Labour CAN still win in 2020

In today’s Observer Andrew Rawnsley details a terrible fatalism gripping Labour. He claims that the upper echelons of the Party are increasingly convinced that Ed Miliband’s legacy is so damaging that Labour is bound to be rejected at the polls yet again in five years time.

This is nonsense. History’s lesson is clear: oppositions can win elections even after a previous very bruising and unexpected loss. But, and this is the hard part for Labour politicians and members to accept, they need a fair bit of luck and, more importantly, a willingness to show beyond doubt that they have understood the reasons for their rejection by the voters.

Hoping for a Crisis

Winning back power is very far from easy. There have been 18 General Elections in the UK since the unique 1945 contest in which both main parties had already been in government for five years. In just seven of those elections or 38% , the opposition triumphed. In just three or 16% did the opposition emerge with a decent working majority in the House of Commons.

Incumbency is a very big advantage in British politics while regaining trust when you have been rejected is difficult. There seem to be two factors which make that rare occurrence possible.

The first is entirely out of the hands of HM Opposition: economic crisis. Every change of party in government has been preceded by a major reversal of economic fortune.

Before the 1951 election, it was a balance of payments and exchange rate crisis. By 1964, trust in the Conservatives had been eroded by stalling growth and rising unemployment. The 1970 election was dominated by similar concerns to those that afflicted Labour in 1951. By 1974, however, Labour was back after the Tory PM, Edward Heath, was forced to introduce a three day working week to deal with energy shortages. Thatcher romped home in 1979 as prices and trade union militancy spiralled beyond the control of James Callaghan. That long spell of Tory incumbency was brought crashing down in 1997 following the exchange rate fiasco of Black Wednesday. And most recently, of course, Labour was thrown out of office after it hit the economic crisis motherload with the 2008 Crash.

So what is generally very bad news for the country is good news for an opposition party. An economic crisis can reset the game dissolving the credibility which secured the incumbent its place in power in the first place.

Signalling A Fresh Start

History is also clear, however, that an economic crisis alone is not enough to get the the Leader of the Opposition back into Downing Street. The economy is a complex and volatile thing and it is a very rare government indeed that doesn’t suffer some sort of major economic challenge in its time in office. But if the opposition party has not shown the voters that it has learned from its previous mistakes and changed accordingly then those economic problems are unlikely to translate into the necessarily significant shift of votes away from the Government.

1992 and 2015 provide the best examples. The serious economic slowdowns that afflicted both Major’s and Cameron’s Governments before those elections did not translate into a big enough swing to the Labour opposition. In 1992, Labour was still associated with the high tax, high spend policies that, rightly or wrongly, were blamed for the problems of the 1970s. In the most recent election, Cameron brushed off some serious economic problems because Labour was still too closely associated in the public mind with the economic approach that led to 2008.

In those examples where opposition parties have triumphed, it is because the Party has clearly signalled a fresh start that shows it respects the electorate’s previous decision. In 1951, the Conservatives moved firmly to the left embracing many of the policies that had won Labour a landslide in 1945. In 1964, Harold Wilson showed Labour had accepted the new world of aspiration once associated with Tory PM Harold MacMillan. In 1979, the Conservatives had a new forceful leader giving the clear impression that the u-turning on core economic policies of the previous Tory PM was not her style. In 1997, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown signalled the break Kinnock and Smith had been unable to deliver in 1992 by rewriting Clause IV and matching the first two years of the Conservative Government’s tight spending plans. And in 2010, the Tories were led by men who reinforced the fact they were not even MPs when Black Wednesday happened by deliberately displaying their concern for protecting the NHS and schools from inevitable cuts very much against the spending policies of John Major.

The only example where a victorious Opposition did not go through such a transformation was February 1974 when Labour took over the reins of Government with a leader who had already been PM for six years and without anything particularly new to say. It is telling therefore that Labour entered government 17 seats short of a majority having actually endured a 6% swing away from the Party to the Liberals.

Can Labour Win?

If Labour is to win in 2020 it will need that combination of luck and judgement that always marks out the few victorious opposition parties from the many failures. Is that possible?

Strangely Labour seems more likely to be blessed with luck than judgement. The economy is on an upward trajectory currently but George Osborne could fall down a great many traps between now and 2020. It is very far from certain that the Eurozone is stable. The spiralling conflict in the Middle East could yet force higher oil prices. The Chinese economy is afflicted by stock market chaos. And whether the world can survive the tighter money policies now being indicated by the US Federal Reserve is a moot point to say the least. Any one of these factors could blow up and dent the Government’s economic reputation.

But even if that did happen it seems highly unlikely Labour will have signalled to the voters that it understands why it has been rejected twice before. Unless Liz Kendall makes a miraculous leap forward, Labour will elect either a leader very closely associated with the previous 1997–2010 administration (and hence the 2008 Crash) or someone who completely rejects the idea that the Party needs to address its reputation for overspending and economic incompetence.

This is simply a long way of saying that Ed Miliband’s impact on the 2020 election is negligible as long as Labour wants it to be. Choose a ‘fresh start’ leader, signal to the voters that you very clearly understand the message they are sending you and then hope for the crisis that will shred the Tories’ credibility. Even if Labour does not do that this year, if it can find its way to do it before 2020 then its chances of grasping a victory are not as poor as some seem to think.

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