Labour – new, old or any other variant – has never really come to terms with the basic nature of the country it seeks to rule (The undoing of Ed Miliband, 4 June). A country founded on and dedicated to maintaining entrenched privilege (of which, of course, the Conservative party is part). While no one would deny that a huge majority of ordinary people, in a mythical referendum, would vote in favour of the monarchy and hence for entrenched privilege, privilege is quite indifferent to ordinary people. Nevertheless it has a need for them when it’s time for a non-mythical vote. Convincing enough “ordinary” voters to associate the things they have that make their lives good – their houses, gardens, cars, kids’ education, foreign holidays, healthcare, good food, nice clothes, insurance and so on – with the security the entrenched privilege blesses them with is a sure-fire winner. Not only do they vote accordingly, they perceive any threat to entrenched privilege as a direct threat to them personally.
The old saw about holding on to nurse for fear of something worse implies that voting patterns will always revert to the long-term mean and that the Tories – and entrenched privilege – will always win in the end. It is the most successful and the most regressive model of statehood that the world has so far evolved. In it, the rightwing media’s job is simply to reinforce Labour’s threat to the things we hold dear. Rather than taking on the challenge this poses, Labour, it seems – and thanks mainly to Tony Blair – are more concerned with becoming part of the entrenched privilege than trying to change anything. But the privileged already have a party so there is no space for them and they’re redundant. And we end up where we find ourselves today. Unless Labour change themselves, then the power to change society will be forever beyond them. Which is, of course, precisely the role entrenched privilege wants them to play.
John Smith
Sheffield
• Labour’s election defeat was indeed a partly self-inflicted tragedy. But a broad historical perspective over the last 60 years suggests it was to an extent predictable. Over this period voters have effectively given five prime ministers on six occasions a “second chance”. Macmillan was re-elected in 1959, Wilson twice in 1966 and 1974 (second election), Margaret Thatcher in 1983, Major in 1992 and Blair in 2001, in four out of six cases (not Major and Blair) with an increased majority. In only four elections (Home in 1964, Heath in 1974, Callaghan in 1979, Brown in 2010) did the sitting prime minister not get a second chance from voters. From this perspective, Cameron was odds-on to win in 2015. Labour can reasonably conclude that electoral history was not on its side this time round, but may well be again in 2020.
Robin Wendt
Chester
• Economic and nationalist issues aside, Patrick Wintour’s saddening account of the disarray over inner-circle advice and tactics reads like a textbook example of how a talented team can fail to do it. David Axelrod was apparently paid an “astronomical fee”. I note that Warren Bennis’s 1997 work Organizing Genius: the Secrets of Creative Collaboration is currently available on Amazon for 1p. It might have given some useful pointers.
Penelope Wilson
Cambridge
• Owen Jones offers a welcome rebuttal to the ridiculous much-repeated myth that Ed Miliband was either of the left or too leftwing (Opinion, 5 June). But progressive politics also requires that the two sides of the other great lie – that according to the Tories, New Labour overspent or for neoliberals, that New Labour massively socially invested – needs to be confronted. If, for example, New Labour had sufficiently invested in adequate teacher numbers, then why invent the position of teaching assistant? If sufficient numbers of doctors were being supplied, why extend prescribing duties to nurses and pharmacists and why steal locally needed medical staff from developing countries? And if police numbers were adequate, why invent community support wardens? If money was a problem, why – as Margaret Hodge has subsequently demonstrated – give billionaires and corporations a free ride on tax? Or why base social provision on market logic at all?
Grassroots working-class voters are not fools. They stopped voting for the party for genuine historical reasons. Hopefully Jeremy Corbyn’s presence will ensure these reasons are really debated.
Dr Gavin Lewis
Manchester
• This was a totally dishonest and unfair election governed entirely by the huge amounts of money the Conservative party threw at every single marginal seat, destroying any idea of a level playing field. I am about a mile from what was a south-west constituency, in Corsham and Chippenham. Its previous Lib Dem MP had done a superb job over five years, acknowledged in the local press and by hundreds of constituents. Until this week, when I met up with former nursing colleagues in the Chippenham constituency, I was unaware that they had been bombarded, sometimes three times daily, in the preceding weeks, by the local Tory team, or should I say “army”, in what became a really annoying campaign, which included masses of leaflets and door-knocking. I live about a mile “over the border” in the North Wiltshire constituency, and guess what? I had no visits or contact of any kind and one Tory leaflet. Surely we must question the involvement of big money which so skewed the eventual outcome?
Anne Keat
Corsham, Wiltshire
• Patrick Wintour fails to credit Lynton Crosby sufficiently as if he only employed his “trademark ‘dead cat’ strategy” as a one off to counter Labour’s non-dom proposal. In fact Crosby strung together dead cat after dead cat so that the agenda on which the election was fought throughout the campaign suited the Tories more than any other party. Thus no or minimal debates on important topics such as climate change, affordable housing, the low-wage economy, productivity, the defence budget, private debt or Trident. And by attacking Labour’s record on the economy they managed to almost completely avoid having to defend their own abysmal record. A masterly but extremely sinister performance. If the highest-funded party machine can so successfully manipulate the agenda on which an election is fought then what hope that any other less-well-funded party can ever win an election again.
David Murray
Wallington, Surrey
• Patrick Wintour’s article makes fascinating reading, but perhaps tells us a lot more about life inside the Westminster bubble than the reality outside. As you reported earlier this year (20 April) the Electoral Commission estimates that “7.5 million eligible voters were not registered to vote, with poor, black and young people least likely to be on the electoral roll”. In the general election an additional 15.8 million people did not vote. Compare that with the 9.3 million people who voted Labour and the scale of the challenge facing the party becomes apparent. Perhaps if Labour had offered something other than “austerity lite” it might have persuaded some of those missing millions to support it.
Declan O’Neill
Oldham
• Patrick Wintour’s analysis of the failed Labour vote does not mention Ukip. They took votes unexpectedly from Labour. The anti-Tory vote, the protest vote, for different reasons was split in many marginals. This the polls did not foresee. The immigration issue was not tackled clearly by Labour, and the EU referendum not promised. So many sided with Ukip, unfortunately.
The majority of the electorate did not want another five years of Cameron/Osborne and their divisive policies. But the protest vote was alas split.
Christina Naylor
Languenan, France
• Congratulations on Patrick Wintour’s excellent article on Ed Miliband’s leadership. However, before the post-mortem on Labour’s 2105 campaign closes, one other issue should be highlighted. This is the dismal support that we in the constituencies received from the party’s central technology function. We were all encouraged to sign up to a central system know as Contact Creator. This allowed the national party to download the electoral register and local parties like ours to input information on voter intention gained from door to door canvassing. While the intention was good the fulfilment was truly dreadful. The system, which didn’t work at all on Apple computers, was counter-intuitive and over-engineered with a whole range of options that confused and served as a barrier to the more straightforward applications.
In addition, the party offered a series of webinars: presentations broadcast through the internet. No past webinars were available on the site until 23 March – exactly the period when they were most needed. The excuse offered was that they were being updated. One important new webinar was broadcast the week before the election: this covered procedures at the count. We could all hear the presenter speaking but could not see any slides. After the webinar had finished the presenter said that he saw that there had been a technical problem and was very sorry. Finally, a series of downloadable applications were made available for the count; these were so complex as to be virtually unusable. Was anyone in charge?
Martyn Sloman
Parliamentary agent, North Norfolk constituency Labour party
• There have been many questions raised about the how the Labour party needs to move forward after the election and even before that. It is time now is to really challenge the onward marketisation of just about everything, and the enclosure of things such as the law and commerce, such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. All of this meaning, perhaps, that the very sustainability of this country is at risk of being undermined by the corporatisation of almost everything, if we are not very careful.
The past few governments seem more concerned with what they can get for themselves and politics being just a career path for many of them to fill their own pockets, rather than to really look after the country and to care for its people. Business is about really letting the medium and the small thrive and on an equal footing with the corporations so that individuals can truly aspire. Then we can really have a truly strong country in which to live in, and not one that is essentially controlled by those who care more about themselves than they do the country, its people and the environment.
We need to be able to challenge the current discourse in a meaningful and powerful way and we need to bring that voice out so that it is heard. Real growth is in every single person in the country, and elsewhere, growing and freeing themselves meaningfully within themselves, and not just financially. This cannot happen if the people are just the playthings of the powerful, and shackled to the effects of this often unethical power, eg recently with alleged corruption at Fifa. All which is what is continuing right now and at a concerning pace.
Gavin Robinson
London
• Patrick Wintour’s piece on the Westminster Labour bubble confirms what many of us in the Labour party knew… that for five years a regiment of highly paid policy wonks has been searching in vain for some fantasy talisman or sci-fi, anti-Tory deflector-shield to win the election for them. Policies in the interests of the majority of working people? Not a chance. Meanwhile, in the real world, millions of workers, including professionals such as teachers, have experienced real cuts in their living standards on a scale not seen for generations. Meanwhile, public services like health and education are privatised or prepared for same. Meanwhile, local government services are cut to the bone. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of teens or twentysomethings have no prospect of ever buying a house and little hope of even affording to rent. Meanwhile, there is seething indignation about the huge shift of wealth and income from the least well off in society to the richest 10%.
The Labour leadership, wholly, comprehensively, completely, and utterly failed to address any of these real issues. For all they knew about what was – and still is – really happening, they might as well have had their policy conferences on another planet.
And now, who can I vote for? Jeremy Corbyn will struggle to get the minimum 35 nominations to even get on the ballot paper for leader, because Labour’s parliamentarians are still dominated by those completely out of touch with ordinary people and their needs.
John Pickard
Brentwood, Essex
• Patrick Wintour’s account of Labour’s disastrous election defeat was interesting, but hardly revelatory. What went wrong can be more easily summed up in two words: Ed Miliband. From the moment the 2010 leadership contest was hijacked by those looking for the opportunity to settle old scores against New Labour, the 2015 general election was effectively lost. David Miliband, in terms of public perception of a prime minister in waiting, ready to set the party an uncomplicated objective of a return to power, was manifestly the only serious choice. Fatally, his inexperienced younger brother became the beneficiary of this internal bloodletting. From then on, the Labour party lumbered through four and a half years of weak leadership and a masochistic obsession with disowning its own, highly successful, election-winning past.
If Gordon Brown had been replaced a few months before the 2010 election, it may have been a Labour-Lib Dem coalition defending its record in 2015. Had David Miliband stayed in parliament, he would have been available to put his sibling out of his and everybody else’s misery and achieved a positive result on 7 May. The decision of the party not to require the next leader to put him or herself forward for re-election before the 2020 poll, means that whoever takes over in September will stay at the helm come what may. Given the uninspiring field of runners, this is already looking like one more blinkered and foolish decision.
Brian Wilson
Glossop, Derbyshire
• This column was amended on 8 June 2015. Because of an editing error, an earlier version of Robin Wendt’s letter referred to the last 70, rather than 60, years.
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