Election Outcome: Not Enough

There’s a photograph from election night that I can’t get out of my head. Ed Miliband, looking genuinely bewildered as the exit poll results came in, the realisation slowly dawning that Labour hadn’t just lost - we’d been decimated. Scotland had gone SNP, the Tories had gained seats, and the party that was supposed to represent working people had just been comprehensively rejected by them.

I spent months on the streets campaigning for this. Knocking on doors, delivering leaflets, trying to convince people that Labour had something to offer them. The conversations on doorsteps were depressing - not because people were hostile, but because they were resigned. “What’s ’effin the point?”. “You’re all the same.”

When I tried to explain our policies, the response was often a weary shrug. Why vote for cuts delivered with a guilty conscience when you could vote for cuts delivered with conviction?

The post-mortems are already coming thick and fast. Ed was too weird, too left-wing, couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich properly. The media narrative is writing itself: Labour moved too far from the centre, alienated Middle England, scared the business community. The usual suspects are lining up to explain why the party needs to move rightward, be more sensible, more electable.

But they’re wrong about almost everything.

The fundamental problem with Labour’s campaign wasn’t that it was too left-wing - it was that it wasn’t nearly left-wing enough. Faced with the Conservatives’ austerity agenda, our response was essentially: “Yes, we’ll cut public spending too, but we’ll do it more slowly and with a sadder face.”

This was political suicide dressed up as pragmatism. Why would voters choose austerity-lite when they could have the full-strength version from people who at least seemed to believe in it? We spent five years accepting the Conservatives’ framing that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by Labour “overspending” rather than by a global banking collapse, and then wondered why people didn’t trust us with the economy.

Ed Balls seemed to genuinely believe that the path to power lay through demonstrating fiscal responsibility to an imaginary group of swing voters who were apparently crying out for public service cuts delivered with more compassion. The result was a manifesto that offered nothing transformative, nothing inspiring, nothing that could materially improve anyone’s life.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, the SNP was offering everything Labour should have been: anti-austerity, pro-public investment, willing to challenge Westminster orthodoxy. They weren’t just proposing to manage decline more humanely - they were offering a genuine alternative. The result? We lost 40 seats in Scotland, many in constituencies we’d held for decades.

The SNP’s success should be a wake-up call. When given a choice between grudging acceptance of austerity and a party promising to fight it, Scottish voters chose resistance. But instead of learning this lesson, the party seems determined to double down on the idea that we need to be more acceptable to English swing voters who apparently love austerity as long as it comes with better messaging.

This is the fundamental flaw in Labour’s electability argument: people don’t vote for a nicer brand of Toryism, they vote for the real thing. If you accept your opponents’ framing - that public spending is bad, that inequality is inevitable, that there’s no alternative to whatever capitalism currently looks like - then you’ve already lost the argument. You’re just negotiating the terms of your surrender.

The tragic irony is that Ed Miliband, personally, probably understood this. His conference speech about “predatory capitalism” suggested someone who grasped that the system needed fundamental change, not minor adjustments. But by the time that insight had been filtered through focus groups, polling data, and the advice of people who thought Tony Blair was still relevant, it had been reduced to price controls on energy bills and a mansion tax that somehow wouldn’t affect anyone who mattered.

Thursday’s defeat was inevitable from the moment Labour accepted that austerity was necessary. Once you’ve conceded that public spending caused the crisis rather than private speculation, once you’ve agreed that working people should pay for the bankers’ mistakes, once you’ve decided that the best you can offer is managed decline - then you’ve already lost.

You can’t win elections by telling people that things are going to get worse but that you’ll make the pain more bearable. You can’t inspire voters by promising that you’ll implement Conservative policies but with better PowerPoint presentations. And you definitely can’t build a coalition for change by treating your own supporters as an embarrassment and your opponents’ supporters as the only voters who matter.

The lesson of this election shouldn’t be that Labour was too left-wing - it should be that being a slightly nicer version of your opponents isn’t a winning strategy. But that would require admitting that the entire New Labour project has been built on quicksand, and that’s too uncomfortable a truth for the people who’ve spent their careers believing that the only way to win is to move rightward.

So instead, we’ll get the comfortable lie: that Ed was too weird, that the voters weren’t ready, that the only solution is to be even more like the Tories. And if anyone suggests that maybe, just maybe, we lost because we offered too little change rather than too much, they’ll be dismissed as unrealistic, unelectable, out of touch with ordinary voters.

Sometimes being right isn’t enough. But being wrong, consistently and catastrophically, while insisting that you’re the only sensible person in the room? That’s delusion.

We deserved better than this campaign. The country deserved better. And until Labour stops trying to be a nicer brand of Tory and starts offering an alternative, we’ll keep losing to people who at least have the courage of their convictions, however appalling those convictions might be.