The crushing defeat of the British Labour Party was much worse than that suffered by the Australian Labour Party earlier in the year. However, there were some disturbing similarities and some common lessons to be learnt. The ALP is fortunate to have had the Emerson/Weatherill Review. The British Labour Party needs to do something similar.
The crushing defeat of the British Labour Party was much worse than that suffered by the Australian Labor Party earlier in the year.
However, there were some disturbing similarities and some common lessons to be learnt.
The ALP is fortunate to have had the Emerson/ Wetherill Review to forensically examine the causes of the unexpected loss and suggest some improvements.
The British Labour Party needs to do the same, but I am not sure they are capable of allowing such an objective and rigorous review in their current state of administrative and political malaise.
What were the common mistakes?
I don’t want to be unfair to the ALP or to Bill Shorten here. Bill did much better than Jeremy Corbyn. The Morrison government still has only a wafer thin majority, and is one by-election away from minority government. (This may explain their adamant defence of the indefensible Angus Taylor.)
The British Labour Party suffered a defeat of historic proportions and faces a minimum of 5 years in Opposition, with the probability of a decade in the wilderness.
However, there were some similarities which an objective analysis of the British result would highlight.
The Emerson/Wetherill review found that “Labor lost the election because of a weak strategy that could not adapt to the change in liberal leadership, a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky and an unpopular leader.”
The second and third of these factors were present in spades in the UK election.
There is no doubt Brexit was a factor in the result. Labour was vulnerable here because of its failures in the campaign around the initial referendum and their failure to come to an agreement with Theresa May. Their final position on Brexit was an awkward compromise, which may have been the best option available in the circumstances but was difficult to explain and made the leader look weak. How could he be neutral about the biggest issue facing the country?
And the unpalatable truth is that Labour’s share of the vote fell in strong remain areas as well.
The failure of both parties’ policy presentation was not in the individual policies. Research in both cases shows a number of the policies were popular when taken in isolation. The problem was the number and extent of the policy offerings. The review in Australia found that “The sheer size, complexity and frequency of Labor’s policy announcements had the effect of crowding each other out in media coverage and made it difficult for local campaigns to communicate them to their voters”.
Further it found “Voter trust in politics globally and in Australia has collapsed, resulting in economically insecure, lower income voters treating all political promises with extreme scepticism while being highly receptive to negative campaigns”.
These two findings make the case for the fundamental requirement to set priorities. It is essential for political parties, particularly those of the left, to show that they are capable of choosing between competing priorities.
Reported candidate feedback reinforces the view that the British party had even bigger problems in this area. Individual policies seemed popular but the number and scale of them was frightening to voters and very difficult for candidates to communicate.
A former French PM, Pierre Mendes-France, said “gouvenir et choisir”. It remains the case: to be ready to govern one must be ready and able to choose. Voters are entitled to demand an indication of priorities rather than a mere wish list of everything a party would like to do.
Bill Shorten did not suffer from some of the image challenges of Jeremy Corbyn. No one could accuse him of tolerating anti-Semitism, for example.
But, nevertheless, the ANU survey found that he was the most unpopular major party leader since 1990.
Popularity is not everything but it does matter. Lord Ashcroft, in his very large post-election poll found that while Brexit was the main reason for a Conservative vote, economic management and who would be a better PM came a close second and third. Brexit cannot explain why 16% of 2017 Labour voters who also voted to remain declined to vote Labour in 2019. The poll suggests that voters’ main fear of a Labour government was the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister.
Noted Corbyn supporter Owen Jones, in the Guardian, recently noted “Labour insiders would often bemoan …no serious attempt to turn around Corbyn’s woeful ratings”.
No political leader in the most recent election in either country was popular. All recorded nett negative approval ratings. But the relative popularity is revealing.
For Bill Shorten, the last five polls showed a nett -18.8% approval compared to Scott Morrison’s -2.4%.
In the UK the numbers for the last five polls were Corbyn -41.6 and Johnson-12.2.
To be less unpopular than Jeremy Corbyn is not much comfort but it does help explain the relatively stronger performance of the ALP.
The polling figures for Jeremy Corbyn were astonishingly bad in the lead-up to the election. Boris Johnson was unpopular, but he was an asset compared to the Labour leader.
Popularity is not everything. Recognition of strength or courage can be a political asset for an unpopular leader.
But the combination of unpopular leadership, an excessively cluttered policy agenda and confusion about Brexit was lethal for Labour.
The British Labour Party could do worse than inviting Jay Wetherill and Craig Emerson to give them some advice about the best way to conduct a post-election review.
Bob McMullan was National Secretary of the ALP from 1981 to 1988 and a Senator, MHR, Parliamentary Secretary and Cabinet Minister during the period 1988 to 2010.
Bob McMullan was State Secretary of the Labor Party and National Secretary as well as a Senator, MP and Cabinet Minister. He is now a Visiting fellow at the Australian Studies Institute at ANU.
Comments
4 responses to “BOB MCMULLAN. Lessons for Labour from Labor”
Significantly, what both ALP and Labour have in common is voters. To understand the electoral loss, the focus should be on understanding the vigorous shift to self-serving indifference to cruelty and mean-spiritedness in voters. For that the Emerson/Weatherill Review is worthless.
Brexit is fundamentally racist driven by a craving to regain supremacist relevancy and whiteness. Ditto USA driven by a dark ages Christianity. Ditto Australia.
Now Labor, desperate for an electoral win, is cloning the LNP’s no policy, no action, no decency election strategy instead working hard to restore principles back into the Australian spirit and governance.
So desperate is Labor that it is blind to the fact that the LNP win was slim and that the younger generation are out there fighting for everyone’s future which is what the ALP should be doing. Hence, they are more stupid and self-serving than the LNP.
Hi Bob. You left out the main story of the 18 May and 12 December elections, namely the conservative leadership. Scott Morrison conducted a superhuman campaign, using every minute of his limited time, kicking footballs from one end of Australia to the other. His energy and personality won the day. Boris Johnson made the correct assessment of the public’s mood on Brexit and was able to hold his side firm on that issue.
The “anti-Semitic” smear on Corbyn and anybody else who supports Palestinian rights casts a dark shadow on contemporary politics but did not affect the result, which was all about Brexit.
The views of Emerson and Wetherill — like yours and mine — are only matters of opinion. In my opinion Labor this year produced the best policies in memory only limited by Chris Bowen’s insistence on a budget surplus and his unfortunate personal rudeness to retirees.
It will be a shame if labour parties reviewing themselves inside-out slide back to the wishy-washy centre-right position of the neoliberal era known in Britain as The Third Way, in America as triangulation and in Australia as economic rationalism.
The ALP showed what is possible when it took the lead in the Senate and the union-bashing legislation was thrown out. Labor needs to take the same, unequivocal opposition to the religious discrimination legislation which is designed to cause trouble and to the Limitation of Cash legislation designed to protect the banks at the expense of the people.
‘unfortunate personal rudeness’ is one way of putting it – in my opinion it failed to mask Labor’s continuing problem with People. They are useful only for a tick at the ballot box and for the rest they get in the way. People don’t like it, Chris, and they took your advice.
Apparatchiki and ‘Insiders’ (who don’t even know when a coup is underway) have a skewed perspective on Australian politics. Look at this very piece – Bob McMullan simply can’t help himself, can’t convey his message absent a spin… ‘we’ – the ALP – are better than Corbyn’s Labour- meretricious drivel – and Emerson-Weatherill is just more of the same. These ‘politicians’ are not up for change, and they have no taste for learning the ‘People’. If Boris is there, as is mooted, for the next 10 years? is this possible I ask myself? seriously? – then Scott Morrison is not so easily Mungo’s dupe, and ‘we’ are on – as they say in Kolkutta – ‘a sticky wicket’.
Labor had the most coherent policies I can remember in 50 years of voting.
What they lacked, was a slogan to pack the policies together, repeated endlessly to give the voters something to remember when they pick up the pencil to vote:
https://www.smh.com.au/federal-election-2019/it-s-time-to-unpack-this-election-s-campaign-slogans-20190501-p51j86.html
Something like:
Stronger, Better, Fairer.
How good is that?