IN ORDER TO WIN WE MUST PUT NEW LABOUR COMFORT ZONE BEHIND US

Ed Miliband has just produced a Fabian Society essay about what is required for Labour to win back the support we have lost since 1997.

It is a clear a well argued tour-de-force. It covers why we lost and how we can regain the confidence of people who have stopped voting for us. It also identifies the need to expand our base to win new support to enable us to win back power in order to build a better society.

For me, it is a perfect illustration of why Ed Miliband is best placed to lead a Labour Party renaissance that will once again put Labour in the vanguard of progressive politics.

If we can do that, I am convinced that we can win back power at the first attempt.

I have reproduced Ed's essay in full below.

TO WIN WE HAVE TO PUT THE NEW LABOUR COMFORT ZONE BEHIND US
By Ed Miliband - Fabian society essay 16 August 2010

Without values we become managers and technocrats. It is a Labour ideology that
makes us who we are. That is why I have put values at the centre of my campaign:
a belief in equality, social justice, fairness at work, internationalism. But the
challenge is how to apply that ideology to our time—and how to win power.

Tony Blair said in his first Conference speech in 1994 “If the world changes, and we
don’t, then we become of no use to the world. Our principles cease being principles
and just ossify into dogma.” Tony was right then and the lesson applies today. We
should always stand up for our ideology and values but always be willing to
recognise the way the world has changed.

In the early 1990s some Labour people thought of themselves as traditionalists
defending the Labour cause against Tony Blair and the modernisation of New
Labour. Today our danger is to defend traditionalist new Labour solutions on every
issue because this will consign us to defeat. It is my rejection of this New Labour
nostalgia that makes me the modernising candidate at this election.

To win next time, it is the New Labour comfort zone that we must escape: the rigidity
of old formulae that have served their time, the belittling of any attempt to move on
from past verities and the belief that more of the same is the way to win.

New Labour was right to seek to build a coalition of lower and middle income support,
show we can create wealth as well as distribute it and speak to people’s aspirations.
We need to keep doing all these things. But old-fashioned New Labour thinking about
what this means today in electoral strategy, policy and style of leadership is now an
obstacle to winning the next election and transforming our society.

Start with electoral politics: New Labour’s proposition was simple - we need to
persuade Tory voters to come to us. The task is very different now. Five million votes were lost by Labour between 1997 and 2010, but 4 out of the 5 million didn’t go to the Conservatives. One-third went to the Liberal Democrats, and most of the rest simply stopped voting.

It wasn’t, in the main, the most affluent, professional voters that deserted Labour
either. New analysis has been produced by Ipsos/Mori which shows the scale of loss
among lower income groups. Between 1997 and 2010, for every one voter that Labour lost from the professional classes (so called ‘ABs’), we lost three voters among the poorest, those on benefits and the low paid (DEs). You really don’t need to be a Bennite to believe that this represents a crisis of working-class representation
for Labour---and our electability.

Add in skilled manual workers, and the differential goes to six to one. Almost all the new Tory voters came from these social groups. Put it at its starkest, if we had
enjoyed a 1997 result in 2010 just among DEs, then on a uniform swing we would
have won at least 40 more seats and would still be the largest party in parliament.
Seats like Stroud, Hastings & Rye, and Corby would have stayed Labour. The core
Labour vote that some thought could be taken for granted became the swing vote
that went Conservative.

We also need to understand that the danger of people switching from our party to
others has been joined by the danger of people simply drifting out of voting---and
disproportionately among our supporters. The gap between turnout among ABs and
DEs grew from 13 to 19 points between 1997 and 2010.

This is bad for democracy and particularly dangerous for us. We need to take this
skewing of the electorate far more seriously than we have done in the past. As
President Obama has shown in the United States, expanding the electorate is part of
a winning strategy as well as winning back voters who have gone elsewhere.

We can neither win an election with a working-class vote alone—New Labour was
right about that---nor can we take it for granted. But the problem of conventional New Labour analysis applies to white collar voters too. Particularly when it comes to the South of England, we sometimes clung to an illusory picture whereby we imagined easy affluence to run wider than it did. Half of the people in work in Reading, where the Conservatives got one of their biggest swings to take Reading West, earn less than £21, 000 a year. Even in Britain’s more comfortable places, people increasingly feel insecure, overstretched and distant from rich elites.

Furthermore, many of the affluent voters themselves didn’t go blue, they went yellow-
--the Conservative vote has fallen among ABs since 1997. In a number of seats, like
Hornsey and Wood Green or Manchester Withington, we lost to the Liberal Democrats because of desertion over issues such as Iraq, civil liberties and tuition fees and in many other places, the Labour vote was depressed, thereby letting the
Tories in by the back door.

All this requires a refounding of Labour, as profound as New Labour in the mid-
1990s. Our working-class base cannot be dismissed as a ‘core vote’ and taken for
granted, we need to understand the real landscape of middle England to strengthen
our appeal to voters right across the income scale, we need to recognise the
concerns and nature of modern affluence, and we need to change our style of
leadership.

To do this we need, just as we did at the start of New Labour, to go back to our core
values and apply them to the world in which we find ourselves. We need to understand what our belief in equality, fairness and opportunity means in the face not just of the electoral situation, but also the economic and social condition of Britain.

This rethink is all the more important because many of the good things that
happened under new Labour were possible because we used the proceeds of growth
to support public services and redistribution. Given the fiscal constraints, this route to social justice is going to be much more constrained for the foreseeable future.

First, the renewal required in relation to Labour’s so-called ‘traditional’ vote is
perhaps most profound. We need to tell a story about how we can improve people’s
lives, starting with the way we approach the economy.

That begins by revisiting New Labour’s recipe for the jobs Britain can create. A low
skill, low wage economy that is over-reliant on service industries is not the future that people aspire too. Instead, we should build on the active industrial policy that we came to late in our term in office, and which had already helped develop the
beginnings of an electric vehicle industry, an offshore wind industry and a nuclear
power renaissance in Britain. By supporting British business, we can create high
quality manufacturing jobs, and under my leadership we would.

We also need to think again about our approach to labour markets. What became a
dogmatic attraction to maximum flexibility meant poorer wages and conditions, and
we need to address that. We need to learn the lesson from other countries that
raising the floor in the labour market can be a more sustainable route to both better
conditions and stronger growth. Creating stronger incentives for companies to invest
in their workforce can have a powerful impact on productivity and provide a stronger
platform for the future.

That is why I am for a living wage over £7 an hour, not just a minimum wage, so
people can feel more comfortable that they will get a decent day’s wage for a decent
day’s work. I am for greater protection for time outside work so people don’t feel
compelled to work harder for longer for less.

This new approach will help address the issue which Labour candidates heard so
much about on the doorstep: immigration. Eastern European immigration is a class
issue because it increases competition for jobs, particularly those at lower wages. It looks very different if you are an employee rather than an employer. But we refused to recognise that sufficiently. Similarly, concerns about preferential access to housing - often false - built up because we refused to prioritise the building of new social housing. If we want to win back our lost support, this can no longer be a marginal issue.

Second, we must speak to aspiration and recognise where we need change from the
past in order to meet people’s hopes for the future. The burden of University debt is
big issue for swathes of parents—and their kids. That is why I have proposed we
scrap tuition fees and replace them with a graduate tax.

But we must recognise as New Labour sometimes didn’t that aspiration is not simply
about earning and owning, but also enjoying time with your family. So our economic
strategy should change the culture of working time. It’s not just the low paid in Britain who work the longest hours in Western Europe, don’t get a chance to read to their kids, and feel stressed out.

Third, we must recognise that people, including affluent voters, care about tax but
also about the sort of society we live in. I will unashamedly argue for a more equal
society because I believe it harms the rich as well as the poor to live in a country
which is increasingly unequal. I will argue for a society characterised by responsibility at all levels – from bankers pay to people who can work but at the moment are not doing so. I will make the case for a greener society because climate change is the greatest challenge to our way of life.

We must also be reformers of the state to make it more democratic, more open, more
efficient and less overbearing. Alan Johnson’s view expressed last week that “I can’t
think of a single issue on which Labour got the balance wrong on civil liberties”
speaks to an understandable desire to defend the past, but if we don’t recognise and
put right our mistakes, we won’t win back those who have left us.

Face it: we never convinced people of the case for ninety days of summary detention
without charge, or ID cards and they spoke to a belief in an off-putting overpowerful
state. I am for CCTV and measures that work, but under my leadership, we will not
be casual with civil liberties. As important, we must have the courage to accept
where we got things wrong and change our approach. Without that, we will not win
again.

Fourth, we need to change our style of politics. Disconnection from voters, including
our working-class base, is not just a product of policy error, it is the result of the hollowing out of the movement and the party. In part, this hollowing out is a long-term trend that faces political parties in many parts of the industrialised world. But in part it happened because people left us over specific issues like Iraq and it is also a product of a particular approach to the role of the Labour Party.

A Labour party member in Cornwall, Nick, put it best when he said to me that New
Labour had behaved as if “the role of the Labour leader is to protect the country from the views of the members of the Labour Party”. That may have been necessary in the 1980s, but Neil Kinnock’s Conference speech about Militant took place twenty five
years ago. We can’t still let ourselves be haunted by those ghosts. Unless we change
this style of leadership we will never change society in the way we aspire to do
because we will never have the political movement we need.

We need that movement because we can only win the arguments we need to win — both in Opposition and in government - if we have a movement that can sustain us and from which our ideas emerge. That outward looking, vibrant movement comes from high ideals and party members who recognise that we are hearing their voice.

And anyone who thinks that listening to our party is somehow pandering is doing
them a great disservice. Indeed, if we had listened more to them, we would have
been a better government not a worse one: on housing, on agency workers, on
tuition fees.

Of course, no leader is ever going to agree with everything their party members
believe. And we need to forge a winning coalition which reaches out well beyond
traditional supporters of our party. But the answer to this is to build a party which
connects us to the public, and that must also include an understanding of the
strength that could come from our trade union link.

The crisis of support among our working-class base shows the ground we have to make up. The relationship with the trade union movement needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Part of the problem is that MPs are not connected locally to the trade
union levy payers. As a start, each MP should be reaching out to these levy payers
and hearing their voice with regular dialogue and meetings.

The final change we need as part of our future is political confidence. New Labour
was ultimately quite pessimistic about the ability of our values to speak to a
progressive majority in Britain. Contrast this with the self-confidence of the new
coalition government: nobody would really believe that the Conservatives won just
36% of the vote at the election. While Labour often acts like squatters in government, the Tories act like they deserve to be there.

That pessimism about what is possible is now a barrier to winning again, not just to
creating the kind of country we believe in. Unless we address issue of low wages,
working time, inequality, we will never reach out to those people we have lost and
make politics seem like it might have an impact on their lives.

New Labour nostalgia says that there is a tension between our values and our
electability. But the truth is that the opposite is the case. Whether you look at our
approach to the excesses of markets, or our belief in a foreign policy based on our
values, not just our alliances; the morally right and the electorally right thing to do come together. We lost because people lost a sense of who we are and what we
stand for. To win again, we need to restore our clarity of purpose.

Only with a politics based on clear values can we win again. Indeed, it is by speaking openly and clearly about what we believe that we can best get back into power. Head and heart come together in a politics based on clear values, a sense of who we stand up for, and a vision of the good society.