Margaret Beckett, then Britain's Minister of State for Housing and Planning, arrives for a cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street in June 2009.
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The Beckett Report— "Learning the Lessons from Defeat"—has finally been published nearly nine months after what Jon Cruddas has termed the worst defeat in Labour history. It is obviously far too late. A rapid inquest would have had a chance of shaping the terms of the leadership debate and, indeed, the future direction of the Labour Party. And it could have easily been rapid because there has never been a mystery as to why Labour lost in May 2015. It was because Labour weren’t trusted on economic management, welfare or immigration. Any one of those is a threshold issue for voters—if you don’t meet the standards they demand then you aren’t even in contention for their vote. Labour managed a hat-trick—falling short on all three issues. And as a bonus added a leader who was seen to be weak.
As a consequence the late and heavy onslaught by the Tories that Labour would be in the pockets of a high-spending, left-wing SNP was immensely effective in persuading swing voters to give Cameron the first Tory majority in nearly 20 years. But let’s be clear, it was neither an unfair nor misleading attack—Mark Textor, one of the best pollsters in the world, heard it come from voters in focus groups and Lynton Crosby amplified it and played it back to them. Tough? Yes. But politics is a contact sport.
There is a sense in which the major flaw of the Beckett Report is not that it is too late but that it is too polite—it pulls its punches. The most fundamental error of the Labour Party is never mentioned—that fact that it ran in the wrong country. An imaginary one in which, after the Great Recession, the voters had moved substantially to the left. One in which their anger at the banks had led to not merely a generalised disillusionment with capitalism but to an appetite for a more interventionist left-wing policies. One which didn’t have a good word to say about 13 years of Labour government but didn’t blame the party for the deficit. As I said an imaginary country. Though, to be fair, the polls gave some credence to this analysis by falsely showing Labour in an electorally competitive position.
Allied to this profound miscalculation about the nature of Britain was an equally profound misunderstanding about the nature of modern political communications. Labour did realise that it had problems on key issues, it’s just that the solution to these was to make one speech and move on. Miliband was pretty robust on immigration, including a commitment on speaking English which was as tough as Cameron’s recently announced plans. It’s just that no-one knew about them—not even the activists let alone the voters. Beckett gives a mention of Labour’s lack of "narrative"—actually it was the lack of repetition that hurt Labour.
Margaret Beckett concludes her report with a stark summary of the electoral Everest facing Labour. Among the low-lights are:
- the Boundary review that might reduce Labour seats from 232 to 220 - demographics that will see 1.5 million more voters aged 65+ which with the same turnout as 2015 could see the Tories automatically gain 570,000 votes. - economic change: the proportion of private sector versus public sector workers will increase and there will be 1.5m more self-employed
In different times the scale of Labour’s defeat and the immensity of the challenge would be a spur to urgent action and reform. Not this time. Rather than addressing real weaknesses in the Labour case Corbyn is set on creating a new vulnerability on defence and security. The self-indulgent debate about Trident within the Labour Party has no good outcomes—either the existing Labour policy of commitment to the deterrent will be confirmed at the cost of a split party looking unfit to govern or unilateralism will be adopted and it will be conformed that Labour can’t be trusted to govern. It is a cliché that elections are lost in years and not weeks but it is also true. Labour are already rapidly consolidating their next defeat.
