This piece is taken from the Fabian Society pamphlet Never Again: Lessons from Labour's Key Seats
Of all the unjust and mean-spirited things that the Tories did from 2010 to 2015, the bedroom tax was perhaps the worst. Hundreds of people in Rossendale and Darwen were affected. When we campaigned on the issue in one affected housing estate, a man in his forties who’d never voted before signed up for a postal vote because of the terrible effect it was having on his mother’s finances and health.
But our failure to win the Lancashire constituency I fought at the General Election, Rossendale and Darwen—70 on the target list and therefore needed to govern with an overall majority—means that the bedroom tax will continue for another five years. Those affected will pay close to £4,000 over the course of this parliament. Meanwhile, our plans to reform the sanctions regime lie on the scrap heap with every other idea in our manifesto.
It is crucial that we understand why we failed to win and are therefore unable to help improve the lives of those affected by such harsh uses of state power.
Rossendale and Darwen is a geographically odd constituency—two areas with little sense of common community divided by a windswept moor. But Darwen and the four small towns which make up Rossendale share a number of characteristics. A generation ago, most jobs were in the textile and slipper factories with this employment supporting thriving market towns. There are now just a handful of medium-sized manufacturers left. A third of people commute to Greater Manchester with thousands more working in the bigger neighbouring towns of Blackburn, Burnley and Accrington.
Labour won the seat in 1992 by 120 votes, which increased to over 10,000 in the 1997 landslide. Janet Anderson served as MP throughout this period, until 2010 when the Tories gained a 9 per cent swing—double the national average—and racked up their own majority of 4,493. I was selected in September 2013 and had 20 months to build a campaign and take the fight to the Tories. But while we increased our vote by 2,000 the national tide against us meant that the Tories’ majority increased.
Labour focused for much of the parliament on the “cost of living crisis,” a phrase rarely uttered outside the Westminster village. But it was other issues that came up on the doorstep. Top of the list were the NHS, immigration and “benefits.”
Despite Labour’s vocal campaigning, people rarely wanted to talk about the bedroom tax unless they were directly affected. Instead, they wanted to know what Labour would do about the family down the street on benefits who’d “never done an honest day’s work in their life” or why some families jumped up the housing ladder. Others asked why their savings meant they were not entitled to the same benefits as someone who had never bothered to put something away at the end of each month.
I remember a particularly difficult public meeting on school transport reforms proposed by the council as a result of spending cuts. One couple gave me a tough time, asking why families who already got free school meals also got free school transport when they had to struggle to find the daily fares and lunch money for their kids. People felt particularly aggrieved when they themselves ended up on the dole after decades in work. Disgusted at the failure to be treated with respect for their contribution over many years, they chose to rely on their redundancy pay or spouses’ salaries instead of turning up once a fortnight to sign on.
Whatever your political perspective, Britain’s welfare system is far from perfect. Those with actual experience of it—claimants and staff alike—rarely seem happy. Wherever I turned there was a palpable sense that the system was devoid of any sense of contribution. Our “benefits” system appeared to too many to be an arbitrary transfer of cash following an undignified and intrusive application process. Neighbours looked on and could not work out why some benefited and others did not.
Yet Labour was seen by too many people as the defender of the status quo, the defender of a system that they simply could not comprehend as fair. However much we may dislike it, the public thought that we were on the side of people who don’t work. Post-election research from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for the TUC showed that 54 per cent of people who had considered voting Labour thought that the party should be tougher on those “abusing the welfare system.”
Ed Miliband famously forgot to mention the deficit in his 2014 conference speech. He didn’t even plan to talk about the welfare system.
During his entire time as Labour leader, he made only one major speech on the topic, in June 2013. The speech was well-meaning and sought to explain why the rising social security bill was down to a lack of decent jobs, low pay and insufficient house building. But it fell on deaf ears because it failed to address the questions that most people were asking and therefore reinforced their negative perception of Labour.
“Labour—the party of work—the clue is in the name ... I want to teach my kids that it is wrong to be idle on benefits, when you can work.”
Instead of one mid-term speech, he should have made it the centrepiece of his entire campaign, returning to the theme and its consistency with our founding principles again and again.
The Tories and their cheerleaders sought to make social security a “wedge issue,” provoking Labour to get on the wrong side of the electorate—never more so than through the exploitation of the “welfare lifestyle” of killer Mike Philpott by George Osborne during the 2013 local elections.
But Labour walked into their trap by failing to understand that Osborne was tapping into a widely held sentiment rather than shaping public opinion. Post-election polls in 2010 showed that welfare was one of the three biggest weaknesses for Labour after immigration and our economic record. So why did it take three years for Ed Miliband to make his big speech and why was there then near silence for the next two? Why was there no wider programme designed to convince people that the whole party was really serious about welfare reform?
Our failure to understand voters’ concerns or even sound as though we were listening meant that no one was paying attention when we pointed out the Dickensian fallacies behind Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms. Without credibility on the issue, we were talking solely to our own supporters when we explained that the sanctions’ regime was pushing people into destitution, that the ATOS work capability assessment was removing dignity from disabled people, and that the bedroom tax was profoundly unfair.
So what should we have done differently and what should Labour do now?
Many of the answers lie in the watershed Condition of Britain report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (disclaimer: although I worked at IPPR before the election, I had nothing to do with this project). It argues that the well-intentioned objective of tackling income inequality through cash transfers has narrowed public policy and come to regard real people and their families as little but numbers on a spreadsheet—removing their ability to make the best for themselves. The report documents a shift since the 1970s from a welfare system based on contribution to one based on means testing with a consequent drop in public support and therefore legitimacy.
At its heart the report sets out three principles of reform: spreading power and responsibility away from Whitehall to local people; encouraging a climate of contribution and reciprocity by rewarding those who have paid in more; and moving scarce taxpayer resources from income support to shared institutions: children’s centres instead of child benefit, new homes instead of housing benefit, guaranteed jobs instead of jobseeker’s allowance.
But Ed Miliband failed to take forward the ideas, leaving it to other parties to pick them up. In frustration, Jon Cruddas lamented after the election that IPPR “spent two years on a fantastic rethink around modern social policy... Despite all the work, in the end we had nothing to say on that.”
This cannot continue. Labour must have its own clear and unambiguous account of what a modern social security system is for, who deserves to get it and why. We could even borrow an aphorism from Tony Blair and talk about being “tough on inactivity and tough on the causes of inactivity.”
There can be no justification for people who are abusing the system—even if it is true that they make up a tiny fraction of the overall numbers. But neither should we allow our disgust with Tory reforms to mean that we regard keeping someone on social security rather than in work as a win.
Only a third of those with disabilities and fewer people with a mental health condition are actually in work. But I met very few disabled people in Rossendale and Darwen who have absolutely no capacity or interest in working. The problem is that the system doesn’t seek to support them.
The Labour Party’s primary role is to win power. Over a century it has used that power to advance the rights of working people, to create lasting institutions like the NHS, comprehensive schools and the state pension, and to encourage our country to be more at ease with itself and accept people of different races, sexual orientation and religion.
Without power we are nothing but a campaigning organisation howling with righteous indignation but neutered and unable to change anything for the better.
As we have just found out for the second time in a row, winning power in a democracy is challenging. If we want to win again, we must start by listening to the public on the issues that matter to them. When they tell us that Britain’s social security system is a problem, they mean it. They are not just responding to scare stories in the right-wing media and we are not pandering to the right by listening to their concerns so long as our solutions are based on our values. But when we disregard the question, we cannot expect people to listen to any of our answers.
In this election the public largely chose to ignore us. Hundreds of people in Rossendale and Darwen, and millions more across the country, will continue to live without hope and dignity because of our failure. We certainly have our own work to do.
Of all the unjust and mean-spirited things that the Tories did from 2010 to 2015, the bedroom tax was perhaps the worst. Hundreds of people in Rossendale and Darwen were affected. When we campaigned on the issue in one affected housing estate, a man in his forties who’d never voted before signed up for a postal vote because of the terrible effect it was having on his mother’s finances and health.
But our failure to win the Lancashire constituency I fought at the General Election, Rossendale and Darwen—70 on the target list and therefore needed to govern with an overall majority—means that the bedroom tax will continue for another five years. Those affected will pay close to £4,000 over the course of this parliament. Meanwhile, our plans to reform the sanctions regime lie on the scrap heap with every other idea in our manifesto.
It is crucial that we understand why we failed to win and are therefore unable to help improve the lives of those affected by such harsh uses of state power.
Rossendale and Darwen is a geographically odd constituency—two areas with little sense of common community divided by a windswept moor. But Darwen and the four small towns which make up Rossendale share a number of characteristics. A generation ago, most jobs were in the textile and slipper factories with this employment supporting thriving market towns. There are now just a handful of medium-sized manufacturers left. A third of people commute to Greater Manchester with thousands more working in the bigger neighbouring towns of Blackburn, Burnley and Accrington.
Labour won the seat in 1992 by 120 votes, which increased to over 10,000 in the 1997 landslide. Janet Anderson served as MP throughout this period, until 2010 when the Tories gained a 9 per cent swing—double the national average—and racked up their own majority of 4,493. I was selected in September 2013 and had 20 months to build a campaign and take the fight to the Tories. But while we increased our vote by 2,000 the national tide against us meant that the Tories’ majority increased.
Labour focused for much of the parliament on the “cost of living crisis,” a phrase rarely uttered outside the Westminster village. But it was other issues that came up on the doorstep. Top of the list were the NHS, immigration and “benefits.”
Despite Labour’s vocal campaigning, people rarely wanted to talk about the bedroom tax unless they were directly affected. Instead, they wanted to know what Labour would do about the family down the street on benefits who’d “never done an honest day’s work in their life” or why some families jumped up the housing ladder. Others asked why their savings meant they were not entitled to the same benefits as someone who had never bothered to put something away at the end of each month.
I remember a particularly difficult public meeting on school transport reforms proposed by the council as a result of spending cuts. One couple gave me a tough time, asking why families who already got free school meals also got free school transport when they had to struggle to find the daily fares and lunch money for their kids. People felt particularly aggrieved when they themselves ended up on the dole after decades in work. Disgusted at the failure to be treated with respect for their contribution over many years, they chose to rely on their redundancy pay or spouses’ salaries instead of turning up once a fortnight to sign on.
Whatever your political perspective, Britain’s welfare system is far from perfect. Those with actual experience of it—claimants and staff alike—rarely seem happy. Wherever I turned there was a palpable sense that the system was devoid of any sense of contribution. Our “benefits” system appeared to too many to be an arbitrary transfer of cash following an undignified and intrusive application process. Neighbours looked on and could not work out why some benefited and others did not.
Yet Labour was seen by too many people as the defender of the status quo, the defender of a system that they simply could not comprehend as fair. However much we may dislike it, the public thought that we were on the side of people who don’t work. Post-election research from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for the TUC showed that 54 per cent of people who had considered voting Labour thought that the party should be tougher on those “abusing the welfare system.”
Ed Miliband famously forgot to mention the deficit in his 2014 conference speech. He didn’t even plan to talk about the welfare system.
During his entire time as Labour leader, he made only one major speech on the topic, in June 2013. The speech was well-meaning and sought to explain why the rising social security bill was down to a lack of decent jobs, low pay and insufficient house building. But it fell on deaf ears because it failed to address the questions that most people were asking and therefore reinforced their negative perception of Labour.
“Labour—the party of work—the clue is in the name"Instead of using wonkish language, Ed Miliband should have trimmed the near 5,000 words and focused instead on one of his phrases which actually resonated with voters and showed that we understood their concerns:
“Labour—the party of work—the clue is in the name ... I want to teach my kids that it is wrong to be idle on benefits, when you can work.”
Instead of one mid-term speech, he should have made it the centrepiece of his entire campaign, returning to the theme and its consistency with our founding principles again and again.
The Tories and their cheerleaders sought to make social security a “wedge issue,” provoking Labour to get on the wrong side of the electorate—never more so than through the exploitation of the “welfare lifestyle” of killer Mike Philpott by George Osborne during the 2013 local elections.
But Labour walked into their trap by failing to understand that Osborne was tapping into a widely held sentiment rather than shaping public opinion. Post-election polls in 2010 showed that welfare was one of the three biggest weaknesses for Labour after immigration and our economic record. So why did it take three years for Ed Miliband to make his big speech and why was there then near silence for the next two? Why was there no wider programme designed to convince people that the whole party was really serious about welfare reform?
Our failure to understand voters’ concerns or even sound as though we were listening meant that no one was paying attention when we pointed out the Dickensian fallacies behind Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms. Without credibility on the issue, we were talking solely to our own supporters when we explained that the sanctions’ regime was pushing people into destitution, that the ATOS work capability assessment was removing dignity from disabled people, and that the bedroom tax was profoundly unfair.
So what should we have done differently and what should Labour do now?
Many of the answers lie in the watershed Condition of Britain report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (disclaimer: although I worked at IPPR before the election, I had nothing to do with this project). It argues that the well-intentioned objective of tackling income inequality through cash transfers has narrowed public policy and come to regard real people and their families as little but numbers on a spreadsheet—removing their ability to make the best for themselves. The report documents a shift since the 1970s from a welfare system based on contribution to one based on means testing with a consequent drop in public support and therefore legitimacy.
At its heart the report sets out three principles of reform: spreading power and responsibility away from Whitehall to local people; encouraging a climate of contribution and reciprocity by rewarding those who have paid in more; and moving scarce taxpayer resources from income support to shared institutions: children’s centres instead of child benefit, new homes instead of housing benefit, guaranteed jobs instead of jobseeker’s allowance.
But Ed Miliband failed to take forward the ideas, leaving it to other parties to pick them up. In frustration, Jon Cruddas lamented after the election that IPPR “spent two years on a fantastic rethink around modern social policy... Despite all the work, in the end we had nothing to say on that.”
This cannot continue. Labour must have its own clear and unambiguous account of what a modern social security system is for, who deserves to get it and why. We could even borrow an aphorism from Tony Blair and talk about being “tough on inactivity and tough on the causes of inactivity.”
There can be no justification for people who are abusing the system—even if it is true that they make up a tiny fraction of the overall numbers. But neither should we allow our disgust with Tory reforms to mean that we regard keeping someone on social security rather than in work as a win.
Only a third of those with disabilities and fewer people with a mental health condition are actually in work. But I met very few disabled people in Rossendale and Darwen who have absolutely no capacity or interest in working. The problem is that the system doesn’t seek to support them.
"Without power we are nothing but a campaigning organisation howling with righteous indignation but neutered and unable to change anything for the better."Neither Ed Miliband’s single welfare reform speech nor (astonishingly) the party’s 2015 manifesto contained the phrase “full employment”—a concept that had, in previous elections, been a central plank of Labour’s mission. Without this guiding principle, how could members of the public be convinced of our intention to eliminate idleness which was, after all, one of Beveridge’s five giant evils.
The Labour Party’s primary role is to win power. Over a century it has used that power to advance the rights of working people, to create lasting institutions like the NHS, comprehensive schools and the state pension, and to encourage our country to be more at ease with itself and accept people of different races, sexual orientation and religion.
Without power we are nothing but a campaigning organisation howling with righteous indignation but neutered and unable to change anything for the better.
As we have just found out for the second time in a row, winning power in a democracy is challenging. If we want to win again, we must start by listening to the public on the issues that matter to them. When they tell us that Britain’s social security system is a problem, they mean it. They are not just responding to scare stories in the right-wing media and we are not pandering to the right by listening to their concerns so long as our solutions are based on our values. But when we disregard the question, we cannot expect people to listen to any of our answers.
In this election the public largely chose to ignore us. Hundreds of people in Rossendale and Darwen, and millions more across the country, will continue to live without hope and dignity because of our failure. We certainly have our own work to do.
