It doesn’t matter what anyone’s opinion on this is, the Tories are having a free ride here and why the opposition cannot see how the public view them is beyond me.

It isn’t just because of the obvious limitations of the Labour leader (shown in the fact the polls should have the opposition WAY ahead) but mainly because people in this country simply do not trust the Labour Party anymore – especially with the economy.

For the life of me I do not understand why Labour cannot accept there was a reason they lost the last election with one of their worst results ever and instead of constantly being negative why can’t they have a New Labour moment and get people back on side?

Articles like this one seem to purely remind people about how poor the official opposition is in this country and do nothing to help Labour’s future election prospects…

…the Tories and their Liberal cohorts were on the most disciplined messaging campaign seen outside of a dictatorship…

Someone hasn’t been paying attention for the last 15 years…

Sadly I think Anon is right.

Labour Lost because Brown in particular was so disliked. However the tories struggled when they should have walked it. In effect the verdict was that the public disliked all the options they were offered, but Brown especially.

The saddest part of this is that under thingy’s leadership Labour has been so vague and feeble that they have failed to effectively capitalize on clear tory failings.

Whilst I agree with your main thrust – that the Tories have failed on every pledge they made – and firmly believe it is our duty to force a General Election asap to oust them, I cannot bring myself to believe that Labour is the vehicle for this. The leader, and the rest of the leadership, are weak and ineffectual – you say they have been fighting on many fronts, but I haven’t heard any useful actions or positions from them – and there is little appetite for change amongst those entrenched in power in the party.
It is THIS failure, more than the Tory’s failure, that gives birth to some of the real opposition movements; UKUncut, Occupy, even the sluggishly reactivated Unions through whom todays’ strikes are possible. If this agglomeration of movements does not yet have a political voice – they are rightly suspicious of political parties, and have resisted being co-opted – it doesn’t invalidate either their messages or their power.
I have often tweeted; the scariest thing about this awful Tory/LibDem Coalition Government is that New Labour is the Opposition.

Our problem now is that we need to sell a paradox: borrowing is getting out of control (and that’s a sign of the Coalition’s failure), but we probably need *more* borrowing to get things back on track. The point we need to get across is that if we’d borrowed a bit more *this* year to maintain investment in infrastructure, maintain the Future Jobs Fund etc, we wouldn’t be needing to borrow so much *next* year to pay extra unemployment benefits etc – because higher growth would have meant tax revenues were now higher and unemployment was now lower. Therefore it’s reasonable to think that higher borrowing *next* year might put us in a stronger position in the medium term. But as that becomes more and more true (as we get further down the spiral back into recession, with more and more borrowing needed to plug the gap between falling tax receipts and the costs of unemployment), it also becomes a harder and harder sell (because the higher borrowing gets, the scarier the idea of borrowing *even more* becomes).

So Labour have to focus on getting people to see the truth of that paradox – e.g. drawing attention to the fact that that the deficit was coming down much faster *before* Osborne’s spending cuts and tax rises really kicked in. (From memory, it fell by around £16 billion last year – from £156bn to £140bn – mostly due to the strong growth we saw in the mid-2010. This year we’ve supposedly had far more ‘deficit reduction’ and it’s set to fall by only £13 billion, to £127 billion, with an even smaller fall next year.)

@4. Peter Garbutt

I am a disgruntled ex Labour voter who is not a fan of Miliband (or any of his career politician types from any party) but in fairness he made a speech regarding good and bad businesses and I do think that was worthy of discussion.

Even Matthew Paris in the Times, hardly a fan of the Labour Party, stated Ed Miliband had a right to be heard but until the party realises it has throughly lost any credibility with the electorate and changes the way it presents itself it will not get heard.

I don’t think Labour are devoid of ideas but they are just so out of touch with real people that the message is being ignored and as for the pompous, middle class dreamers like UK Uncut they should just go and do something useful instead of having sit ins anywhere but The Guardian Newspaper Group….

Grandma – a dyed-in-the-wool Tory – can’t understand why her grand-daughter’s SureStart is closing; her grandson can’t afford uni; her single-parent nursing daughter is struggling to pay the mortgage; her severely disabled son-in-law’s benefits are being stopped; or why her neighbour is having to pay £15.50 an hour for someone to come in and get her Alzheimer’s-suffering husband in and out of bed; why another neighbour had to sell up and move into a home because she couldn’t afford social care or why the bus service is being cut. To cap it all, the local library is closing. But she’s all for cutting benefits to scroungers and thinks the unions are too powerful. She reads the Daily Mail.

@1 – That’s your narrative. What’s happening is your Tories are making it irrelevant by gerrymandering their 30% support into a permanent majority. Of course you want Labour to stay “New” and keep shedding voters to make New China look more convincing, but it fools nobody who’s paying attention.

You’re a die-hard far right winger, nothing else.

@7

Grandma – a dyed-in-the-wool Tory – can’t understand why her grand-daughter’s SureStart is closing; her grandson can’t afford uni; her single-parent nursing daughter is struggling to pay the mortgage; her severely disabled son-in-law’s benefits are being stopped; or why her neighbour is having to pay £15.50 an hour for someone to come in and get her Alzheimer’s-suffering husband in and out of bed; why another neighbour had to sell up and move into a home because she couldn’t afford social care or why the bus service is being cut. To cap it all, the local library is closing. But she’s all for cutting benefits to scroungers and thinks the unions are too powerful. She reads the Daily Mail.

This is precisely the problem. The Tories have completely sold the narrative.

@5

Our problem now is that we need to sell a paradox: borrowing is getting out of control (and that’s a sign of the Coalition’s failure)…

So Labour have to focus on getting people to see the truth of that paradox

I completely agree. I also agree with the OP that politically, it is very powerful to argue that Osborne is failing – even on his own terms, never mind all the other damage they are doing.

The question is one of political strategy. How do we change the narrative? (with a very pro-Tory media) How do we make the case Osborne’s medicine for the economy is the wrong thing to do? How can Labour regain the public’s trust?

I am not as negative about Milliband as many – he is not immediately inspiring but I think the jury is out as to whether he will rise to the challenge.

AFZ

@8 – Leon Wolfson

You say”You’re a die-hard far right winger, nothing else.”

Absolutely right I agree with you. That’s why I vote Labour usually….