Britain’s Labour Party must return to the political centre ground and acknowledge the aspirations of millions of voters it ignored in its election campaign, senior figures said yesterday, as the party’s crushing defeat hit home.
The Conservatives, who during their five years in coalition with the Liberal Democrats imposed huge public spending cuts, won a surprise overall majority with 331 seats in Parliament and are now forming a single-party government.
Labour leader Ed Miliband, widely seen as having steered the party leftwards from former PM Tony Blair’s centrist “New Labour”, resigned on Friday. Blair, who won three elections in a row to be prime minister from 1997 to 2007, wrote in The Observer newspaper that Labour should be more inclusive and aspirational – comments echoed by one of the frontrunners to replace Miliband, Chuka Umunna.
“The route to the summit lies through the centre ground. Labour has to be for ambition and aspiration as well as compassion and care,” Blair wrote.
“Hard-working families ... want to know that by hard work and effort they can do well, rise up, achieve.”
One of Blair’s closest allies, former minister and EU commissioner Peter Mandelson, was scathing about Miliband’s strategy.
“We were sent out ... to make an argument, if you can call it an argument, which basically said we’re for the poor, we hate the rich, ignoring completely the vast swathe of the population who exist in between,” Mandelson told the BBC yesterday.
Asked about a speech in which Miliband had tried to differentiate between business “predators” and “producers”, Mandelson said that was “a completely useless label that led nowhere in any serious debate”.
Blair is now a divisive figure due to his decision to lead Britain into the Iraq War, while Mandelson made many Labour supporters uncomfortable when he famously said he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”.
The leadership race has not officially begun. As well as Umunna, the party’s business spokesman since 2011, former ministers Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper are expected to run. Their views are not well-known as the party has just emerged from a period of intense campaigning where party discipline held and everyone supported Miliband’s platform.
Umunna, who stopped short of announcing his candidacy but said yesterday he intended to “play the fullest part I can in rebuilding our party”, drew similar lessons to Blair.
“We talked about the bottom and top of society, about the minimum wage and zero-hour contracts, about mansions and non-doms. But we had little to say to the majority of people in the middle,” he said. Umunna said Labour’s collapse in Scotland, where it lost all but one of the 41 parliamentary seats it previously held to the Scottish National Party, was compounded by a failure to gain ground against the Conservatives in a more populous England.
The divide between Scotland, where all but three of the 59 parliamentary seats are now held by the left-leaning nationalists, and England, where the Conservatives now dominate, poses a strategic difficulty for Labour. There may be a temptation to tilt leftwards to try and regain ground in Scotland, but that would seem unlikely to help in England, which accounts for 85 per cent of the UK’s population.