Andrew Neather Labour’s London wins can’t hide the need for a radical rethink
The capital was the only place where the party made significant gains — but last night was a devastating blow
FOR Tony Blair’s generation of Labour MPs, 1992 held totemic power. It was an elec tion defeat so cruel that Blair was fond of invoking the bitter feeling of the morning after it as a warning to strive for victory. Last night Labour suffered another 1992 — only even more astonishing and devastating. Its effects will be far reaching.
David Cameron, meanwhile, can only have dreamt of a victory on this scale. As one senior Tory told blogger Paul Goodman: “Been saying to journalists for months that we’d win outright. Didn’t believe a word of it.” But as soon as the 10pm exit poll predicted 316 seats for the Tories against a Labour collapse of 239, with the Lib-Dems reduced to just 10, it was all over.
Now we know the Conservatives have done even better than that, with an outright majority. This is a stunning victory for Cameron and for his strategy: for an i nc umbent gove r nment to increase its number of seats is a rare feat, last managed by Margaret Thatcher in 1983. It is a disaster for Labour and the Liberal Democrats — and a catastrophe for the nation’s pollsters, none of whom came close to calling the result right.
Labour’s agony is, of course, in part down to the SNP landslide. Yet its defeat stems primarily from its failure to take seats off the Tories. Even without the SNP tsunami, Labour would still have been trounced. After five years of savage cuts and economic stagnation through much of the nation, Labour should have done so much better than this.
The one place that it did was London, where it made solid gains — and therein may lie some lessons for the party. Labour’s grip on the capital was already tight, with 39 of London’s 73 seats. Last night it won seven more — taking Ealing Central and Acton, Il ford North , Brentford and Isleworth, and Enfield North from the Tories, and Hornsey and Wood Green, Brent Central and Bermondsey and Old Southwark from the Lib-Dems. In London, the Lib-Dem massacre sees them reduced to just one MP, Tom Brake in Carshalton and Wallington.
In the capital Labour ran both energetic campaigns and a series of impressive candidates, such as Tulip Siddiq, increasing Labour’s majority in the ultra-marginal seat of Hampstead and Kilburn, and Neil Coyle, smashing Simon Hughes’s stronghold in Bermondsey to win a majority of almost 4,500. There may be some irony to Labour doing best in the richest part of the country. But it has shown here that it can win in the South.
Labour’s London election supremo Sadiq Khan MP now looks almost certain to use such successes as a springboard for a London mayoral election campaign: nominations open next week.
Yet where Labour fell short in London, it offered some clues about the wider weaknesses in the party’s strategy. The Tories held on in Battersea, Harrow East, Finchley and Golders Green, and Hendon — all more affluent seats.
Labour’s message under Miliband was shaped by the party’s retreat from New Labour. But a policy offer focused on the NHS, inequality and living costs, while perhaps just enough to move the party’s northern heartlands, simply will not cut it with the southern working class.
There were ill omens in one set of Lord Ashcroft’s constituency polls last week: L abour was trailing in both South Swindon and Croydon Central, exactly the sort of southern working-class seats that it should be winning, as it did in 1997 and 2001. Last night the Tories held both.
Elsewhere in the English marginals, Labour failed even in Warwickshire North, the most marginal Tory seat, with a majority of just 54. Indeed there was a three per cent swing to Conservatives in the marginals that they won in 2010.
Worse, the Tories actually won some seats off Labour, a situation unenvisaged by pre - elec tion polls. Telford and Southampton Itchen were both Tory targets in 2010 that Labour held on to then; last night the Conservatives finished the job. Labour’s strategy focused most on winning over 2010 LibDem voters: last night the party’s main gains were against the Lib-Dems rather than the Tories.
“It’s a crushing defeat for the 35 per cent strategy,” says one London Labour MP. “The party will be making a mistake if it thinks that this was about the leader — it was the policy offer that didn’t grip. We didn’t take the fight to the Conservatives.”
Labour appears to have lost and not yet won back many of the nation’s “C2s” — skilled workers. It will not do so without a more aspirational message: education rather than energy bi ll s , af f ordabl e home ownership rather than the bedroom tax.
Now the party needs an unsparing re- think. “If Labour can no longer bank on having 30 to 40 Scottish MPs, the task is how do we build a majority in England?” said one senior Labour figure. “That’s the question that could force Ed to a more centrist position.”
Yet Ed Miliband now looks almost certain to resign. Chuka Umunna, Andy Burnham, Dan Jarvis and Yvette Cooper, perhaps freed up by her husband Ed Balls’s shock defeat, are all potential contenders.
For now the focus will be on the Tories’ achievement of what looked impossible until 10pm last night: governing alone. When the euphoria of these results wears off, though, Cameron faces a daunting task. He may have a majority but he will still face relentless skirmishing to get tough votes through Parliament with a majority this slender.
More serious, the PM cannot duck his commitment to hold an EU referendum by the end of 2017 — the red meat that really excites Tory Eurosceptics . His party may yet implode in the course of that battle. Some in Labour have even murmured in the past that the referendum battle would make this a good election to lose. For the moment, though, nothing — not even Labour’s London surge — will assuage the pain of this defeat for Miliband’s party.
A policy offer focused on the NHS, inequality and living costs will simply not cut it with the southern working class