I have the feeling Harman’s Equalities Bill may also motivate Labour’s traditional male working class base to go elsewhere too.

I very much doubt that any of those reasons you list – other possibly than post offices – figures high in the thinking of the average voter.

Of the average Guardian reader, yes.

I’m not saying I personally agree or disagree, but you have listed why *you* think Labour has failed, not why the average ex-Labour voter might think they have failed.

good article, but you left out:

Actively allowing and/or facilitating torture, and colluding in an illegal war with the most out of control American regime in history which should have been the unambiguous enemy of a supposedly centre-left progressive party.

Blair and Brown are not Labour,they are fucking Tories.

#5 Unfortunately, the vast bulk of the Parliamentary Labour Party has colluded with them in all the crimes and stupidities listed. That’s what Labour *is* now – a second Tory Party…

I very much doubt that any of those reasons you list – other possibly than post offices – figures high in the thinking of the average voter.

Probably true but they are important to many people on the left whose support Labour has lost and desperately needs to get back if they are to have a hope at the next election. And if they don’t figure high in the thinking of the average voter then Labour is harddly going to lose votes by doing the right thing on those issues.

I’m constantly surprised at the individuals and headlines making statements to the effect that “Labour has failed its own supporters”. Yes it has, consistently, for over 10 years now. This is not news.
“If you are left of centre, you shouldn’t vote for New Labour” – er, yes. We know. For about 10 years now.
“The Tories will win because Labour sucks and there’s no party for the left-of-centre voters” – Yes, that’s now certain.

I like your piece though. I too was confused at how Labour are failing to smash the hypocritical Tory statements on the economy.

Liberal Conspiracy reckons that Labour’s failed its own supporters because of Trident and ID cards which are the only issues the core vote care about (as opposed to the 50 percent tax on those earning over £150,000

Hmm, I think you’ll probably find that a few people on the left have been arguing for a higher top rate for high earners for some time, whereas the New Labour fundamentalist types who inhabit Common Endeavour would have seen it as equivalent to nationalising the commanding heights of the economy and making Arthur Scargill president. So don’t go all high-moral-ground-y on us.

Probably all your points are true.

Unfortunately that is pretty irrelevant. If you are to the left of Genghis Khan and to the right of Stalin you only have one party to choose from and that is the Labour Party. Sad but true. Where do you think most people in this country would place themselves relative to Khan and Stalin?

Why should skilled craftsmen, the self-employed, those in the Armed Forces and those running small businesses vote Labour? As the largest form of employment are the self employed and those working in small businesses. Look at the breakdown of newspaper sales and voting trends in England, Wales and Scotland. The Labour Party needs to connect to the self-employed , skilled craftsmen, shop keepers and those owning and working in small and medium sized businesses in England if it is to win the next election. Brown and Harman are a liability. Labour have the proven ability to persuade hardworking self employed English to vote for the Tory Party which is largely financed by those in private equity, hedge fund management, investment banking , commercial law and who are tax exiles. Wait until the issues of pensions for government employees become a public issue . This is likely to ensure even less self employed and those working in small businesss vote for Labour as they see their interests more closely aligned with hedge fund managers than middle class state employees and the unskilled.

Blair persuaded many in the categories I have perviously mentioned to change from the Tories to Labour in 1997.

Charlie- Blatcherism in both parties is now utterly discredited as a result of the credit crunch. Brown has failed to respond which is all one would expect from someone who has completely signed up to the worship of banker scum, privatisation, and the rest of the fucking shite of the free-market shite which now lies in ruins.

New Labour no longer has a narrative. Ten years ago the narrative was very much influenced by “the end of history” or “the end of ideology”. “Let’s not go back to those ideological debates of the 1908s.” The narrative seemed to be that we just had to embrace globalisation and American military power and then we could harness them to end poverty and get rid of evil and everything would be wondeful; the question of what would do if globalisation and American military power didn’t lead to these pleasant outcomes was dismissed as “old thinking”. The experiences of the last 10 years show that things are not that simple. Choices do have to be made. Ideology hasn’t ended. The interests of Worcester Woman cannot always be aligned with the interests of Labour’s core constituencies and it isn’t possble to endlessly finesse these diverging interests through spin.

Campbell’s editorial in the NS, when he was guest editor, was very thin:- Labour can stil win if it attacks the thinness of Tory thinking. You would think that Campbell would use it as an opportunity to start a fightback, but he didn’t. New Labour is incapable of really attacking the lack of Tory policy, because that would involve getting involved in an ideological discussion and New Labour doesn’t do ideological discussions.

So it’s not really about individual issues. It’s about the fact that New Labour based itself around the idea that they were nice people who would get Bill Clinton to sign the Kyoto Treaty and get George Bush to work for peace in the Middle East and improve public services without increasing taxes or cutting other expenditure. That idea has collapsed and there is no mechanism to create alternative ideas wthin mainstream politics.

David Brough wrote:
“Fuck off Charlie- Blatcherism in both parties is now utterly discredited as a result of the credit crunch. Brown has failed to respond which is all one would expect from someone who has completely signed up to the worship of banker scum, privatisation, and the rest of the fucking shite of the free-market shite which now lies in ruins.”

From this I assume you are a member of the party that promotes the brotherhood of man.

I used to be a member of the Labour party, when there was one.

Richard: I have the feeling Harman’s Equalities Bill may also motivate Labour’s traditional male working class base to go elsewhere too.

…but that’s because Harman seems confused as to whether the legislation is designed to (finally) address inequality based on class (or economics/accident of birth) or gender – or whether the two in fact intersect in far more complex ways.

David Brough wrote:
“Fuck off Charlie- Blatcherism in both parties is now utterly discredited as a result of the credit crunch. Brown has failed to respond which is all one would expect from someone who has completely signed up to the worship of banker scum, privatisation, and the rest of the fucking shite of the free-market shite which now lies in ruins.

David, just out of interest – whose party do the people who took out loans and mortgages that the banker scum gave to them when both sides knew that they couldn’t afford to pay – which led us to the credit crunch. The Banker scum I take it are – in your mind Tories but the customers were they labour? As fas as I can see the banker scum could not have caused the credit crunch alone?

Cjcjc – there is this amusing view among ppl like yourself and the Common Endeavour types that that the guardianista types are ppl who can be ignored because they’re not interested in high-minded issues like Iraq or civil liberties.

This is funny because they then never offer why they think labour has lost so much support and why it’s core supporters are so de-energized. The cultural issues matter as much as the economic ones. Have you never heard of working class ppl complaining about labour sucking up to the rich? About complaining about the war? Never heard public sector workers complain about labour spending money on Iraq while saying to them they have no money? I have.

Lilliput – In the US where the problem began, loans were usually Non Recourse meaning that if a borrower defaults, they can simply hand back the keys to the property with no further debts to settle. Banks knew this when they issued these loans, but still went ahead and are now stuck with the consequences. In the UK it is different, but I’d suspect that most thought that home ownership was not an unaffordable aspiration, besides, it wasn’t homeowners securitising their loan books and buying credit default swaps or paying themselves obscene salaries as a result of their mistaken hubris.

#9 Andrew – Believe it or not us folks at Common Endeavour aren’t as New Labour as you might think.

Sorry, meant to say that many assume that guardian types are completely removed from the ‘real working class’.

Sorry Andreas, I don’t see the difference between Americans or Brits spending more then they earn, or greedy bankers and civil servant drawing ridiculous salaries. I think both sides are as guilty as each other for the credit crunch.

Sunny – I think you’re confusing “supporters” with “voters” – they are not the same thing at all.

I am not sure where to look, but are there not regular polls of top voter concerns?
I would be surprised if your list and that list overlapped too much.
Jobs, crime, immigration, health, the cost of living will trump ID cards, climate change, police brutality and “poor bashing” any day.

David Brough – howl as you will, your vision of “old Labour” will not return, and if it does will prove just as electable as Michael Foot. Sorry.

I had wondered if Sunny’s British understatement was overdone in this post, but it has lead to a set of clear and never exaggerated comments.

Labour is dead. Has been since about 1998 when Blair proved to be as credible as a marzipan catapult. Has been since Labour emasculated the local parties and effectively removed their power to select parliamentary candidates (unless they were the ‘right’ ones — see Erith and Thamesmead). So where’s the replacement Left party? Unfortunately, all the running in this area is amongst the myriad far-left groups. Fortunately, as few people take them seriously, there is still space to form a true broad Left party. Perhaps spaces like this can be used to debate how such a party should be formed – to thrash out a central constitution that is honest and true – and how such a nascent party should interact with the people it wants to represent. Ensure that the new party is never beholden to corporate interests, lobbyists and personality cults and that all communication (and in the future, legislation) is in plain English. There. That’s a start.

This discussion thread is an excellent example of how this site has too many articles which are biased towards Labour and should be re-named ‘Labour Conspiracy’.

cjcjc @21 may have a point, but the issues they list are not actually those on the mind of the British public so much as they are the issues the Tory press want to impress on the minds of the British public. Crime and immigration are only the biggest issues to the fainting blossoms that read the Mail and Express.

The main problem with Labour swinging back to the left would be the withdrawal of support by the Murdoch press and the Blair-friendly oligarchs that made their 1997 bid possible. That, unfortunately, is a function of the times we live in. As much as I’d love the kind of Labour Party that Cheesy @23 describes, the fact is that the global business interests that make the decisions woudl never allow a party like that to govern a Western nation state.

bluepill – of course, the proles don’t know their own minds, if only they read the Guardian instead…

no wonder you guys aren’t going to make any headway if you insist on addressing the concerns which *you* believe that people *should* have, rather than the ones they actually have!

@26
You really need to get over this perception of disengaged theory-obsessed Guardian-readers. Just remember – you used the word proles, not me.

Coming from a teenage single-parent low-income background myself, I wonder why you don’t give “the proles” credit for coming to their own conclusions. Also worth pointing out is that push-polling can give you any answer you want, so I don’t trust any poll that has a newspaper involved, not even the Grauniad.

I don’t see anything wrong with New Labour losing the next election at all – it would be a Godsend – I don’t even see a real peoblem with the Tories having a slight majority in parliament.

Both these Tory parties, in fact, should join at the hip – it is like seeing a marriage in the middle of a dirty divorce.

I have said this before and I will say it again – the Tories would vote Tory if Gordon Brown crossed over and became the leader of the Conservative party – they always vote, they always will vote.

New Labour have let down the people because, as others have said here and I have said since 2001 – New Labour is Tory, why other still feel it is any different is beyond me – why can’t people see that for themselves? Is it that you really want a Labour party? If you do then you have to advocate one.

If you want a left-wing government the closest thing there is at the moment is the LibDems – and they are more a tad left of centre at the moment.

What the LibDems should be doing is highlighting the piss-poorness of both New Labour and Conservative policy – because whichever of these shit parties get into government, either New Labour or Conservative – you are going to get exactly the same as has been for the last 30 years.

Who is to blame for that?

Those who vote for Conservative and Conservative-lite.

I wonder why you don’t give “the proles” credit for coming to their own conclusions

er, hello?

You were the one claiming that their concerns were manufactured!

As I said, if you want to ignore the evidence, that’s up to you.
But don’t expect to get very far.

Oh, for goodness sake. I’d stayed out of this thread until now – some of the criticisms are valid, if overstated. But this “there’s no difference between a Labour & Tory government” is just absurd, especially in the present circumstances where Labour have introduced a top-rate tax of 50% & attempted some kind of fiscal stimulus (albeit limited) & the Tories want cuts to public services to run much deeper & say they’d cut Surestart & school building programmes but won’t give up proposals on inheritance tax or marriage allowances.

By all means argue. By all means argue that the Lib Dems are more left-wing (though I think that’s absurd, too). But arguing that Labour & the Tories are the same thing makes no sense except on an ultra-leftist level where you’re arguing capitalism has to be overthrown tomorrow and therefore both Labour & the Tories are obstacles.

The difference between Labour and the Tories may not be as great as you or I would like, but in the real world even small differences are important.

*that Labour aren’t left-wing enough*, penultimate paragraph, completing first line

@29
“Evidence” provided in the form of a Daily Mail/Express/Star/Sun survey is no evidence at all.

No, of course not.

Now put your head back in the sand…all will be well.

tim f The difference between Labour and the Tories may not be as great as you or I would like, but in the real world even small differences are important. – ah, the old ‘inch of difference’ argument…a gap which has shrunk considerably smaller in the last 12 years.

25 “As much as I’d love the kind of Labour Party that Cheesy @23 describes, the fact is that the global business interests that make the decisions woudl never allow a party like that to govern a Western state”

Blair was actually created by the right wing press. After years of them heaping vitriol and ridicule and scorn at various labour leaders, Labour basically gave up, and said if you can’t beat them join them. So they came up with a candidate that nullified all the right wing hatred. He was young, married, no ex wives all over the place, a Christian right winger. He got rid of clause 4, promised not reinstate all the Thatcher anti union laws, and promised not to raise the top rate of income tax. Which is what he did, and won 3 elections.

Trouble is the Labour party became just another bunch of sleazy Tories.

Funding by a small group of wealthy businessmen in exchange for honours, the Tory way.
A total belief in market forces and deregulated businessman. The Tory way.
Let the rich get richer and richer and richer. The Tory way.
Foreign wars for profit for large Anglo corporations. The Tory way.
The surveillance society and turning a blind eye to the police misbehaviour. The Tory way.

Tories will always turn out and vote Tory because they don’t believe anyone else should govern. It is deep rooted in their soul, dam it , Many of them don’t even think non Tories are even British.

tim f -

Cameron advocating he is the rightful hair to Tony Blair speaks more to me than a 50p hike in tax for those who are in the top 1 or 2% of the earnings bracket. Which the Tories won’t repeal BTW. The only real, significant difference between New Labour and the Tories is 3 million more unemployed – the Tories, this lot coming into power will be worse than Thatcher – and that is saying something.

All for the benefit of the economy, of course.

Whichever way we look at it, Tim – New Labour and the real boss, Mandelson, are more Tory than many would wish to see. I want a Labour party – not a Tory-lite. Jesus, even the Tories are fighting to grab New Labour policies and make them their own – will the odd ultra-Tory policy thrown in.

“David Brough – howl as you will, your vision of “old Labour” will not return, and if it does will prove just as electable as Michael Foot. Sorry.”

Fuck that- Labour lost in the 80s because of the myth that Thatcherism was good, which has now been exposed as one fucking giant lie built on nothing.

People exercised their right to buy with joy- now their inheritance is going down the tubes as house prices crash and their kids can neither get a council house nor buy into a market distorted by buy to let scum.

People thought we’d all get rich by selling each other double glazing and borrowing money off each other- you can fuck that off now the lies of banker filth have been exposed.

There was also this unbelievable shite about how letting people like me, on less than £20,000 a year, pay all the fucking taxes through VAT while tax evader vermin got off scot-free would make us all rich- now even twats like Brown realise what bollocks this is.

Every one of the forces that fuelled Thatcherism is discredited and only fucking gobshite libertarians fail to realise this.

Unfortunately Brown’s allegiance to his shameful years of betrayal prevent him from fully taking action as a response to this.

#36

Re 50% – depends how long the Tories are in and what levels of growth the economy gets as to whether they’ll cut it or not. I could see them doing it towards the end of a 4-year term although I agree Cameron doesn’t want the signals cutting it straightaway would send.

The difference of 3m in unemployment you highlight is a good enough reason on its own to vote, nay campaign for, a Labour government, I’d say. And there are heaps of other stuff Labour has done that the Tories wouldn’t – signing up to the social chapter, (finally) giving agency workers better rights, compensation for asbestosis & white trigger finger, minimum wage, Surestart, BSF, huge rises in nurses’ pay just off the top of my head. If the Tories get in we can expect to see public sector wages taking large real terms cuts, huge cuts in grants to the voluntary sector, a scaleback of BSF etc

Just because Cameron wants to position himself as the heir to Blair doesn’t mean he is (apart from in the style over substance spin-happy sense). Of course I’m no fan of Blair, but since when did we take the Tories at their word?

I’m not expecting to convince you to vote Labour or anything – or suggest I’m not angry at New Labour’s acceptance of the economic framework they were presented with on arrival. I’m just trying to show how the spectre of a Tory government is not just a bogeyman* – there are real meaningful, qualitative differences between a Labour & Tory government.

* apologies for the terrible mixed metaphor; I’m typing/thinking quickly as I have to pop out to the shops before the game starts & I’m never going to make it.

I agree with Tim F at [30], despite everything, I still believe Labour has done more good than harm overall. Unfortunately, the stuff they’ve either messed up, made worse or not done are the things I most cared about when they came to power and still care a fair bit about now. They failed to reform the Westminster system, and the Westminster system unreformed requires that every so often someone else gets a Turno.

Blair knew this. He couldn’t persuade Brown and Prescott. Now they’re going to lose. However, to the actual subject of the post…

Sunny? I think your psephology is a little off. You say:

This doesn’t point to the party failing to attract swing voters – it points to the fact that it can’t even manage to energise its own constituencies

Labour, in winning and retaining office, did so by mobilising its core vote and the swing voters. Those voters that voted Labour last time but might not now? They’re the swing voters.

As to the stuff about ‘natural’ voters being less likely to vote, that’s always been the case for Labour and to a lesser extent Lib Dem voters. There’s reams of psephology on this and, um, that post I started writing last week on this very subject.

A lot of core Labour voters live in safe Labour seats. Why bother voting? The party won’t be wasting resources campaigning there, they’ll be putting it into the marginals.

A lot of core Lib Dem voters live in no-hope seats (because of the 500-odd English seats, about 200 have the Lib Dems in with a chance if you look at it realistically at this stage). If you live in a Labour/Tory marginal and you’re a committed partisan Lib Dem voter, what’s the point? That’s not how many people think, not even how most think, but it represents a significant chunk of actual observable voter behaviour.

So this poll indicates that Labour has lost the swing voters, and that those that voted Tory last time are, unsurprisingly, partisan Tories who’ll be doing so again. The big question really is will those that voted Tory in 1992 but haven’t voted since turn out again? That’s the real swing.

Psephology would be a fun little hobby, if it wasn’t so serious.

ccjc @3: “I very much doubt that any of those reasons you list – other possibly than post offices – figures high in the thinking of the average voter.”

A couple of years ago, I fell into conversation with the 20 year old bar man, a building labourer in the day, at my local. He didn’t have many strong political opinions and was a typical target Labour voter. But he would never vote for them because of National ID. There wasn’t a big debate about National ID at the time (is there ever?) but he knew about it, and instinctively understood what it is about.

Don’t make assumptions about the average voter: person on the street will kick against things you never thought about, but is also open to debate. In the early 2000s, the LibDems achieved some good parliamentary by-election results against opponents who played the immigration card. When open debate is conducted, the average voter becomes more open to liberal ideas.

tim f-

I campaigned for Blair in 97 – I truly believed back then that he would do as he said – and yes, New Labour have done a few things that the Tories wouldn’t do.

Now it is a matter that they have ridden down the road on a Tory horse and become what they are against, or at least should be. The avocation of Tory policy, whether red-Tory or not is by the by – they have and that is all I can judge them on.

They are called Socialists, as if that is supposed to be an insult – yet have done little (12 years in government). They have abandoned the poor to Thatcherites such as Purnell – why that man is even in New Labour is beyond me.

They(New Labour) have abandoned the principles of freedom to Thatcherite policy of policing the public rather than freeing them – I could go on but I thing you get the message.

*think – blugh spelling.

#39 makes good points. Signs are that the Tory vote is more motivated to vote than it has been since 1992, which is a dangerous thing. Of course the Labour vote will be less motivated to vote after 12 years – and Labour governments always end up disappointing their natural supporters by not going far enough. This government has done that pretty consistently since 1997. Getting those people to vote is as much an organisational challenge as it is political, though drops in membership of political parties hurt Labour disproportionately for that very reason. My view on swing voters (not that they’re one bloc, of course) is that many would vote Tory if they had to make a choice this minute (effectively the question pollsters ask), but they’re not convinced by the Tories and are open to changing their minds. That all adds up to a huge challenge for Labour at the next election, but I think those who’ve written off Labour’s chances already have done so prematurely.

“Fuck that- Labour lost in the 80s because of the myth that Thatcherism was good, which has now been exposed as one fucking giant lie built on nothing.”

I think you’ll find that the Alliance was polling ahead of Labour at one point because although the Tories were unpopular, Labour under Foot were seen as a bunch of fruit cakes.

“Every one of the forces that fuelled Thatcherism is discredited and only fucking gobshite libertarians fail to realise this”

You are evidently unaware that many libertarians are critical of Thatcherite neo-liberalism for its adoption of monetarism and Chicago School economics instead of more pure libertarian policies such as abolition of the central bank and introduction of a gold standard (which would have gone a long way to shutting down the business cycle and saved us from this mess).

By the way, using the f-word a lot doesn’t make you big or clever, you just sound like an 14 year old.

Charlieman @ 40 – while there are many people who identify as “working class” that blindly subscribe to the nothingtohidenothingtofear crap they read in such as the Sun, there are others out there like your barman. Last year I remember catching the first bus one morning after an overnight shift, and on the way to where I was living at the time four old guys from the local refuse depot boarded the bus and sat down a few seats in front of me. And these binmen were talking about ID cards and their associated national register in the most disparaging terms, and one of them stated that he was no longer going to vote Labour despite having done so loyally since 1964 for that very reason. None of these fellows talked like shop stewards or dyed-in-the-wool Trots do either.

Whether or not there are more folks around who think this way is another kettle of cheese all together. But by george it was surprising and heartening to hear such enlightened, liberal opinions – all the more so in a “multi-cultural” Northern ex-mill town – coming from the mouths of people who couldn’t possibly be described as the “chattering classes” in a thousand years.

Mat – good point. So this poll indicates that Labour has lost the swing voters, and that those that voted Tory last time are, unsurprisingly, partisan Tories who’ll be doing so again. The big question really is will those that voted Tory in 1992 but haven’t voted since turn out again? That’s the real swing.

But that still points, doesn’t it, to the fact that Labour can’t give anyone a reason to vote Labour?

donpaskini: This discussion thread is an excellent example of how this site has too many articles which are biased towards Labour and should be re-named ‘Labour Conspiracy’.

heh!

Matt’s point is the pertinent one, but it’s also so basic I’m amazed it took 40 comments before it occurred to anybody. If Labour retains the entirety of its 2005 vote then it could expect a similar result, so obviously it is more than the Labour core vote. And if this is true, then the obviousness of winning these voters back with even more leftist policies is called into doubt. Surely if Matt is right, and he is, your post is in shreds?