Appeal to Dwindling Core Proves Costly for Labour Party in Britain
By STEVEN ERLANGER and STEPHEN CASTLE

LONDON — The Labour Party’s defeat in Thursday’s British elections was its poorest performance in nearly 30 years.

It was nearly wiped out in Scotland, long one of its strongholds. Some of its brightest and most experienced members of Parliament lost their seats, including its shadow chancellor and shadow foreign secretary.

Most important, it lost the argument about Britain’s best path toward the future and was left with no clear guiding philosophy.

Ed Miliband, Labour’s leader for the last five years, took responsibility and resigned, initiating another round of soul-searching for a party with trade union and socialist roots in a globalized country where heavy industry and the traditional working class are fading fast.

Mr. Miliband bet on a strategy to appeal to Labour’s core voters: After the global crash of 2008, he believed, the electorate would favor an egalitarian party that called for higher taxes on the rich, tighter regulation of business and increased social spending. His agenda was sold by Labour as a responsible alternative to the fiscal austerity imposed on Britain by Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservative-led government of the past five years.

But Mr. Miliband’s campaign was also a challenge — and a rebuff — to the “New Labour” strategy of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who won three elections by downplaying socialism, reaching for the center and convincing business that Labour was its friend.

In the end, the Conservatives appeared to succeed in much of Britain with their argument that Labour under Mr. Miliband could not be trusted with the economy, especially if prodded by the Scottish National Party.

But in the face of economic anxiety and the nationalist revolution in Scotland, which destroyed Labour’s inbuilt demographic advantage in a first past the post system that rewards regional concentrations of support, the core strategy backfired badly. Labour won 41 of Scotland’s 59 seats in Parliament in 2010. On Thursday, it won one, and it won very few seats from the Conservatives in England.

Alan Johnson, a former home secretary for Labour, said on Saturday that the party needed “a proper rethink.”

The problem was not Mr. Miliband’s personality but policy, “the issue of aspiration in people’s lives,” Mr. Johnson said. “We can no longer relate to them as a party of aspiration. And that was one of the big successes that won us three elections.”

The problem for Labour is deeper than just its abandoning the middle ground, said Steven Fielding, professor of political history at Nottingham University. “On one level they are seen as too left-wing in England and too right-wing in Scotland, but actually it is about the relationship the party had with the electorate in both countries,” he said.

Labour “faces a basic existential crisis,” he said. “The most basic problem is that the party has to reconnect.”

The left “has failed to capitalize on the crisis of 2008,” said Tony Travers, a political scientist at the London School of Economics.

“The voters here decided they trusted the center-right more than Labour anyway,” he said. “People will vote to get rid of a government if the alternative is credible and competent, and they looked at Labour and said, ‘No thanks.’ ”

British elections “are still fought on the center ground,” Mr. Travers said. “The more Labour drifts from the center the more it hurts, and they may not like it, but Britain is a very moderate country that signed up to Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and risks outside the mainstream worried voters.”

Mr. Blair won three elections, starting 1997, but inside the party there remained a sharp battle between the “Blairites,” who pushed outreach to business and the middle class, and the “Brownites,” who supported Gordon Brown, a defender of traditional policies. Mr. Brown succeeded Mr. Blair as prime minister.

Mr. Brown lost the 2010 elections, but because Mr. Cameron did not quite win it, having to go into a coalition with the centrist Liberal Democrats, the Brownites kept control of the party.

The most obvious symbol of the internal conflict was the post-2010 battle of the brothers — David Miliband, a Blairite who was foreign secretary, versus Ed Miliband, a Brownite. The fight was close and Freudian, but while Labour members of Parliament backed David, the trade unions pushed Ed narrowly into the leadership.

The former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, reportedly quoting a trade-union ally, famously said, “We’ve got our party back.” Ed Miliband gave that traditional socialism a modern gloss, but he sometimes seemed less than comfortable dealing with issues like nurturing the economic recovery, shrinking the budget deficit, appealing to business and managing, as opposed to funding, the national health service.

In some sense, he was seen as running against Mr. Blair as much as Mr. Cameron. As Mr. Johnson said, if Labour was “suggesting that we failed in our 13 years in government it’s not going to do us much good.”

Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that Labour must avoid a simple rerun of the old debate. A core strategy will no longer work since the electoral system no longer favors Labour, he said.

“So will there be another debate about how to win back lost voters?” he said. “Or about ideas, values and ideologies? After 2010 the argument was more tactical, but the result was a miserable 30.4 percent of the vote.”

These elections were more about identity than a left-right battle, Mr. Leonard said, not only in Scotland but in England, too, when Mr. Cameron used the prospect of a Labour government propped up by Scottish separatists to appeal to English nationalism. Labour failed to win many Conservative seats in England, taking gains there from left-leaning Liberal Democrats.

Labour this time got “squeezed by two nationalisms,” as Labour grandee and former strategist Peter Mandelson said, by the Scottish National Party and by English nationalism, not just by the Conservatives but in the form of a strong U.K. Independence Party vote in northern England. The anti-immigration, anti-European Union UKIP hurt the Conservatives in the south, but it had a big impact among Labour voters in the north, and was the main reason that Labour’s shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, lost his seat in Leeds to the Tories.

Labour needs to respond to members’ unease about immigration and the European Union, which requires freedom of movement and labor among its member states. On these issues, this time, Labour had little to say, acknowledging Blair-era laxness but simply arguing that European Union membership was a good thing and there had to be more control over immigration, without specifying how.

The immediate focus was on who might replace Mr. Miliband as party leader.

But the personalities are not necessarily the main issue for Labour. The problem is the old one — how to reach out past its core constituencies, about a third or so of voters, to the aspirational center that wants social justice and personal success. That center may dislike the Conservative Party as a brand for the careless southeastern elite, but the results of successive elections suggests that it does not hate wealth, and it does not believe that the Conservatives are going to “destroy” the National Health Service.

“We failed to offer a compelling vision of the future which married a social democratic future to the personal aspirations of voters,” one possible new leader, Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, told the BBC.

Last December, Mr. Blair said presciently this election risked becoming one in which a “traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result.”

Asked by The Economist magazine if he meant that the Conservatives would win the general election in those circumstances, Mr. Blair replied: “Yes, that is what happens.”

左派路線失靈、民族主義夾殺 工黨兩大敗因

紐約時報指出，英國反對黨工黨在這次大選中慘敗，一是因為主打的意識形態錯誤，英國多數選民為中間派，工黨卻主打傳統左派路線，不符選民期待，二是因為同時遭到蘇格蘭和英格蘭民族主義夾殺，工黨卻無法有效反擊。

工黨這次的表現是近卅年來最糟，在傳統票倉蘇格蘭五十九席國會席次中只拿下一席，在執政黨保守黨占優勢的英格蘭也只攻下少數席次。已卸任黨魁的米利班在競選期間認為，經過2008年金融海嘯後，選民會更注重社會公平，所以他訴求對富人多徵稅，加強管制企業，並增加社會福利支出，希望打動那些厭倦撙節的選民。

倫敦政經學院政治學教授崔維茲說，左派「未能從金融海嘯得利，選民最後決定，比起工黨，他們更信任中間偏右的卡麥隆政府，如果選民認為反對黨可靠，就會用選票唾棄原來的政府，不過他們看到工黨的表現後，決定敬而遠之」。

崔維茲說，在英國，選戰路線「仍以中間派為主流，工黨離中間派越遠，就傷得越重，雖然工黨可能不喜歡這點，但英國以資本主義為主流，選民擔心偏離主流會有危險」。

智庫「歐洲外交關係協會」主席里歐納德認為，在這場大選中，民族認同對投票行為的影響比意識形態更大。保守黨籍首相卡麥隆訴諸英格蘭民族主義，宣傳工黨一旦勝選，可能會跟主張蘇格蘭獨立的蘇格蘭民族黨組成聯合政府，成功打動選民。

曾擔任工黨選戰軍師的曼德森指出，工黨這次「被蘇格蘭、英格蘭兩種民族主義夾殺」，在英格蘭地區，不僅保守黨，「英國獨立黨」也喚起民族主義情緒。英國獨立黨反對外來移民、反對英國留在歐盟，在英格蘭北部吸走許多工黨選票。工黨未能回應選民對移民的疑慮，和對歐盟「成員國人民可自由遷徙」的不安，只說留在歐盟很好，必須加強管制移民，卻未說明如何做。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/world/europe/appeal-to-dwindling-core-proves-costly-for-labour-party-in-britain.html

2015-05-11．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯李京倫