Chuka Umunna, a lawyer and British Labour politician, born of Irish mother Patricia, and Nigerian father, Bennett, of Igbo ethnic group, who has served Streatham as Member of Parliament since 2010, said this in his submission to the Guardian, UK
Why did Labour do so badly?
Umanna said: “First, we spoke to our core voters but not to aspirational, middle-class ones. We talked about the bottom and top of society, about the minimum wage and zero-hour contracts, about mansions and non-doms. But we had too little to say to the majority of people in the middle.
“Second, we allowed the impression to arise that we were not on the side of those who are doing well. We talked a lot, quite rightly, about the need to address “irresponsible” capitalism, for more political will to tackle inequality, poverty and injustice (and we must never give the appearance that we are relaxed about them). But we talked too little about those creating wealth and doing the right thing.
“That’s why I’ve always argued you cannot be pro-business by beating up on the terms and conditions of their workers and the trade unions that play an important role representing them. But you cannot be pro good jobs without being pro the businesses that create them. In spite of the fact that our policy offer was pro-business, the rhetoric often suggested otherwise. And sometimes we made it sound like we saw taxing people as a good in itself, rather than a means to an end.
“Third, we treated parts of the electorate as no-go areas. We tried to cobble together a 35 per cent coalition of our core vote, disaffected Lib Dems, Greens and Ukip supporters. The terrible results were the failure of that approach writ large. We need a different, big-tent approach one in which no one is too rich or poor to be part of our party.
Fourth, we did not tackle the legacy of our recent past so did not allay the concerns some voters had about us. Of course, the last Labour government should not have been running (an albeit small and historically unremarkable) deficit before the financial crash. But we should have done far more to challenge the ludicrous claim that our investment in public services caused it. The Tories conveniently ignore the fact they signed up to our spending plans before the crash, we inherited a debt-to-GDP ratio of 42 per cent from them in 1997 and had got this down to 37 per cent by 2008; and, under 18 years of Tory rule before 1997, the deficit averaged 3.2 per cent of GDP, whereas it was 1.3 per cent from 1997 to 2007.
The failure to nail this argument allowed doubts to arise about our competence. We should have shouted louder about there be nothing progressive about spending more paying debt interest to City investors and others every year than we invest in our housing or transport.
Fifth, as the party that believes in government’s ability to make people’s lives better, we should have been the ones championing a smart, efficient public sector that uses technology, co-operative and mutual principles and a pragmatic “what works” approach to get things done. By way of an example, consider Transport for London’s decision to make its data freely available to developers. The move has spawned the creation of some 200 travel apps by tech companies, improving users’ experiences and adding tens of millions of pounds to the economy.
Sixth, the divergence of different parts of the UK and voters’ lack of trust in politics require bigger solutions than those we put forward. We must be the party of drastic political reform. We should be saying: it is time for parliament to move out of the relic that is the Palace of Westminster and into a new, modern, accessible site fit for purpose, for a serious debate about the electoral system, for an elected Senate in place of the outdated House of Lords.
We should start by changing our party: cultivating networks of supporters and civic society organisations and making it more of a force for progressive change in people’s communities every day, not just every five years. It’s worth noting that if Labour had as many members as the SNP, relative to population, it would have 1.2 million.
Finally, we needed a clearer vision of Britain in the world. Labour is the party of internationalism and openness. It is up to us to explain how global change can be harnessed, how we in Britain can use our strengths – our universities, industry and innovation, our diverse population, our global alliances (especially the EU) – to make life here better. It is also up to us to fight the root causes of anti-immigration sentiment, like the housing crisis, rather than pandering to it.
So as painful as Thursday’s result is, the direction we need to taketo rebuild is clear. We must stop looking to the past and focus on ensuring everyone has a stake in the future. Our vision as a party must start with the aspirations of voters: to get on and up in the world, to see their children and grandchildren do better than they did, to get that better job, to move from renting to owning, to take the family on holiday, to move from that flat to that house with a garden. That means offering competence, optimism not fatalism, an end to machine politics, an economic credo that is both pro-worker and pro-business and, most of all, a politics that starts with what unites us as a country rather than what divides us. Only then will we be able to build the fairer, more equal, democratic and sustainable society that led us to join our party in the first place. Our defeat was on the scale of 1992, but our revival can be on the scale of 1997, and just as rapid if we do what needs to be done. Labour is down, but not out. We must – and will – recover, and win again.
...Set to replace Ed Miliband as Labour leader
Labour’s leadership race turned serious Sunday morning, after front-runner, Chuka Umunna wheeled out his new girlfriend in public for the first time as he set out his plan to replace Ed Miliband.
The MailOnline reported that shadow business secretary was pictured walking hand-in-hand with his glamorous lawyer partner Alice Sullivan ahead of his interview on the BBC’s flagship Andrew Marr show.
Umunna used the interview to criticise Labour’s drift to the left and admitted he was considering a bid to become leader.
His intervention came after Labour’s leadership battle descended into open warfare after Umunna and the other leadership contenders were accused of “behaving like family members taking jewellery off a corpse” by openly criticising Mr Miliband so soon after the election defeat.
Blairite front-benchers, Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendal joined Umunna in criticising Labour’s disastrous campaign, after the party suffered its worst election defeat in almost 30 years.
The party lost all-but one of its MPs in Scotland and failed to make any gains south of the border, where even the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls lost his seat.
Hunt said the party was in a “really deep hole” and admitted he would ‘get involved” in the leadership contest to take over from Ed Miliband.
Ms Kendal, the shadow care minister, was the first Labour candidate out of the blocks revealing she was running for the leadership.
While Hunt and Umunna have not formally announced their leadership bids, the speed with which they distanced themselves from the former leader sparked criticism from elsewhere in the party.
A source from an unannounced leadership campaign told the New Statesman magazine they were “behaving like family members taking jewellery off a corpse.”
Diane Abbot, speaking on Sky News, questioned why figures such as Mr Umunna had not challenged Mr Miliband’s strategy when they were in the shadow cabinet.
She said: ‘Some of (the leadership candidates) have rushed in putting articles out that basically trash Ed Miliband’s entire election strategy.
‘I’m slightly struck, these people sat in the shadow cabinet for nearly five years and did not say those things.
But a source from what was described as an ‘unannounced leadership campaign’ went further – claiming the leadership candidates were ‘behaving like family members taking jewellery off a corpse’.
Labour MP John Woodcock, who is a strong ally of Ms Kendal, slammed the ‘disgusting slur’ and called for the un-named aide to be named.
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, the wife of ousted former shadow chancellor Ed Balls, is widely expected to stand – alongside Andy Burnham and the former paratrooper Dan Jarvis.
Speaking this morning on Sky’s Murnaghan programme, Mr Hunt said: ‘I think everybody who loves the Labour party, as I do, needs to get involved now.
“We are in a really deep hole and we need everyone to pull together and really have it out about what went wrong and what went right and I do want to be one of those voices.
“But it’s more than about just leadership; it’s about how the party is led and about the political philosophy behind it.”
He agreed that Labour had shifted too far from the centre ground.
“Public didn’t feel that they could trust us with their economic futures – they didn’t feel that we spoke to their sense of cultural or national identity in England and clearly in Scotland as well.
“We are in a terrible hole. We are 100 seats behind the Conservative party. We should be in no doubt about the seriousness.
“I was certainly shocked by the scale of the loss... I felt that we could have had a stronger message for those aspirational parts of Britain.’
Mr Umunna gave a similar analysis for why he thought Labour had lost.
Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, he said: ‘In my view the Labour party succeeds and does best when it marries together its compassion for people who can’t provide for themselves – the vulnerable or the poor – with others’ ambition and drive and aspiration to get on and do well.”
He said he would ‘play the fullest part I can’ in rebuilding the Labour Party but declined to confirm that he would seek the leadership amid a barrage of criticism from senior figures of the tactics that ended in a crushing General Election defeat.
“I certainly intend to play the fullest part I can in rebuilding our party and having the proper debate that we now need to have to make sure we win,’ he told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show when pressed to say if he would stand.
“We are down but we are not out. The scale of the defeat is of ‘92 proportions but there is no reason why we shouldn’t get back in in 2020. I do not buy this idea that this is somehow a 10-year rebuilding project.
“We can do this in five years if we make the right decisions now and present that aspirational and compassionate case to the British people which we are so good at. We can do this.”
Mr Umunna: ‘This was a collective failure on the part of all of us who were on the front line,’ he said - conceding that at times the party gave the false impression ‘we weren’t with the wealth creators.”
‘Labour should be more inclusive and aspirational’
The Labour Party must return to the political centre ground and acknowledge the aspirations of millions of voters it ignored in its election campaign, senior figures said on Sunday, as the party’s crushing defeat hit home.
The Conservatives, who during their five years in coalition with the Liberal Democrats imposed huge public spending cuts, won a surprise overall majority of 331 seats in parliament and are now forming a single-party government.
Labour leader, Ed Miliband, widely seen as having steered the party leftwards from former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s centrist “New Labour”, resigned on Friday after the party won just 232 seats.
Blair, who won three elections in a row to be prime minister from 1997 to 2007, wrote in The Observer newspaper that Labour should be more inclusive and aspirational, his comments echoed by one of the frontrunners to replace Miliband, Chuka Umunna.
“The route to the summit lies through the centre ground. Labour has to be for ambition and aspiration as well as compassion and care,” Blair wrote.
“Hard-working families ... want to know that by hard work and effort they can do well, rise up, achieve.”
One of Blair’s closest allies during his period in power, former minister and European Union commissioner Peter Mandelson, was scathing about Miliband’s strategy.
“We were sent out ... to make an argument, if you can call it an argument, which basically said we’re for the poor, we hate the rich, ignoring completely the vast swathe of the population who exist in between,” Mandelson told the BBC on Sunday.
Asked about an often-cited speech in which Miliband had tried to differentiate between business “predators” and “producers”, Mandelson said that was “a completely useless label that led nowhere in any serious debate”.
There is no guarantee that such views will be well received.
Blair is now a divisive figure due to the legacy of his decision to lead Britain into the Iraq War, while Mandelson made many Labour supporters uncomfortable when he famously said he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”.
SCOTTISH CHALLENGE
The leadership race has not officially begun. As well as Umunna, the party’s business spokesman since 2011, former ministers Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper are expected to run.
It is also possible that a new leader could emerge from the ranks of relative newcomers with fewer links to the New Labour era, such as members of parliament Dan Jarvis, Tristram Hunt, Liz Kendall or Rachel Reeves.
Their views are not yet well-known as the party has just emerged from a period of intense campaigning where party discipline held and everyone supported Miliband’s platform.
Kendall, a party spokeswoman on health, told The Sunday Times newspaper the party needed a “fundamentally new approach” and she was considering running for the leadership.
Umunna, who stopped short of announcing his candidacy but said on Sunday morning he intended to “play the fullest part I can in rebuilding our party”, drew similar lessons to Blair.
“We talked about the bottom and top of society, about the minimum wage and zero-hour contracts, about mansions and non-doms. But we had little to say to the majority of people in the middle,” he said, referring to several of the party’s policies.
Umunna said Labour’s collapse in Scotland, where it lost all but one of the 41 parliamentary seats it previously held to the Scottish National Party, was compounded by a failure to gain any ground against the Conservatives in far more populous England.
The divide between Scotland, where all but three of the 59 parliamentary seats are now held by the left-leaning nationalists, and England, where the right-leaning Conservatives now dominate, poses a major strategic difficulty for Labour
There may be a temptation to tilt leftwards to try and regain ground in Scotland, but that would seem unlikely to help in England, which accounts for 85 percent of the United Kingdom’s population.
In his column, Blair gave a clear view on that issue.
Source: Tribune
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