IT’S BUSINESS as usual. A large Labour majority. A backbench rumble of discontent. A question mark over the Prime Minister’s longevity.
It’s almost like May 5 didn’t happen. Of course, Tony Blair’s achievement in leading Labour to a third successive electoral success is unparalleled. In essence the electorate got what it wanted — a Labour Government with a smaller, although good, working majority. The question is whether the denting of Labour’s majority together with Tony Blair’s eventual departure marks the beginning of the end not just for Labour in government but for new Labour.
Certainly, Labour lost votes among the young where Iraq took its toll and, most worryingly, among aspirant C2 voters especially in the eastern region and London. In the South East, where concerns about tax, crime and immigration were greatest, Labour slumped to third place. In the early 1990s a “southern discomfort” factor cost Labour elections. Action is needed to prevent the 2005 swing from Labour in the South becoming a tidal wave that could do the same in the future.
At the next election we will be defending 20 seats with majorities of below 1,000. Thirteen are in London and the South East. In 16 the Tories are the challengers. Similarly of the 20 most marginal seats that Labour will want to win back, 16 are held by the Tories. So although we need to win votes back from the Liberals our principal enemy remains the Conservatives.
We can win again but doing so means new Labour will need to renew itself. Tempting though it might be to stand idly by enjoying the spectacle of the Tories and Liberals’ soul-searching, there are huge risks in Labour becoming the business-as-usual party. With both opposition parties potentially repositioning themselves to our detriment by contesting the Centre, new Labour cannot be the status quo party. At times we have looked like that.
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We cannot sustain that through another campaign. Next time round, after 12 years or more of Labour government, “time for a change” is likely to have far stronger public appeal. To win we will need to have as strong a claim on the future as we will have on delivery in the past.
Everything we do needs to scream out loud that our purpose is a society where every individual, regardless of class or background, gets the chance to succeed. Getting Britain moving socially — speeding social mobility — will allow us to compete and win economically.
By reclaiming this banner of progressive radicalism we can outflank the Liberals. And we can outflank the Tories by insisting that people have a responsibility to help themselves as well as a right to be helped. A new Labour fair deal is not unconditional. It has to be earned: there for those who are willing to put in the effort. This maxim should be our guide to realigning new Labour with those aspirant voters who left us because they thought we were no longer on their side.
Nowadays, people want to get on with their own lives, able to make choices for themselves and their families. Equally they want to know they are not on their own in facing the modern world’s challenges. The job of progressive politics is to empower the individual as an individual. In an age when people are more informed and more inquiring, with less deference and expectations higher, reverting to the old big state interventionist solutions could only set Labour back.
So we cannot let up on reform. We need social reforms to help families to balance work and home life. We need constitutional reforms to empower communities and devolve power. We need welfare reforms to help pensioners in old age and to get more people off benefit into work. We need economic reforms that prioritise deregulation and flexibility, home ownership and business innovation. We need public service reforms that give individuals more of a choice and the voluntary and private sectors more of a role. We need criminal justice reforms to put the system on the side of the victim and to tackle illegal immigration and asylum abuse. And if we are to make progressive change irreversible, our foot needs to be on the accelerator of change, not the brake.
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After we lost the 1992 election many thought they would never see a Labour government again. What changed was that we did. We should never forget that lesson. Tony Blair’s forging of US-style economic dynamism and European social justice is making Britain a role model for other nations. Our success is the envy of other progressive parties. It would be folly to abandon this approach. Instead it should be renewed and deepened.
Our manifesto provides the mandate to push forward with a big reform agenda. It is the programme every Labour MP stood on, so the public will expect to see it implemented in full. But it must be regarded as the minimum we need to deliver, not the maximum. The longer we are in government the greater the need to keep on changing to keep pace with the times in which we live. A party serving a third term has to demonstrate that it has ambition and momentum if it is to have any hope of serving a fourth.
And winning needs a relentless focus on those policies and those seats that will win back support in the centre ground. You only have to look at what has happened to the Tories — or remember what once happened to Labour — to know that vacating the centre is, to coin a phrase, a move back not forward. Far from the door shutting on new Labour, it is new Labour that holds the key to a fourth election victory.
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Alan Milburn MP was Labour’s 2005 election campaign co-ordinator. A longer version of this article appears in Progress magazine