Labour is in a more difficult position now than it was after its defeat in 1992. In ’92, the electorate had sent Labour a clear message: move to the centre, don’t say you’ll put up taxes and get a better leader. But this time round, the message Labour has been sent is more complicated.
There are three groups of voters that Labour failed with at this election, I argue in the magazine this week. Aspirational voters who went Tory, the left behind working class who went Ukip in England and SNP in Scotland and Nationalist-minded ones north of the border. What the Labour leadership candidates have to explain is how they would win these voters over.
We can already see two fault-lines in this leadership contest which, to put it crudely, are New Generation v Old Guard and Southern Labour v Northern Labour. On one side of this divide, are Chuka Umunna and Liz Kendall who are both 2010 intake MPs who have talked about how Labour has to have more to say to the middle classes and admitted that it shouldn’t have been running a deficit pre-crash. On the other, are Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham who were both Cabinet ministers in the last Labour government, sit for northern seats and haven’t accepted that spending was too high pre-crash.
Ed Miliband’s defeat showed that any Labour electoral strategy that doesn’t involve winning votes off the Tories isn’t worth the paper it is written on. So, Labour has to ask itself which candidate is best suited to doing that. On that front, it is clear that Umunna and Kendall are less tribal than Cooper and Burnham and better placed to do that.
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