a compelling message to voters. There were consistently encountered complaints about immigration and the EU, Labour’s economic record and Ed Miliband as a leader. However the response to them was not to engage with the complaint but to look towards Labour sympathisers and seek revalidation that Labour’s answer was the right one. Perhaps social media’s biggest contribution to this campaign was to exacerbate the group think around the political left. People have allowed themselves to succumb to an echo chamber that lazily accepts and promotes their views. A chamber that hates the Tories, loves Ed Miliband, and sees signs of economic and social failure everywhere. It was this collective affirmation that allowed Ed Miliband to survive as leader despite consistent ballot box failure throughout his tenure.

Labour may be a party in favour of immigration but its former core demographic is not. The message about preventing the damage from immigration by controlling labour markets, increasing and protecting the minimum wage, and legislating against importing low paid workers simply did not fly. It was too distant, too theoretical and too clever to connect. To the voters I spoke with it felt like a different point was being answered. They complained about the flooded basement and were told how to fix the leaky roof. The connection may seem obvious to us and to the echo chamber, but to many it was simply dodging the question. Labour failed to sell the connection, and failed to highlight that Cameron’s economic recovery was built on increased immigration. It was the key contradiction of the campaigns. Labour wanted to protect wages and had no problem with immigration, Conservatives wanted to raise GDP and restrict immigration. I don’t believe there is an easy answer to this issue because there is no restriction on immigration compatible with Labour’s core values and there is seemingly no end to voter’s frustration with the issue. People feel there is a deep change happening to this country as its identity changes with increased immigration. In London where there have been large immigrant communities and a huge number of languages spoken on the streets for decades UKIP cannot get a foothold and Labour was able to win from the Tories. Elsewhere communities unused to the change they feel were given no security by Labour and voted UKIP or Tory in their droves.

On the economy, voters simply did not see the same picture that so many in the party saw. Headline figures of GDP and employment growth masked all other factors and the Tories successfully drowned out other issues as nay saying or anti British negativity. The cost of living crisis wasn’t translated into the simple struggle to pay the bills that many experienced. There does not seem to have been a popular hatred of zero hours contracts for Labour to tap into, or people didn’t feel that banning them was the answer. The economy has been a polling disaster for Labour since the crash and history shows that parties not trusted on the economy find it hard to win power. The constant reference to the 1% simply made no headway, it was too wonkish, the stable of an internet meme not a winning political party. The idea remains right, Labour should want to redistribute the economy and proposing an asset or wealth tax of some kind will be the right side of that debate historically but this has to be phrased in a way that appeals better to people’s sense of fairness. At the moment it seems too many buy into the idea that Labour are against aspiration. The appointment of Ed Balls as Shadow Chancellor was a huge and costly error, his ousting may have been a painful moment and Parliament is weaker for losing a man of his intellectual calibre but it may be a blessing in disguise for Labour. His and Ed Miliband’s deep connections to the Brown chancellorship hurt the party again and again during the campaign. Attempts to explain that the global financial crisis was beyond their control felt like an avoidance of responsibility. Had the party had a stronger leader, and a shadow chancellor better able to articulate the view, then they could have argued that their policies before the crash were right but given the team they had, and Balls’ perceived arrogance, they would have been better to accept fault and move on regardless of the truth of the matter. This party has now lost two elections because of their 2007 financial policy and it is time to accept they have lost the argument in the public mind. An election campaign is not a time to teach macro-economic theory to a deeply unreceptive audience. The only answer at this stage is to completely move on from the team of advisors, economists and politicians associated with that policy. In the meantime it is perhaps worth reflecting on the lack of voter engagement needed to install a figure so disliked that he could not even retain his seat into the second most important opposition role.

On the economy, but also across policy areas, Labour never shook the impression many have that the Coalition was a competent government. I think everyone on Twitter will have seen a list like this  or this at some point but how many of them were mentioned when talking to voters? For instance I heard not one mention of food banks despite their increased use being at the heart of the Labour campaign. That is not to say it isn’t a worthy thing to campaign on, but it has to be asked why the punch didn’t land. Perhaps a more negative campaign would have helped, perhaps a campaign more grounded in individual’s lives. A single person using a food bank may have more impact than being told a million do.

It is with genuine sadness that I am also forced to reflect on Ed Miliband’s personal failure. He is, I think, a good man. He seems to genuinely believe in a progressive agenda for improving the UK and has proposed a great many brave and worthy ideas but his failure to promote himself as a leader has cost Labour dearly. Nowhere more so than in Scotland where the firebrand authenticity of Alex Salmond and the calm steel of Nicola Sturgeon were telling contrasts to his hesitant, awkward style. That comparison hurt him even in England and Wales as the Tories ruthlessly exploited the command gap by portraying a future Ed Miliband PM as beholden to his SNP rivals. From the moment Ed Miliband reacted with shock and terror at being elected leader to his reedy Hell Yes he has struggled for command and power when talking. It is depressing that it should make such a difference but politicians’ careers can be predicted on three attributes Voice, Persona and Policy (and by voice I mean their speeches and talking style). Ed was never helped by his brother to overcome his persona problem, if David had ever joined him on the front bench or supported him it would have killed the stab in the back myth that persists to this day. Ed won a fair contest, but he was never able to shake the illusion that he in some way screwed his brother over and it hurt his image and was brought up on the doorstep even 5 years later. On policy he was strong, but his speeches were betrayed by his style. He always appeared to be second guessing his own sentences until he remembered his training to be passionate at which point he would lurch awkwardly into fist pumping staccato intellectualism. His phrases never stuck, having tried predatory capitalism, one nation, and zero zero economy, amongst others, none formed a key theme for the campaign.

Even the commitments he made were phrased in the nervous uncommitted style of his speech. There was a promise to “Strengthen” the minimum wage, not raise or enforce but the entirely meaningless “strengthen”. His infamously written in stone pledges, leaving aside the fact that the 6^th was awkwardly added mid campaign after not being included on the actual pledge card, contained not a single genuine policy commitment. It made the #EdStone so much worse that none of them are written in language that could even be checked against in five years. ‘A Strong Economic Foundation’ is not a rising economy or falling unemployment, it’s not even a strong economy. It is a meaningless phrase in a campaign that was all too full of them. This is only made more baffling by the good reception most announced policies received. The removal of the non dom status in particular got fantastic coverage and looked to be winning the campaign until it was shunted from news schedules by Fallon’s personal attack on Miliband and never heard from again. All through the campaign I saw and agreed with mockery of Lynton Crosby’s two issue campaign from Labour sources, but that focus gave clarity to voters that the Labour party could not give them. Ultimately voters ask themselves why they would vote for a party, what vision can they project, what goals do they propose? The Conservatives gave a clear answer, promising economic security and strong leadership. Labour produced six vague sentences carved into an 8 foot slab of limestone.

In Scotland this failure to provide clarity helped an SNP surge. Sturgeon could not have been clearer in her anti austerity rhetoric even if her policies were decidedly more aligned. Miliband always minded his words and could offer no resistance when the SNP decided they were a genuinely left wing party for social justice and nuclear disarmament. Labour should not fool themselves into thinking this is purely a result of the referendum campaign, the wheels were set in motion far earlier with the SNP’s crushing victory in the 2011 Scottish Parliamentary elections which allowed them to hold the referendum in the first place. However, that referendum campaign positioned Labour as part of a Westminster bloc that opposed the fundamental political principles of a socialist Scotland. It is hard to see how a campaign that could have stopped the SNP would have been economically conservative enough to survive in England so it is easy why Labour struggled so desperately to match the SNP. But it now has to examine how it can ever win back Scottish hearts and minds whilst continuing to appeal to England and Wales. That Labour lost so comprehensively north of the border but lose only two shadow cabinet members, one from Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, suggests another, deeper, problem with Scotland’s relationship to the party’s leadership.

The Labour party is now in a tough bind. It must select a new leader quickly or Cameron and Sturgeon will frame a national debate without them, but it must also take its time to take a genuine look at what happened and what to do next. An honest, public debate is deeply needed not just to identify the right way to move forward but the right person to do it as well. Whichever way the party goes, they and the country need clarity. Cameron faces a challenging second term with major issues to be resolved on a small majority, so strong purposeful opposition is vital for all our sakes.

Of course, having written two and half thousand words on why Labour lost, it’s important to remember that two parties also won, the Conservatives and the SNP. A huge part of rebuilding the Labour party will come from questioning how and why they won and seeing what can be replicated within the confines of Labour, but maybe that’s an unnecessarily long blog post for another day.