Taking stock: moving forward from Thursday

It’s hard to imagine a larger contrast between the upbeat pre-election blog I posted here on Wednesday and the one I sadly have to write today. Thursday’s election was an unmitigated disaster for Labour, as well as for the Liberal Democrats and large parts of the pundit class. It was a triumph for David Cameron, as he won a small overall Tory majority – their first since 1992 - against the expectations of most commentators (though not quite all – voices such as Dan Hodges have been predicting it for quite some time, and we’ll be mad if we don’t listen to them from now on).

The SNP also prospered of course, nearly sweeping the board in Scotland on extraordinarily large swings and decapitating multiple ‘big beasts’ from both Labour and the Lib Dems. But as bad as it was, all that was telegraphed long enough in advance that we were at least able to ‘price it in’ to our expectations for the night to some degree. By contrast, Labour’s near-total failure to make compensating gains in even some of the lowest-hanging Lab-Con marginals like Nuneaton was anything but inevitable. Further salt in the wound were the sudden losses this time in narrow 2010 Labour defences like Southampton Itchen (where I spent polling day five years ago) and Ed Balls’ own seat of Morley & Outwood, which had been the frontline where Labour thwarted an outright Tory breakthrough back then. Labour only took 232 seats - even if Labour had held every seat in Scotland, the Tories still would have had their majority based on these English results. Labour will need to win almost 100 seats in one go in 2020 to form even the narrowest of majorities.

Nor was the sheer scale of the Lib Dem collapse in England expected, something which proved to be very much a double-edged sword for Labour. I spent most of Thursday and the early hours of Friday morning in Bermondsey & Old Southwark, where Hughes’ legendary personal vote meant it was reasonable to expect either a successful Lib Dem defence or a wafer-thin Labour gain. In the event, at around 4am it was officially announced that our candidate Neil Coyle had skilfully converted an 8,500 majority for Hughes into a 4,500 vote Labour win, bringing unbridled jubilation and much-needed relief to the activists there after the demoralising 10pm exit poll and hours of dire returns from the rest of the country. However, Labour had been tacitly reliant on centre-left Lib Dem defectors only handing over these sorts of Lib-Lab urban marginals, while continuing to prop up Lib Dem incumbents in seats where the Tories were the challenger. Most commentators had anticipated this would have left the Lib Dems with 25 seats and help deprive the Tories of the majority they secured. Instead, we saw the Lib Dems crash all the way down to eight, with figures like Vince Cable, Ed Davey and David Laws swept away in a blue tide.

Amid all this, there are plenty of lessons that sorely need to be learned.

1.     No more truck with failing leaders

As Phillip Collins argued in The Times yesterday, some fundamental rules of politics are unbreakable – one such rule is that a party won’t win while trailing badly on both leadership and economic competence.

I still like Ed Miliband – I believe he is a moral and well-intentioned man of great intellect, who even by the cut-throat standards of politics has shown incredible resilience in the face of brutal personal attacks (“I will put up with whatever they throw at me in order to fight for you” was one of his best lines). In the short campaign he was personable and passionate, beating expectations and drawing praise from many previous critics. He had more mettle than many gave him credit for - rarely for an opposition leader, he was able to shift the national narrative on phone hacking and energy market reform (and on Syria, though I disagreed with him there at the time). He initiated a process of renewal in Labour that overhauled the party’s operations and saw the quiet beginnings of a fused ‘New & Blue Labour’ ideological trend emerge in the party. And yesterday morning, he took a tough result on the chin, accepting sole responsibility and resigning with dignity.

But in politics, widely-held perceptions or set narratives can be indistinguishable from reality, hard to change once accepted by the press and public. You may well get only one chance to make a first impression, and from day one of his leadership, Ed Miliband never instinctively struck the public as naturally “prime ministerial”. He was maligned as “weird” or straw-manned as “Red Ed”. Critics harped about the manner of his selection, against his front-running elder brother and reliant on the trade union section of the electoral college. He never led David Cameron on leadership at any point in the last five years, and while it is true that strong performances on the campaign trail lifted Ed’s ratings significantly from what they had been, the sardonic assessment of one of the Labour characters in Channel 4’s Ballot Monkeys (“Ed has all the confidence of a man whose leadership ratings have just rocketed to minus 19”) unfortunately wasn’t far from the truth. Some of Ed’s defenders cited the precedent of Thatcher, who won despite trailing Callaghan in polls on leadership in 1979, but this was the singular exception that proved an ironclad rule (voters were also immeasurably more change-hungry in ’79, and I’d wonder if initial scepticism about Thatcher was partly just down to the pervasive sexism of the era). And above all else, every single minute and moment we exhausted defending Ed’s leadership were ones when we should have been explaining our substantive agenda for the country instead – the leader should make the case for their party, not the other way around.

Labour also knew all of this. It’s why Ed suffered repeated leadership wobbles throughout his time as leader, most notably in November 2014 when speculation about a rebel coup or an Alan Johnson coronation hit fever-pitch. But as in Gordon Brown’s time and in sharp contrast to the ruthless Tory and Lib Dem leadership putsches we’ve seen in times gone by, Labour plots tend to spill onto the front pages without ever actually reaching fruition, condemning us to the worst of both worlds – we publicly appeared divided and Ed was further undermined, but there was no chance of him actually being replaced. I must admit that it crossed my mind at that time that a quick Alan Johnson or Andy Burnham coronation might well have been the best thing for the party, but as it became clear to me that the plotters were just as gutless or disorganised as Brown’s tormentors had been, I became sympathetic to the #WeBackEd hashtag campaign on Twitter. There was simply no sense in disunity without result, and it was clear to me that come what may, Ed was the only person actually brave enough to lead Labour into the 2015 election.

The lesson of all this is clear – we need to reform our party rules to make leadership challenges at times of crisis somewhat easier, as the institutional barriers for a challenge from the PLP are simply too high at current (though reforms will need to be measured - constant, destabilising “leadership spills” in Australia suggest that the other extreme isn’t desirable either). In exchange, worthy internal opponents of any embattled future Labour leaders need to make a firm choice when they sense the party is on course to lose – break cover and set out your stall, or just shut up and campaign. Self-promotional briefing from the shadows is worse than useless.

2.     “It’s [still] the economy, stupid”

Economic competence is an even tougher question - it’s an impression that people take from the entire party and its past history, rather than one we can hope to shift simply with a change of personnel. But except for a brief window in 2012 in the wake of the Omnishambles budget, Labour never had the initiative here and always trailed badly. Without it, it’s actually hard to comprehend why we ever thought we would win.

To my mind, the 2015 Labour manifesto did hit most of the right notes here from a pure policy standpoint – Miliband and Balls pledged not to borrow and to cut the deficit every year, they made these pledges subject to a budget lock, they promised not to raise income taxes or NI for the vast majority of people and they rolled out sensible pro-business policies (freezing business rates, a pledge for the lowest corporation tax rate in the G7 even after a small rise to fund the business rate cut, a British Investment Bank, continued EU membership, long-termist infrastructure planning etc). At least by the time of the election, the charge that “Red Ed” had abandoned the centre-ground didn’t fully make sense – this was perhaps evidenced by the coordinated fire he had to put up with from the anti-austerity Sturgeon-Wood-Bennett axis in both of his leaders’ debates.

It’s also true that any Labour leader would have struggled to respond to constant Tory attacks tethering them to the 2008 crash and the subsequent deficit. Labour essentially lost that argument in the 2010 election, before Ed was even leader. David Miliband, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham were all senior faces in Brown’s government, so the “don’t give the keys back to the people who crashed the car” logic the Conservatives have hammered could still have applied to any of Labour’s plausible 2010 leadership candidates. The response Ed seemed to settle on was economically sound (apologising for failing to regulate the banks, defending the deficit as a necessary evil post-crisis and pledging to reduce it at a managed pace once the economy had begun to grow). However, that response died on its feet in the political arena because of its inherent nuance – it can come across as a dodge, and saying “we weren’t wrong to run up a deficit, but I will cut it” can sound contradictory on its face.

Tory messaging, meanwhile, has been both thoroughly hypocritical and economically illiterate (they pushed for more bank deregulation, Osborne backed Labour’s spending plans in 2007, Osborne later used Quantitative Easing after denouncing it in 2009, the Tories themselves left a post-Black Wednesday deficit to Labour in 1997, they have missed their own deficit targets, and they went on an uncosted splurge during this election campaign). But unfortunately, the Conservative moral narrative of “cleaning up the mess” and demanding that Labour apologise for the deficit cut through easily in both this election and in 2010, down to its instinctiveness and (over) simplicity. And it’s also a rule that if the public feel strongly enough that an incumbent government is doing a decent enough job with the economy, it is hard for the opposition to make weather, whatever its message may be (the old mantra of “oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them”).

But having said all of that, the size of the task simply meant that Labour’s only slim chance of success was to approach the issue with the same level of monotonous message discipline the Tories have. In his first conference speech in September 2010, Ed did praise New Labour’s pro-business focus and backed the need for cuts under the Darling deficit reduction plan, but these were brief passages and weren’t followed up consistently throughout last the last five years. Ed addressed the anti-austerity ‘March for the Alternative’ in March 2011, hoping to harness popular anger, but this undermined the idea that we were a serious party of government. Labour kept vaguely acknowledging that it would’ve been making cuts had it been in government, but it has not been in enough of a coordinated manner, and it was inconsistent with the fact that Labour often appeared to take an oppositional stance to almost all actual coalition spending cuts. The clearest messaging on deficit reduction was seen to come at the time of the 2015 manifesto launch, but it’s hard to shift existing impressions at that late stage. And Ed sometimes struggled to reconcile his case for a more moral economy (e.g. his ‘predators and producers’ conference speech in 2011) and support for tax rises at the upper end with the simultaneous need for a positive pro-growth, pro-aspiration message.

In contrast, some have pointed to David Miliband’s 2010 ‘conference speech that never was’ (leaked to the Guardian in 2011), which put a clear narrative on wealth creation and deficit reduction front and centre as a statement of intent. While the sudden speculation about David returning to the UK for the leadership is probably baseless (and should be ignored even if not – he had his chance), the text of his speech gives a good template for the next Labour leader’s economic message. Labour must read it, and digest it.

More generally, even lower-level Labour politicians and activists need to get out of our comfort zone on these issues. Early last year, Karen Landles of the Labour and Finance and Industry Group (LFIG) commented that Labour needs to talk about wealth creation with at least as much passion as we do with the NHS – she was absolutely right. Even if the next Labour leadership finds its voice on business policy and fiscal restraint, we can’t just leave the heavy lifting solely to them while sticking to our patter on public services and inequalities whenever we find ourselves on the doorstep. Change must be total, top to bottom and throughout the party. All CLPs must be issued talking points and given seminars on these issues (and for that matter on others where we are struggling to connect – immigration, welfare etc – but more on that under point 4).

There’s of course a counter-charge that Labour may have suffered from sounding too similar to the Tories on the economy in the eyes of the left, exacerbating the losses to the SNP and allowing the Greens to split our vote. But in the end, Labour put itself in a worst of both worlds position in this election – the message inevitably wasn’t left enough for some SNP switchers or the 1.1 million who went Green, something we couldn’t do much about (there’s no electoral majority there, even if they did all stick with us). But at the very same time, the lack of discipline and passion behind our message meant centrist swing voters in England also came away resoundingly unconvinced that they could place their trust in us. In the months and years ahead, we need to go full-bore to win back the latter group, assuming it’s not too late to do so.

3.     The next leader probably needs to be someone fresh

I’ll probably blog about this separately soon, but clearly, Labour needs to think carefully about its next leadership election. In spirit of summer 2010, and in contrast to the stitch-ups of 1994 and 2007, it needs to invite all comers and have spirited debate about the direction of the party. Timetabling will be a point of discussion. Some will suggest a longer contest to allow more of an airing of issues, but Labour might want to keep an eye on the timing of the Lib Dem and UKIP leadership contests – there may be a case for beating them to the punch, to establish momentum as the sole opposition to the Tories.

Many have already said that Labour needs to move on to the 2010 generation, which I basically agree with. Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper are both strong in their own ways, and I have great respect for them. I first-preferenced Burnham on my ballot paper in 2010, and might well have voted for Cooper instead had she stood then. It’s also true that they are known quantities with experience in government, which Labour’s 2010 intake will lack. But Blair and Cameron had similarly little experience, and it didn’t do them harm. Meanwhile, substantial baggage from the New Labour era weighs Burnham and Cooper down – the same “they crashed the car” problem on competence Ed faced, the memories of factional infighting, their half-baked manoeuvres against Ed in this parliament, Cooper’s inevitable association with her now-defeated husband (unfair and sexist though that may be) and Burnham’s with the Mid Staffs hospital scandal. The new generation are free of all this.

Of the newer intake, Chuka Umunna and Dan Jarvis are the most heavily tipped, along with the likes of Tristram Hunt, Stella Creasy and Liz Kendall (Rachel Reeves is also a fantastic prospect, but she is on maternity leave and so may not wish to stand right now). They come from a variety of backgrounds – several bring much-valued experience from outside the ‘Westminster bubble’ - though all are thought to be savvy political operators. Umunna, Hunt and Reeves formed a ‘praetorian guard’ around Ed during times of leadership trouble, which means they cannot be accused of having publicly destabilised the party. And with Harriet Harman also stepping down, perhaps Labour can now get two of them onto a ‘dream ticket’. Labour has plenty of bright lights, and I think moving forward needs to involve putting our faith in one of them.

4.     It’s all about England (and Wales) now – New/Blue Labour is not an optional extra

Perhaps depending on whether Cameron makes a big federalist offer to the SNP, Scotland’s place in the union may well be imperilled by the double-whammy of Nationalist hegemony in Scotland and an emboldened Tory majority in Westminster with an unprecedented lack of electoral clout north of the border (Cameron has just one Scottish MP - Thatcher started out with 22, Major 11). Even if Scotland stays, it’s unclear how long it would take Scottish Labour to recover, so Labour has to work from the basis that 40 seats up there we used to count on are gone.

The one upshot of all that is that it will focus the mind of the Labour Party on how to win in England, without the mental comfort of our old Scottish crutch. In 1945, 1950, 1966, 1997, 2001 and 2005 Labour would’ve had an outright majority of seats even without Scotland - we need to rediscover how do that, but with greater regularity than ever before. As an aside, much of the below also applies to Wales – the Tories just had their best election there in 30 years and UKIP gained notable ground in north Wales.

Under the guidance of Lord Maurice Glasman, Jon Cruddas MP, Jonathan Rutherford, Duncan Weldon and Marc Stears, we saw elements of the Blue/One Nation Labour approach being introduced into the party under Ed, where it was fused with some of the best of New Labour thinking, with which it shares some common ground, and other further-left intellectual strains from within the party (here's a longer summary I wrote about Blue Labour in 2013). This led to decentralisation, community empowerment, English national identity, a measured approach to immigration, making work pay and welfare reform moving up somewhat in Labour’s internal debates and potential agenda, but the result on Thursday makes plain that this went nowhere near far enough. Though UKIP only won Clacton and Farage has now resigned, their second-place finishes in some Labour seats put them in a good position to make future gains and it’s probable that the party took enough white working-class 2010 Labour voters to tip key Lab-Con battles to the Tories, including some seats we held in 2010. In Southampton Itchen, held in 2010 by 192 votes, UKIP’s vote increased six-fold and Eurosceptic Tory Royston Smith got in with a majority of 2,316, despite a fall of over 7,500 in the Lib Dem vote and a concerted community organising-based campaign by Southampton Labour and their fantastic candidate, Rowenna Davis.

Itchen’s outgoing Labour MP John Denham has argued for an English Labour Party to be formally recognised in the party structure, which would be a good start. Making St George’s Day a bank holiday and Jerusalem the official national anthem for England have been suggested in a similar vein, and a few months ago at the time of the leaders’ debates, I mooted the idea of an England-only debate featuring appointed English representatives from each party, alongside the local Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland ones that were already taking place.

The party also needs to be disciplined on immigration. Under Ed’s leadership, Labour has focused on immigration much more as an issue, especially since the rise of UKIP became apparent in early 2013, but this was too little too late in many regards. Labour’s narrative remains essentially positive about immigration in broad spec – as it should – but it is now more willing to engage the public constructively, it is more pragmatic on overall numbers and firmer about enforcement, benefits, wage undercutting and abuses in the system. This stance is less restrictive than some of the public would like, which has been an issue, but it represents the best balance the party can hope to strike.

However, internal opposition means the party’s attempts to tackle the issue have been two steps forward, one step back. Though the phrasing of our ‘Controls on immigration’ manifesto pledge could have been better, the very public outcry from sections of the party about the “anti-immigration mug” in the midst of the campaign was disproportionate and laid bare the unhelpful attitudes of many in the Labour movement, undercutting the entire effort. A Labour councillor in Southampton also commented to me that senior politicians from the London Labour Party need to be far more mindful of how their remarks on immigration play in the rest of the country. Labour made gains on Thursday in the capital and in other metropolitan areas like Manchester, where UKIP aren’t a factor, but badly almost everywhere else in England – a governing majority cannot be won this way. That exact pattern was also heavily foreshadowed a year ago in the May 2014 European and local elections, suggesting that Labour’s efforts in the past 12 months did little to shift the tide. The party’s language on immigration – and our approach to politics in general – needs to permit variance and strike people as less ‘metropolitan liberal’ if the One Nation ideal is to succeed (and I say that as a member of Islington South CLP).

Another big running sore is devolution and the linked issue of English Votes for English Needs (EVEN) – here, the party could do with hashing it out internally and adopting clear, radical proposals. Ed’s twisting in the wind last September on this, falling back on the outcome of a ‘Constitutional Convention’ that many probably took as a politician’s wheeze, did the party absolutely no favours. We need to answer UKIP and the Tories with an alternative vision. I’m personally sceptical of a singular English Parliament being our version of this, as one centralised legislature for 45-53 million people might well answer the question of English national identity, but would utterly fail to empower England’s distinctive regions and counties. However, regionalisation without a unified legislature would threaten English national identity, especially if justice, culture and perhaps tax were devolved areas. Members of elected regional assemblies could perhaps sit at certain times as an ‘English parliament’ to decide on reserved national matters, but another arguable factor with regional assemblies is the need to remember their 2004 rejection and the voters’ John Major test (“if the answer is more politicians, you’re asking the wrong question”). Mark Ferguson’s proposal for English Westminster MPs to also double as regional assembly members might instead meet this requirement, but that would draw fire from unionists rightfully wary of converting the Commons into a part-time English Parliament. And somewhere in all this, we would need to decide where English local government (which might yet need unitarising), cities, the fledgling Combined Authorities and Greater London would fit in to this puzzle. But no more kicking the can down the road - England needs an answer.

All in all, Renie Anjeh put it best recently in pre-election blog for Labour Uncut – between the loss of Scotland and how well the Tories (and in votes, UKIP) did in this election, “Labour must talk to England: it’s not an option, it’s an imperative”. That means the continuation and development of a Blue-New Labour fusion, until it is undeniably rooted in the party and its ethos.

5.     Labour needs to sort out its line on Europe, fast

In the last parliament, there was a debate as to whether Labour should find a way to support an In/Out EU referendum. John Mills’ Labour for a Referendum, a handful of backbenchers, a few voices at the top of party (notably Jon Cruddas) and outright majorities of voters and Labour supporters were receptive to the need for one. Voters have never had a say on the EU in its current form, so granting popular demands for a referendum would’ve put Labour party back in touch with people on an issue that effects their sense of their own national identity, and probably helped prevent further slippage to UKIP and the Tories. I also believe that between cross-party and business support for ‘In’, the public’s status quo caution in referenda and the strength of the arguments that exist for our EU membership, such a referendum could genuinely be won. Recent polls have shown support for ‘In’ outpacing support for ‘Out’, a turnaround that has probably been aided by Nigel Farage’s toxification of the anti-EU cause. I wrote a blog on this subject in 2013.

However, Ed remained unsupportive, reflecting a very large section of the party’s instinctive centralising pro-Europeanism (Tony Blair and his followers, while proven right almost categorically in their pre-election assessment of our strategy on Thursday, are no different here). These voices feared a referendum would harm the recovery through investor uncertainty or an outright withdrawal, undercut the party’s clearest offer to business and distract an incoming Labour government from the rest of its agenda. These concerns all made perfect sense in and of themselves, and Ed was very candid on the campaign trail about a referendum not being his priority. But we woke up on Friday to a Conservative majority with a clear mandate for its promised EU referendum in 2017, kicking off a two-year battle to keep us in the EU. And Labour – both the supposed ‘people’s party’ and the only ‘party of In’ that matters - will now have to enter the coming debate after vocally opposing it even taking place.

An incoming Labour leader needs to accept we were on the wrong side of the issue and apologise for the well-intentioned failure to embrace the referendum (if the bookies are right and it is Andy Burnham, then this pivot wouldn’t be too hard - he was one of the shadow cabinet advocates of a referendum). Labour and the broader pro-European movement, in all parties and none, then needs to build a strong, coordinated campaign. We badly need to learn the lessons of the Scottish referendum, where the Yes Scotland side were all too able to lambast Better Together as “Project Fear” for its overwhelming negativity and lack of a clear, positive case for the union. And we should remember that the margin for error is even smaller here – important though it is, British presence in the EU is nowhere near as integral as the continuance of the UK should have been for Scots. We need to grab the coming referendum with both hands and hone our arguments.

However, another lesson from both the Scotland referendum and UKIP’s successes against Labour is that we will need to carefully manage our language. The Labour leadership will campaign for an ‘In’ vote, and will do so with the support of most of the party. But we must be mindful that the Labour movement has long been home to a proud Eurosceptic tradition that speaks for a large section of our working-class vote, the sort of people we have already started losing to the likes of ‘Red UKIP’. We must find a way to accommodate these voices within our movement as we go forward into the EU referendum. If we don’t, the horror we witnessed in Scotland serves as a warning – during the independence referendum, Labour alienated many ex-Labour Yes voters by failing to appear respectful of their priorities, pushing them firmly into the SNP column thereafter.

That’s where one of the often-overlooked policy shifts we saw in Ed Miliband’s leadership may come in, if maintained and built upon by his successor. As Telegraph columnist Peter Oborne noted in 2011, in the past few years, Labour has started to find a somewhat more Eurosceptic voice. This is not a betrayal of our party’s internationalist values in my eyes – I’m pro-EU, but healthy scepticism is part and parcel of refusing to be painted as subscribing to an unquestioning ‘Europhile’ creed that few Britons will ever share. We’re the Labour Party, not the Liberal Democrats.

And so Ed Miliband’s Labour opposed a rise in the EU Commission budget, instead proposing an outright cut, and demanded that British exposure to Portuguese bail-out be limited. Labour opposed both main Commission President candidates in 2014 – the centre-right’s Jean-Claude Juncker and Labour’s own Party of European Socialists candidate Martin Schulz – as too integrationist. It backed a ‘red card’ reform than would make it easier for member-state national parliaments to veto European legislation. Ed did pledge an In/Out referendum in the unlikely event of a treaty change. It raised the alarm about the effect TTIP could have had on public services, and shadow health secretaries John Healey and Andy Burnham mounted critiques of NHS competition that potentially involved defying EU competition law. The party accepted that the lack of transition controls on Eastern European migration had been an error, and Labour’s manifesto pledge on immigration included putting the party’s pledge to ban benefits for EU migrants for two years front and centre, with Labour frontbenchers taking to defending “free movement of labour, not free movement of benefits”. As a result of these sorts of shifts, Jonathan Lindsell of the think-tank Civitas recently noted that in Labour’s 2015 manifesto, “Labour’s EU reform promises resemble those of Eurosceptic parties, only diluted and couched in workers’ rights terms”. These stands are an acknowledgement of the deep public feeling that Brussels is distant and far from perfect, in need of reform and should not grow ever-bigger. They will be critical to us making a case that ‘In’ doesn’t mean ‘no change’, as Labour had so badly wished to do in the Scottish referendum.

Having said all that, Labour is also not the Conservative Party – we are not gripped by a pathological Europhobic obsession that makes governing with a small Commons majority nigh-on impossible (good luck with that, Cameron) and divorces them from the real-world implications of a withdrawal from the EU. Having to fight the referendum may yet tear the Conservatives apart and trigger a second UKIP surge at their expense. Labour will be largely unified, as we are able to recognise that though it could be better, the EU is overall a great deal for Britain. It gives us access to a huge market that supports 3 million British jobs, safeguards our employment rights, allows us to tackle cross-border security challenges and enhances our proud position as a world-leading nation. In 2006, shortly after becoming Tory leader, David Cameron sought to his balance his party’s natural Atlanticism with a desire not to stand too close to the Bush White House, and so pledged a “steadfast, but not slavish” relationship with the US. We should appropriate those as Labour’s watchwords on the EU, in the coming referendum and beyond.

Conclusions

Labour has re-founded itself in the past and fought back in tough times - we will find our way back to power sooner or later. But our last spell in opposition involved four lost elections and eighteen years in the wilderness. This time we have already lost two, the second of which was arguably winnable. The next five years will be painful, and as the official opposition Labour will need to continue to harness the relative few resources that that position confers to protect ordinary hard-working families, young people and some of the most vulnerable in this country from the damage the Tories are about to inflict. And Labour now also needs a gain of almost 100 seats to win a bare majority, not far from the 145 seat surge we last achieved in 1997. But if we spend the next five years doing all of the above, and more, we can stop the bleeding. If Labour picks a winner this time as leader, regains its reputation for economic competence, fundamentally changes its ethos towards England and wins a 2017 EU referendum as Tories default into infighting, then it can win. Millions of lives count on it.