Why many within the Labour party still take voters for granted
Over the weekend, the Labour group Progress held their ‘political weekend‘, which involved a range discussions and workshops. I didn’t attend but caught a number of tweets from the event.
One of the tweets was along the lines of: ‘It took the Conservatives five years to increase their vote by 5%; it took Labour five days after 2010′. This gives me an opportune moment to discuss a long-standing bugbear.
The tone of the tweet was triumphant, but it shouldn’t be. If anything, the jump in votes after the 2010 election illustrates how badly the Labour party had lost touch with voters.
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Have Labour realised the election is more than three years away?
I don’t think Labour really know that the game has changed. The move to fixed term parliaments means Ed Miliband find themselves in a totally different position to someone like Cameron circa 2005 or Blair in 1994.
In 2005 Cameron suspected the next election wouldn’t be for five years – and he turned out to be right. But he nearly had to fight an election in 2007 against a newly inaugurated Brown.
This meant that Cameron spent a lot time and effort trying to appear electable, trying to appear “in-touch” by visiting the arctic, liberal by hugging hoodies and as a better heir to Blair than Brown could ever be.
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Does Labour have a broader charisma problem?
I was thinking the other day about the Labour Party and its recent history and I realised something that had not really occurred to me before.
Despite having held power for almost half of the last 50 years, there are only two Labour PMs from that period who have actually won an election. They are Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.
I think perhaps this sometimes gets a bit lost in the detail of the 7 election wins and 24 years of power they yielded.
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Messages matter: Why Miliband’s speeches need emotion
contribution by Martin Shovel
Ed Miliband continues to have trouble getting his message across, and he knows it. In the wake of a poor conference speech and a 2011 beset with difficulties he attempted to stop the rot by appointing a new chief-of-staff and speechwriter.
However, on the evidence of last week’s speech on the economy, things are going from bad to worse. It was billed as the relaunch speech that wasn’t a relaunch, which is just as well as it appears to have sunk without trace.
The Labour party needs to focus more on new institutions than policy
contribution by Joe Sarling
Perhaps the lack of concrete policies at this stage is not such a problem for the Labour Party.
Policies are often designed to be no more than quick hits or media sound bites, often trying to be a magic bullet for a multi-faceted problem.
But this approach only panders to the current media culture rather than delivering change. The electorate says they want a change in politics so let’s grant them their wish.
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To judge Miliband’s position, just look at historical polls
contribution by Lee James Brown
Last year we had the Winter version of the silly season with a torrent of newspaper articles making it clear it that Ed Miliband’s time is up.
Predictably they were joined by some of the usual suspects in our own Party who don’t want to accept that it is time to move on from New Labour after it lost 5m votes by 2010, with 4m lost under Blair.
But the Tory boost came around the time of Cameron’s meaningless veto on a European treaty and was mainly due to a decline in the support for “others” (including UKIP). Already, as Europe moves back down people’s list of priorities, Labour’s lead seems to be opening up again.
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Criticism of Miliband is nothing compared to what Cameron faced
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that right-wingers will amplify and focus on the mildest criticism of any Labour leader.
Even the slightest suggestion he attack Conservatives harder is spun as the end of the road for Ed Miliband.
It’s more annoying that some people within Labour are falling for this trap too. I said in Jan last year there were good reasons why Ed M would find it hard to get his message across. They turned out to be true.
And yet some people seem to think a magic wand can be used to reach the public easily.
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Campaigning, not whinging, will help Labour win
Like most people, I usually ignore Dan Hodges and his “strategic advice”. As a campaign organiser for the Labour Party at the last election, I very quickly realised that ‘taking advice from political bloggers’ was not a winning strategy. It is, after all, the voters that will decide the next election and not the people who write for blogs.
But yesterday Dan wrote something that crossed the line for me, something which prompted me to actually feel the need to put pen to paper. continue reading… »
Where I agree with Maurice Glasman’s criticism of Ed Balls
Maurice Glasman’s article yesterday caused some stir on Twitter and spurred Westminster hacks to say he was critical of Ed’s leadership.
But the interesting policy bit of the article was his coded attack on Ed Balls:
Endogenous growth, flexible labour-market reform, free movement of labour, the dominance of the City of London – it was all crap, and we need to say so. Stanley Baldwin had a far more robust industrial growth strategy than Brown and Mandelson could conceive of, let alone Cable and Osborne.
Glasman attacks the “Brownite political economy”, and by extension (as many see it) – Ed Balls. There is one bit to this that I agree with.
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How Ed Miliband could learn from Barcelona’s footballing
contribution by Sean McHale
Watching El Clasico a few weekends ago, I quickly become infuriated by the actions of Victor Valdes. I’ve never liked Real Madrid, and within 30 seconds of the opening of the match, Victor Valdes had hit a wayward past straight to a Real Madrid attacker which resulted in Barca going a goal down.
Minutes later, I urged him to kick it long in the presence of another on-rusher, instead, he passed it ten yards, playing a one-two removing his side from what had looked a difficult situation. In the second half there was the odd dangerous ball played by Valdes, but 95% of the time his passes reached their required destination.
After the game I lamented Valdes for his mistake and criticised Barcelona for being too ideological at times, the one flaw, as I saw it, in their near-flawless philosophy. Yet, what I had failed to realise was that it was these moments of high-risk, as epitomised by Valdes, which characterises the very core of their philosophy.
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