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| Ed Miliband, whose election strategy rebuffed that of Tony Blair, resigned Friday after five years as the Labour Party leader. Credit Christopher Furlong/Getty Images |
NY TIMES
The Labour Party’s defeat in Thursday’s British elections was its poorest performance in nearly 30 years. It was nearly wiped out in Scotland, long one of its strongholds. Some of its brightest and most experienced members of Parliament lost their seats.
Most important, it lost the argument about Britain’s best path toward the future and was left with no clear guiding philosophy.
Ed Miliband, Labour’s leader for the last five years, bet on a strategy to appeal to Labour’s core voters: After the global crash of 2008, he believed, the electorate would favor an egalitarian party that called for higher taxes on the rich, tighter regulation of business and increased social spending. His agenda was sold by Labour as a responsible alternative to the fiscal austerity imposed on Britain by Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservative-led government of the past five years.
But Mr. Miliband’s campaign was also a challenge — and a rebuff — to the “New Labour” strategy of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who won three elections by downplaying socialism, reaching for the center and convincing business that Labour was its friend.
In the end, the Conservatives appeared to succeed in much of Britain with their argument that Labour under Mr. Miliband could not be trusted with the economy, especially if prodded by the Scottish National Party.
The problem for Labour is deeper than just its abandoning the middle ground, said Steven Fielding, professor of political history at Nottingham University. “On one level they are seen as too left-wing in England and too right-wing in Scotland, but actually it is about the relationship the party had with the electorate in both countries,” he said.
The left “has failed to capitalize on the crisis of 2008,” said Tony Travers, a political scientist at the London School of Economics. People will vote to get rid of a government if the alternative is credible and competent, and they looked at Labour and said, ‘No thanks.’ ”
British elections “are still fought on the center ground,” Mr. Travers said. “The more Labour drifts from the center the more it hurts, and they may not like it, but Britain is a very moderate country that signed up to Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and risks outside the mainstream worried voters.”
Mr. Blair won three elections, starting 1997, but inside the party there remained a sharp battle between the “Blairites,” who pushed outreach to business and the middle class, and the “Brownites,” who supported Gordon Brown, a defender of traditional policies. Mr. Brown succeeded Mr. Blair as prime minister. Mr. Brown lost the 2010 elections, but because Mr. Cameron did not quite win it, having to go into a coalition with the centrist Liberal Democrats, the Brownites kept control of the party.
The most obvious symbol of the internal conflict was the post-2010 battle of the brothers — David Miliband, a Blairite who was foreign secretary, versus Ed Miliband, a Brownite. The fight was close and Freudian, but while Labour members of Parliament backed David, the trade unions pushed Ed narrowly into the leadership.
Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that Labour must avoid a simple rerun of the old debate. A core strategy will no longer work since the electoral system no longer favors Labour, he said. These elections were more about identity than a left-right battle, Mr. Leonard said, not only in Scotland but in England, too,
The anti-immigration, anti-European Union UKIP hurt the Conservatives in the south, but it had a big impact among Labour voters in the north. Labour needs to respond to members’ unease about immigration and the European Union, which requires freedom of movement and labor among its member states. On these issues, this time, Labour had little to say, acknowledging Blair-era laxness but simply arguing that European Union membership was a good thing and there had to be more control over immigration, without specifying how.
The problem is the old one — how to reach out past its core constituencies, about a third or so of voters, to the aspirational center that wants social justice and personal success. That center may dislike the Conservative Party as a brand for the careless southeastern elite, but the results of successive elections suggests that it does not hate wealth, and it does not believe that the Conservatives are going to “destroy” the National Health Service.
“We failed to offer a compelling vision of the future which married a social democratic future to the personal aspirations of voters,” one possible new leader, Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, told the BBC.
Last December, Mr. Blair said presciently this election risked becoming one in which a “traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result.”
Asked by The Economist magazine if he meant that the Conservatives would win the general election in those circumstances, Mr. Blair replied: “Yes, that is what happens.”