Posted on 2015-05-29 | 06:34

Commenting on Labour’s defeat in the election, Roger said:

“You may ask what special insight I have that others don’t - and the answer is none. However, I have fought 14 General and Council elections and won 12 times, and in my Hall Green Birmingham seat – which the Lib Dems expected to take in 2010 – my vote increased by 26.9% to 28,147; my majority increased from 3,700 to 19,818 and there was a swing of more than 10% from Tory to Labour. And, just for the record, I am not standing for Leader or Deputy Leader nor for any position within the Party or in Parliament. I am just expressing my own views on why we lost so badly.

“First, the Ed factor. From the day of his election as Leader the wider public did not take to him and did not see him as ‘Prime Ministerial’. However, they did not particularly like Ted Heath when he was Tory Leader but he still beat Harold Wilson in 1970. Ed deserves credit for keeping the Party together during the last five years – even if, in doing so, he made compromises which contributed to the defeat on the 7th May. There were certainly some strange decisions made by him and his closest advisors, such as the “Edstone”, but these were not the decisive mistakes.

  “The biggest mistake was putting forward a minimalist agenda – lots of ‘nice’ sensible polices which had won approval from ‘nice’ people in focus groups – while steering clear of bold radical policies for fear of alienating the electorate. The Tories had no such inhibitions, and chucked around bold policies. They offered pensioners ‘freedom’ to control their pension pots; promised to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million; promised housing association tenants the right to buy their properties at a discount and the electors the right to a referendum on Europe. Radical policies did not do them any harm, but where were our radical polices? What vision did we offer the electorate to inspire them to vote for us?

“So far as the economic argument is concerned we did not just lose it – we did not even challenge the Tories and Lib Dems. I accept that during the six months after the 2010 defeat when the Party was preoccupied with electing a new leader the Tory/Lib Dem Coalition made hay with the phrase ‘we are having to clear up Labour’s economic mess’, in which they were assisted by Liam Byrne’s suicide note. But, crucially, during the next four years, and throughout the campaign, we refused to lay the blame at the door of those who caused the 2008 financial crisis – the bankers and financial institutions in American and the UK who gambled with ordinary people’s money and savings – and then had to be bailed out by the taxpayer!

“Because we would not blame these City institutions – either for fear of being accused of being ‘anti-business’ or because we would have had to admit that we had been wrong to embrace the neoliberal economic agenda introduced by Mrs. Thatcher in the 80s and carried on by Blair and Brown with their ‘light touch regulation’ of City institutions - we ended up in a ridiculous situation where the Labour Party took full responsibility for the 2008 crash. We accepted the Tory argument that the Labour Government had spent too much and we signed up to the ‘austerity agenda’! A fat lot of good this did us as the bankers, hedge funds and City institutions – who could not believe how naïve we had been in letting them off the hook – lined up to rubbish our policies and to back the Tories spending and tax policies and pour money into their campaign coffers.

“In my election campaign I continuously used the following statement in nearly all my election material: ‘The 2008 financial crisis was not caused by ordinary people. It was not caused by nurses or teachers; local government workers; people working in the private sector; small businessmen; students or retired people. It was caused by the greed of a small group of individuals in the banking and financial sector –but everybody is now paying the price.’

“For what it is worth I also campaigned for a referendum on whether we should stay in the EU; for balanced migration; for taking the railways back under public ownership; for scrapping Trident and HS2; and for small shareholders to be given a majority on the remuneration committees of all publicly listed companies to stop the plundering of profits by senior executives. I don’t know whether these commitments had any affect – but they certainly did not do me any harm, as the result showed!

“Our total failure to defend our economic and spending record from 1997 to 2008 and to place the blame for the financial crisis on the banks and City institutions who abused their privileged positons provoked incredulity among a diverse range of people. Paul Krugman, a renowned Nobel prize-winning economist, circulated an excellent rebuttal of the austerity agenda during the election campaign, while lamenting the fact that the Labour Party seemed incapable of challenging Tory myths. The Permanent Secretary at the Treasury gave an interview halfway through the campaign in which he categorically said the 2008 financial crisis was caused by the lack of regulation of banks and financial institutions and not by overspending. Kitty Ussher, the ultra-Blairite former Treasury Minister, recently said Labour was making a terrible mistake by admitting that the 2008 crash was caused by overspending – because it was simply not true!

“So there you have it. Whoever is chosen to lead the Party is going to have to decide in which direction to take it. For what it is worth I think we should be bold and be prepared to embrace new, innovative and radical ideas while holding true to the core beliefs on which the Party was founded. Before the usual suspects jump up and say ‘this would be taking the Party to the left and from there it cannot win’, perhaps I can make it clear that being radical has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘left’ and right’. For anybody to suggest that radical must mean ‘left’ is silly and factually incorrect as Mrs. Thatcher – very much a radical – proved.

“What I am absolutely convinced of, however, is that if we plant our standard in the ‘soggy centre’ of British politics and try to be ‘all things to all people’ then we will end up like the Lib Dems and we will be outflanked on both the left and right by UKIP, the Greens and the anti-austerity and anti-neoliberalist SNP, and we would suffer a similar result to the one we have just experienced. “Perhaps we should remember what Harold Wilson – who won 4 out of 5 elections – said: ‘the Labour Party is nothing if it is not a crusade’.”