Appeal to Dwindling Core Proves Costly for Labour Party in Britain

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.”

Tories Trounce Labour in the U.K. Election Full results are in, and Prime Minister David Cameron’s party did much better than expected.

THE ATLANTIC

Overnight, the stunning exit polls and early results predicting a major Conservative Party victory in the British general election gave way to a triumphant final tally for Prime Minister David Cameron’s party. According to a BBC forecast, “the Conservatives will end up [with] 331 seats in the House of Commons,” crossing the threshold for a majority in the 650-seat parliament.

On Thursday morning, when voting first began, the final pre-election polls showed a neck-and-neck race between Conservatives (or Tories) and the Labour Party, leading some to anticipate that no party would win an outright majority for the second straight election and that it would take days or weeks to figure out who would lead the British government.

Instead, by Friday morning, Cameron was on his way to Buckingham Palace to be invited to form a government by Queen Elizabeth II, and most of Cameron’s rivals—Ed Miliband (Labour), Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats), and Nigel Farage (UKIP)—had resigned their leadership posts.

"I think this is the sweetest victory of all," Cameron said on Thursday evening, after becoming the first Conservative prime minister to win re-election since Margaret Thatcher—and leading the party to its first majority in parliament since 1992. Meanwhile, the Scottish National Party proved the only party to match pre-election prognostications, scoring 56 seats to become the third-largest party in Parliament.

At an event in Glasgow, SNP head Nicola Sturgeon told supporters, “I think the results we may be about to see unfold in Scotland tonight show that the anti-austerity message that the SNP put at the heart of this campaign has resonated across Scotland.”

Nicola Sturgeon, votes with her husband Peter Murrell in Glasgow, Scotland.

Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

NY TIMES


The vote was a stunning disappointment for the opposition Labour Party and its leader, Ed Miliband, who had shifted the party away from the more centrist strategy it pursued in the late 1990s and early 2000s under Tony Blair. [His resignation opens ]up a new debate over the party’s direction.

Labour, was nearly wiped out in Scotland by the surging Scottish National Party and did more poorly than pre-election opinion polls had suggested it would in the rest of Britain. Several of Mr. Miliband’s top lieutenants lost their seats.

The campaign had centered primarily on domestic issues, including the budget austerity imposed by the Conservatives and funding for the National Health Service, but Mr. Cameron had also played up fears that a Labour government, reliant on support from the Scottish nationalists, would drive the country leftward and risk the nation being splintered.

Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, offered his resignation on Friday a day after Thursday’s general election. By Reuters on Publish Date May 8, 2015. Photo by Facundo Arrizabalaga/European Pressphoto Agency.

PAUL KRUGMAN, NY TIMES

“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” I’ve always loved that quote, and have tried to apply it to my own writing. But I have to admit that in the long slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis — a slump that we had both the tools and the knowledge to end quickly, but didn’t — the unthinking were quite successful in fending off unwelcome thoughts.

And nowhere was the triumph of inanity more complete than in Keynes’s homeland, which is going to the polls as I write this. Britain’s election should be a referendum on a failed economic doctrine, but it isn’t, because nobody with influence is challenging transparently false claims and bad ideas.

Before I bash the Brits, however, let me admit that we’ve done pretty badly ourselves.

It began very early. President Obama inherited an economy in free fall; what we needed, above all, was more spending to support demand. Yet much of Mr. Obama’s inaugural address was given over to boilerplate about the need to make hard choices, which was the last thing we needed right then.

 It’s true that in practice Mr. Obama pushed through a stimulus that, while too small and short-lived, helped diminish the depth and duration of the slump. But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the government should match the belt-tightening of ordinary families — a recipe for full-on depression — Mr. Obama didn’t challenge their position. Instead, within a few months the very same nonsense became a standard line in his speeches, even though his economists knew better, and so did he.

So I guess we shouldn’t be too harsh on Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, for failing to challenge the economic nonsense peddled by the Conservatives. Like Mr. Obama and company, Labour’s leaders probably know better, but have decided that it’s too hard to overcome the easy appeal of bad economics, especially when most of the British news media report this bad economics as truth. But it has still been deeply disheartening to watch.

What nonsense am I talking about? Simon Wren-Lewis of the University of Oxford, who has been a tireless but lonely crusader for economic sense, calls it “mediamacro.” It’s a story about Britain that runs like this: First, the Labour government that ruled Britain until 2010 was wildly irresponsible, spending far beyond its means. Second, this fiscal profligacy caused the economic crisis of 2008-2009. Third, this in turn left the coalition that took power in 2010 with no choice except to impose austerity policies despite the depressed state of the economy. Finally, Britain’s return to economic growth in 2013 vindicated austerity and proved its critics wrong.

Sure enough, Dan Balz writes about Britain in the Washington Post, in what I think is supposed to be a news analysis rather than an opinion piece, and states the mediamacro narrative as simply the truth about Britain, with nary a hint even that anyone disagrees with the story.

Now, every piece of this story is demonstrably, ludicrously wrong. Pre-crisis Britain wasn’t fiscally profligate. Debt and deficits were low, and at the time everyone expected them to stay that way; big deficits only arose as a result of the crisis. The crisis, which was a global phenomenon, was driven by runaway banks and private debt, not government deficits. There was no urgency about austerity: financial markets never showed any concern about British solvency. And Britain, which returned to growth only after a pause in the austerity drive, has made up none of the ground it lost during the coalition’s first two years.

Yet this nonsense narrative completely dominates news reporting, where it is treated as a fact rather than a hypothesis. And Labour hasn’t tried to push back, probably because they considered this a political fight they couldn’t win. But why?


Mr. Wren-Lewis suggests that it has a lot to do with the power of misleading analogies between governments and households, and also with the malign influence of economists working for the financial industry, who in Britain as in America constantly peddle scare stories about deficits and pay no price for being consistently wrong. If U.S. experience is any guide, my guess is that Britain also suffers from the desire of public figures to sound serious, a pose which they associate with stern talk about the need to make hard choices (at other people’s expense, of course.)

Still, it’s quite amazing. The fact is that Britain and America didn’t need to make hard choices in the aftermath of crisis. What they needed, instead, was hard thinking — a willingness to understand that this was a special environment, that the usual rules don’t apply in a persistently depressed economy, one in which government borrowing doesn’t compete with private investment and costs next to nothing.

But hard thinking has been virtually excluded from British public discourse. As a result, we just have to hope that whoever ends up running Britain’s economy isn’t as foolish as he pretends to be.