Readers write to the letters page for many reasons – to put an alternative view, present additional information, correct our grammar, burst our occasional pomposity, alert other readers to events or debates, or just let off steam. But in the weeks following the 7 May general election another reason took pre-eminence: as therapy.
At least that’s the way it seemed. Letters were coming in at about twice the normal rate, a huge number fixated on the surprise Conservative win – or rather the surprise heavy Labour defeat. Our letters page headlines pretty much tell the story: Thursday 7 May, “Time to take a deep breath and vote Labour”; Saturday 9 May, “Handwringing and hopes as Cameron returns to Downing Street”.
Of course it wasn’t just Labour that took a drubbing. Guardian readers are overwhelmingly left of centre, but that includes a solid slice of Liberal Democrats and a growing number of Greens. Our other 9 May headlines pretty much summed it for them too: “Lib Dems must refind their true nature” and “Greens’ leftist rhetoric let them down badly” – a fair reflection of views on one party reduced to a rump of eight MPs and another which won more votes, but was still left with just one seat.
We, along with the rest of the media, deserve part of the blame for the depth of the shock. All of the record number of opinion polls given great prominence forecast a hung parliament right up until the large exit poll. (“I haven’t seen any opinion polls being cited in your newspaper for over a month. Any particular reason?” Irfan Husain asked innocently in a letter on 11 June.)
A more serious point was made in a letter from Sally Lynes on 9 May: “The exit polls have got it right in two consecutive general elections. The exit polls are based on a much larger sample than the numerous opinion polls before the election. In future, let’s have fewer opinion polls, based on larger samples, to give better guidance.” Whether or not the pollsters and the media which commission them take note of that – large samples cost money – polls are likely to be sotto voce until more accurate methods are devised or people have forgotten their miserable election record.
What happened, and how our disproportional voting system distorted and magnified small electoral shifts, really needed some detailed analysis. “Labour increased their share of the vote by 3.6% in England,” Stuart Raymond pointed on 11 May. “Why is this being ignored?” he asked. Partly, perhaps, because a number of party grandees jumped in to blame the defeat on a) Ed Miliband’s leadership, and b) the party being too leftwing and anti-business, before there was time for any real reflection. Over the weekend of 9-10 May, a phalanx led by Alan Johnson, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair were already at work to set the narrative for the Labour defeat. Meanwhile, potential leadership candidates Chuka Umunna and Liz Kendall were setting out their stalls in articles for the Sunday papers that said the party had to do more to appeal to Conservative voters. As one Labour source told the New Statesman, Umunna and Kendall were “behaving like family members taking jewellery off a corpse”.
Their view was not without support among our readers. Also on 11 May, Dr Roger Kennedy wrote: “The mansion tax was a terrible psychological mistake, regardless of its rational justification. It made Labour appear to be envious and unfair to the elderly who may have worked hard all their lives to keep their property.”
But a more common reaction was shock that the party was rushing to judgment and pressing ahead prematurely with a leadership election. Ann Wardle, in a letter on 12 May, was “appalled by the feeding frenzy from the Labour party, blaming its defeat solely on Ed Miliband”; while the previous day, counselling against rushing into a leadership election, Roger Clough wrote: “We are desolate and must have time to grieve and absorb what has happened.”
And that sense of numbness was what came out in many of the letters we didn’t publish, showing all the classic symptoms of grieving. Many just reiterated well-attested facts – such as that Labour lost by being too rightwing in Scotland and too leftwing in southern England – as profound new insights. Others latched on to “if only” type explanations. “The failure to challenge the constantly repeated claim that Labour overspending caused the crash and the deficit,” as Professor Ron Glatter put it in a letter of 10 June, was frequently cited. How to challenge this myth in an environment where the press is 85% anti-Labour is never really considered.
Another trope was that by joining a united Better Together campaign for the Scottish independence referendum, Labour had just endorsed Tory austerity, and so caused the SNP landslide. “The failure to develop a distinctive stance meant that Labour’s response became completely identified with a no campaign that was negative in substance, dismissive – even contemptuous,” one correspondent wrote. This is something that Labour appears to have recognised in its decision to fight a separate campaign to stay in Europe, outside any cross-party pro-EU organisation that may emerge in the runup to the in/out referendum.
Whether an immediate leadership contest was the right approach, it is how Labour is framing debate about its defeat and the way forward. Guardian readers will continue to contribute to that debate through the letters page, and the party could do worse than heed advice from Alan Healey, who on 30 May noted “the difference between what a Labour Queen’s speech might have contained and what the currently declared candidates for the Labour leadership are saying”, and warned: “This suggests that all candidates were lying to the electorate during the campaign since they are all, to varying degrees, backtracking on the policies on which they campaigned, just days after the election. If they were not lying then, this is a clear indication that their currently expressed beliefs are designed not to signal a future direction for Labour, but to get themselves elected.”
