The Platform’s Political Editor on the outcome of the 2015 British Elections
Ed Miliband was to be the new British prime minister today, instead he is holidaying in Ibiza with his wife Justine. David Cameron has already completed naming his new cabinet sans the sacrificial lambs that are the Liberal Democrats, the party that lost approximately 70 per cent of their MPs elected in 2010. Among them, big beasts and much-needed progressive ideologues, such as Simon Hughes and Vince Cable, are the giants felled only by the suffocating embrace Nick Clegg received when he went into the coalition government in 2010. It is of little wonder that the master politician that is William Hague is said to have mentioned to his wife upon the end of coalition negotiations that he had just “destroyed the Lib Dems”.
Labour led the polls for the majority of the time since 2010 until the election in 2015. Right up to the eve of the elections the polls were in deadlock and Britain was to wake up to the prospect of another hung parliament on the 8th of May. But the polls were wrong – and colossally so. Many of us were too young to remember the 1992 elections. Back then the polls had predicted a Labour victory, but Neil Kinnock, the then Labour leader, managed emphatically to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and the benign sober figure of John Major was to form a cabinet.
Labour roared back to power five years later with a landslide, but the legacy of that victory is tarred by grim reminders of the Iraq war. Labour, meant to be the party of the working people, socialist at its core and egalitarian in its outlook, is ironically the party credited with the disasters of Iraq. One would think there are other parties who are ideologically better positioned to have been the initiators and proponents of such a war, but it was to be Labour’s Tony Blair who wore that mantle.
Labour will be back; my hunch, too, is that Labour will be back with renewed vigour in 2020. But if a lurch to the right is what is needed in order to win, then one must also entertain the prospect of a Labour leader more Tory than the Tories in power, which in all respects defeats the purpose. John Major is said to believe that Tony Blair was more right wing that he was, and William Hague, the then young opposition leader during Blair’s first term, struggled to dent Blair’s stride. Blair had the naturally Tory press supporting him. Indeed the vitriolic diatribes peddled by the Daily Mail and The Sun against the inability of a potential prime minister to gracefully eat a bacon sarnie is evidence of what lengths the right wing press would go, and in many ways, in this election, it was “The Sun wot won it”.
Boundary changes are up for review in 2018; the current electoral boundary settings have a bias towards Labour. But the Tories are certain to spend some time in gerrymandering to have this changed. And indeed they will succeed. But the 2020 elections will see Labour as the party of British cities. Labour may also have much groundwork done in London by Sadiq Khan, the former Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, who may be the first mayor from a BAME community.
The Labour leadership elections are soon to be underway. With Chuka Umunna withdrawing from the elections, the race is likely to be between Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham. Tony Blair may have stolen the limelight from Gordon Brown, but the current parliamentary Labour party still has Brown’s protégés at her helm.
Labour’s answer is not to move to the right; those who claim this fail to see that the SNP wiped Labour out in Scotland by positioning itself far more to the left of Labour. There was nothing left wing in Ed Miliband’s Labour, that is what The Sun wants you to believe. But Labour lost, and they haven’t won two elections now. Labour has to reform, look deeply into its soul and aspire to stand up for those whom it seeks to represent, with considerations for all others. Working people would rather trust those who don’t pretend to speak for them, than those who claim to but don’t.
It is interesting also to note the apparent new political landscapes formed. From a UK wide non-entity in 2010, the SNP has emerged as a serious player to reckon with. Even though the SNP has no ideological inclination to contest and win seats south of Hadrians’ Wall, there will be many commentators who wonder what electoral prospects the SNP would have should they contest in the North of England. Labour now is at risk of losing working class northerners to both UKIP and the SNP in the hypothetical eventuality that the SNP contests in the North of England.
Realisation that the Lib Dems were indeed pivotal in blocking many intrinsically Tory ideas from becoming law, like the repealing of the Human Rights Act, has resulted in a surge in Lib Dem membership. The Lib Dems may redeem themselves come 2020. The fear peddled by the Tories of a Labour-SNP coalition may also have pushed southern Lib Dem voters to tactically vote Tory.
The political realities may be very different in 2020. The SNP may have not lived up to their sometimes idealistic rhetoric by not translating them into action, the Lib Dems may re-emerge as the third force in British politics and incumbency fatigue may set in and the electorate may want a change from Tory rule. All this spells tentative doom to the Tory leadership come 2020. One caveat in all this is that David Cameron has promised that this will be his last term as Tory leader. As was seen in 1992, when John Major revitalised a waning Tory party, change of hands in the Tory leadership may well revitalise the Conservatives towards the end of the term.
With another five years of Tory rule, and with no Lib Dems to block their stride, British communities will be hit with more austerity, tough and borderline xenophobia-induced immigration rules, a wasteful EU referendum in 2017, increased profit motives and privatisation sickening our beloved NHS and the looming prospect of rampant inequality. Ed Miliband said the right things (almost) and there was hope that a Labour government led by Ed Miliband, with the Greens and SNP pressurising them from the Left, could have made a progressive Britain. But that didn’t happen. The time now is not for despondency, but for a renewed hope in creating a united Britain that would quell the harmful desires of predatory capitalism and its pernicious effects on British communities.
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