Rav Casley Gera

One Labour Prime Minister, two Labour Prime Minister… three….?

It is shortly after sun-rise on Wednesday morning in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Andalucia. I am in despair at the behaviour of ministers and MPs who were briefing against Gordon Brown once the Glasgow by-election result came in. Then the phone rings. It is the Today programme. Would I like to comment on David Miliband’s article in the Guardian? What article? They send it over on my Blackberry.

It is like a breath of fresh air after the stale self-indulgent solipsism from Warwick. It attacks the Tories. Hooray! It sets out Labour’s mistakes – not under Brown’s brief premiership but strategic wrong turns or failures to get out of first gear since 1997. At last! It suggests that Labour needs to do. On the record. Signed by a senior cabinet minister. About time!

So I tell Today I would like to comment and invite other ministers and MPs top attack the Tories and to discuss ideas and ideology and not personality. Big mistake. The phone goes silent as all the BBC wants from me as a Labour MP is to join in the get-Gordon dance.

pfpfpfpffff. Denis MacShane clearly has his own agenda. But I can’t help but feel there is something completely absurd about the firestorm that’s blown up about Milliband’s article in the Guardian. [Read more →]

Labour has done badly in previous contests between election[sic]. It even managed to meet disaster in a national election - the 1999 European Parliament election - and still win by miles the next time.

Yet what characterised these previous defeats was base Labour voters staying at home, unwilling to go out and cast a positive vote for Labour.

Glasgow East was different. In Glasgow East, voters in pretty large numbers did turn out. They rushed out to vote for anyone who could beat the Labour candidate.

In a recent discussion I had on Newsnight, my friend the former Blair adviser Peter Hyman said Labour was “sleepwalking to a massacre”.

So they are.

Daniel Finkelstein has a point, I suspect.

Labour’s current Britain-wide predicament seems to polarise between “New Labour ultras” and “left Labour traditionalists” - the former stressing winning aspirational middle Britain voters, the latter “core” or “traditional” working-class voters. But this offers a false choice. There are core voters in every constituency in Britain. It is not possible to form a Labour government by winning key marginal seats where aspirational voters predominate unless core voters turn out.

We have lost support in both sectors, and our challenge is to win them both back. The New Labour ultra assumption that core voters have nowhere else to go is plain wrong: they are staying at home, or voting for minority parties, including, sadly, the BNP. Equally wrong is the assumption of traditionalists that aspirational voters’ concerns are secondary.

Peter Hain offers a refreshing dose of sanity in the Compass-Progress feud