This time, I could stand the hope – lessons from the election
On Thursday evening, a group of around 20 Labour staffers sat in my front room in Brussels. The clock was about to strike 10.00pm UK time. In a few seconds we were going to hear the results of the exit poll…
Earlier a friend of mine had tweeted me with John Cleese’s classic line from ‘Clockwise’: “It’s not the despair… I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”
I know what he meant. In the previous week, one outlying poll, using a brand new methodology, had suggested that we were on course for a hung Parliament. While everyone else saw a Tory majority as inevitable, YouGov broke with consensus and thought Labour would exceed expectations. It sounded too good to be true. And yet… And yet… It was the hope I couldn’t stand.
We’d been here before, as well. Two years ago, roughly the same group of people had gathered in a bar expecting to see Ed Miliband on his way into Number 10. By 10.01pm, that dream had died. A year later, we were together again to see if we had done enough to convince British voters to stay in the EU. The polls were neck and neck, the hope was there… and then, once more, it was dashed.
So you could forgive us for clutching our glasses tightly, teeth clenched, peering worriedly at the screen as Big Ben sounded 10 o’clock… and the screen turned a familiar Tory blue. “We are predicting the Conservatives will be the largest party,” intoned David Dimbleby. A groan and a resigned sigh around the room. It had happened again.
And then a small voice of hope from somewhere at the back: “Hang on: ‘largest party’? So they haven’t got a majority? It’s a hung parliament?!” A few seconds for this to sink in, and then a huge cheer. They were right! Maybe we were going to do well. Maybe this was going to be a good night!
And it was. Anneliese Dodds, my fantastic MEP boss, turned an impressive 15,000 majority into an astonishing 23,000 one and became the new MP for Oxford East. Labour won back seats in Scotland that were supposed to have been lost for a generation. We held on in Edgbaston, in Exeter, in Ilford and in Hove. Not only that, we won new seats – in Reading, in Plymouth, in Canterbury… in Kensington, for Christ’s sake. The constituency in which the Daily Mail’s office is situated now has a Labour MP!
It was a good night. We stayed up too late, we drank too much and we slept too little. And now, as the dust is starting to settle, I think there are three important things to say.
- Jeremy Corbyn is owed an apology, and a lot of credit…
I don’t think I’m alone – and I certainly shouldn’t be – in saying that I misjudged Jeremy Corbyn. While I never joined in with, nor approved of, the vehement criticism of him from the moment he was appointed leader, I hadn’t voted for him and I did harbour real doubts about the direction he was taking the party in.
Like a lot of people (including former Gordon Brown adviser Theo Bertram, whose Corbyn mea culpa blog is well worth a read), I thought there were some central truths about how modern political campaigning works. It is infinitely harder, the accepted logic goes, to persuade a non-voter to get out and cast their ballot than it is to change the mind of someone who already votes and bring them over to your cause. Non-voters will only let you down. They’ll come to a rally, they’ll retweet and ‘like’ to their hearts content, they’ll even tell pollsters that they are “definitely” going to vote, but when it comes down to it they’ll stay at home and do something else instead.
We were wrong. Corbyn, and the team around him, saw the untapped potential in a lot of those non-voters (especially the young), decided that the rewards of converting them were worth the effort, and developed a strategy to get them out – by delivering a message of hope, by being unapologetically authentic and honest, and by challenging accepted wisdom rather than being resigned to it. He and his team deserve a huge amount of credit for increasing Labour’s share of the vote by ten percentage points, and our total number of seats by 30. And he of course deserves to keep leading the party and building on this success.
- But we mustn’t forget that we still didn’t actually win…
Those who harboured doubts about Jeremy Corbyn aren’t the only ones who need to show a little humility, though. Yes, the Labour results of 2017 are a massive improvement on those of 2015. But certain truths are unavoidable.
Theresa May is still the Prime Minister. The Conservatives are still in power. Worse still, they are reliant on the deeply unsavoury DUP to stay there. For all the progress we have made as a party in the last two years, the fact remains that the UK government is likely to continue cutting public services, pushing for a hard Brexit and generally letting down the working people of our country. It’s only when we are actually in power that we can deliver on the promises set out in our manifesto, and reward those who came out and voted for us in the hope of seeing a better society.
So those in Team Corbyn cannot just say that we did really well on Thursday night and leave it at that. We didn’t get over the line. We fell short, and in some pretty generous circumstances at that. I think it’s safe to say that we are highly unlikely to ever face such an inept, uninspiring Tory party campaign again. They will raise their game ahead of the next election, and we need to as well. Moving on from New Labour doesn’t have to mean throwing out absolutely everything from the Blair and Brown years. We still need a professional communications outfit; we still need proper message discipline; we still need to think and act strategically. None of those things involve compromising our values. In fact, they’re how we put our values into practice.
- And we need to start doing some serious thinking…
So we need to build on last week’s good news, and not just rest on it. That means considerably stepping up policy development. The 2017 Labour manifesto was good. It set out a range of policies which were progressive, popular, and easy to explain on the doorstep. It was an especially impressive document given that the people writing it presumably thought they had another three years to finesse it, before May’s surprise announcement gave them a matter of weeks to get it done.
But it was also quite conservative. It was a long list of promises, with little in the way of an overarching narrative to tell the country who we are as a party. It didn’t have a clear sense of prioritisation – which were our headline pledges, and which were the smaller ones supporting them? The promises didn’t always pass that key test of meaningful politics: that it shouldn’t be difficult for a sensible person to at least set out a dissenting view. If all you’re saying are things that are generally accepted to be reasonable, then you’re not really challenging yourself or taking tough decisions.
The UK faces some immense tests over the coming years: leaving the EU and making our own way in the world; the pressing need to adapt to climate change and end our reliance on fossil fuels (seemingly without the cooperation of the US); the challenges that automation and casual employment pose to working people; our ageing population and the crisis in social care; the new forms taken by stateless terrorism; rebalancing our economy geographically and sectorally; devolving power in a meaningful way. If we are honest with ourselves, we haven’t started to scratch the surface on many of these issues yet.
I don’t mean to take away for a moment from Thursday’s immense, unpredicted success. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has earned the right to be taken seriously, to be allowed to carry on with the job and to be treated with the respect due to a powerful political party in the ascendancy. That’s brilliant. But it’s only half the battle. We have to use the coming months and years to show that we are not just a viable, energetic opposition. We need to push on and show that we are in fact the natural party of government.
To use what seems like an appropriate word – we have the momentum. We now have to build on it.
In defence of public service
Last Thursday afternoon, the MP Jo Cox was murdered on the streets of Yorkshire, while out and about in her constituency, meeting the people she represented and listening to their concerns.
The wider debate about Jo’s killer’s motive – the extent to which he was acting alone, or linked to a wider movement – will rage on, and will not be easily settled. But one deeply worrying thing about her death could be said with certainty almost immediately: she was killed because she was an MP.
Jo Cox was killed because she had chosen a life of public service, and was therefore seen as a legitimate target. That’s a horrible thought.
It’s a truism in the internet age to say that people have become desensitized to the consequences of their actions when those actions take place online. Remove the eye contact, the personal connection, from an interaction, and otherwise mild-mannered people can say the most offensive and extreme things behind the comfort of a pseudonym and an avatar. Public figures in particular are ‘fair game’, as if several thousand followers and Twitter’s blue tick of verification means you can’t be hurt by awful things being said to or about you.
But what if that isn’t the end of the process? What if that desensitization starts leaking back into real life and – to some people – those in the public eye carry the protection of that blue tick with them wherever they go? They deserve it (and ‘it’ can be so, so much worse than 140 characters of vile abuse) because they have put themselves in that position, or so the logic goes. What if online forums and comment sections aren’t the final resting place for awful thoughts that no one would dare give voice to in real life, but instead a breeding ground for those thoughts to become actions?
All of this matters because the contempt with which politicians are currently spoken of is breathtaking. They are viscerally hated by large sections of the public. And it seems to be getting worse.
What is so sad is that this chimes so little with my personal experience working with politicians. Almost without exception, every MP or MEP or councillor I have ever met – from all parties – has gone into public service for the right reasons. They have chosen a path that involves long hours, hard work, intense public scrutiny, and incredibly difficult moral choices when many of them could have done something less all-consuming for more money. They are trying to do the best they can, according to their own values, every day.
But we have lost sight of all of that. Elected politicians are seen as grasping, venal, self-interested megalomaniacs. Unelected civil servants are seen as unaccountable, manipulative pen-pushers stitching up a system that works for them and no one else.
Those attitudes matter. Not just because the people on the receiving end of that abuse are human beings, with real feelings. Not just because we cannot hope to recruit a new generation of MPs or civil servants if that is how the profession is perceived. But because little by little they chip away at the contract between the government and the governed, until those unspoken ties – the ones that say “we put our faith in you to look after us” – start one by one to disappear. And when they go, we are in real trouble.
I’m not naïve. I know that significant responsibility for the way things are rests with politicians themselves. Too often, MPs and others have said the short-term, expedient thing to get them over the line in a single election, without thinking about the cumulative impact that has on the collective consciousness.
Again, that goes for all of them – be it a Labour party narrative that suggests anyone who ever votes Tory is fundamentally evil; a Conservative election campaign built on the suggestion that anyone who finds themselves out of work is a “skiver”; or the SNP turning a blind eye to virtual and physical intimidation carried out in their name. If we are going to rescue politics and public service, then politicians themselves need to reintroduce into the public debate the values and the decency which so many of them embody in their day-to-day business.
The media also has a clear responsibility. One of the more heartbreaking things in the aftermath of Jo Cox’s death was hearing so many people say: “she sounded so wonderful; how come we never heard of her before?” Because journalists don’t write stories about MPs doing their jobs well until after they have retired or, too often, passed away.
Newspaper editors will tell ethics committees that they just give their readers what they want – that the demand is there for salacious gossip and they altruistically respond to it. But at the same time they are attracting advertisers by telling them that their newspaper is an organ of influence: that it has the power to shape debate, to change opinions and behaviour. The truth, as ever, is somewhere in between – which means that journalists and newspapers have a duty to give us a much better and fairer representation of public life than they currently do. They can’t just wait until something horrendous happens before they discover that some politicians were all right after all.
Finally, though, we as citizens need to look at our own role. If the newspaper editors are half-right, then we help to create the demand for stories that do down the role of government and public service as a whole. And those unpleasant, dog-whistle tactics we increasingly see at the tail end of political campaigns are a response to an existing public mood as much as they are an attempt to move that mood in a particular direction.
Democracy is a two-way street. We’re not passive; we are participants – and we have to participate in a civilised and respectful manner if we hope to elect politicians who will do the same with one another. That means taking the time to listen to those who try to tell us that situations are complex and that there may be no easy answer, instead of shouting them down. It means rising above the kind of petty ‘activism’ that sees MPs who voted against action in Syria labelled as “terrorist sympathisers” and those who voted for it sent photographs of dead babies.
We all – the politicians asking for our trust, the press which holds them to account, and the citizens who elect them – need to rise to the challenge that Jo Cox’s death presents to us as a democracy. And that challenge is so simple, so banal that it shouldn’t need to be repeated, and yet on days like this it feels like it has to be: we all need to start being nicer to one another.
the unfinished article 
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