Caroline Flint, a minister in Gordon Brown’s government and a member of Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet, has said the parliamentary Labour party (PLP) was in denial about the unpopularity of Miliband before the last election and implied that if the current leader looked like losing, he should be cut loose.
Speaking at a Guardian Live event at the Labour conference in Brighton on Monday night, Flint was part of a panel chaired by Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland.
“We need a 10% swing to win,” she said. “The only time we came close to that was in 1997. Come 2020 we could be in a different place.”
With the panel debating how Labour could win back power, one member of the audience asked why the MPs did not stand for the leadership themselves if they had the answers about how to lead the party to success in 2020.
Diane Abbott, shadow secretary of state for international development, reminded the audience she had stood as a leadership candidate previously and Tulip Siddiq, MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, joked she might stand for the leadership in 2020.
The panel agreed the party needed a strong leader, but the mountain that Labour had to climb between now and the next general election was laid bare by Deborah Mattinson, founder and director of research and strategy at consultancy BritainThinks. She revealed the concerns undecided voters had at the last election – the economy; immigration; a lack of trust in all politicians – are unchanged.
Nevertheless, while respecting Mattinson’s research, Abbott said that you didn’t just ask what people wanted and give it to them, “you have to lead”. Power is not won, she suggested, by listening to what “eight people drinking white wine think”.
It emerged that while the previous Labour leadership team may or may not have been paying attention to focus groups, they were ignoring the frantic messages coming from activists in the field. Tulip Siddiq said during the election she was feeding back negative comments about Miliband and the mansion tax “but it was falling on deaf ears”.
The panelists also agreed the party needed to do more for the younger generation. Keir Starmer, Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras, said putting vocational and technical skills at the centre of policy making was crucial to winning the votes of young people, while Siddiq drew a big round of applause when she called for the future of the education maintenance allowance to be secured.
In order to win, said Starmer, the party needed to be united and to act in the public interest. “The next stage is much more difficult. We must speak on behalf of the nation.”
That nation includes Scotland but Kezia Dugdale, leader of Scottish Labour, was keen to put some distance between herself and her Westminster colleagues. She said: “To get power you have to give a bit away. Allow me to get on with what I’m doing in Scotland.”
This Guardian Live debate, hosted by Jonathan Freedland took place on 28 September in Brighton.
