Coming to the experts, so to speak: why did Labour do so badly ?
I've read the reports in the media, but I wanted to get it from all of you.
Thanks once again!
Steve
= new reply since forum marked as read
That might explain the low turn-out or maybe everybody had to take their cats to the vet on election day?
Labour's election pollster says public polls "showed a much more favourable position for Labour than we were finding in our internal data" both before the campaign and during it.
James Morris, who worked for Labour from when Ed Miliband was elected leader in 2010 until the election last week, told Newsnight that while "the lead in the public polls suggested Labour had got past the issues that sunk the party in 2010 - its record on the economy and immigration - we knew we had much more work to do and were still dogged by a loss of trust."
...
"While the public polls had Labour ahead until the spring of this year, in our polls cross-over [when the Tories overtook them] came right after conference season in 2014. A four-point Labour lead in early September turned into a tie in October, followed by small Tory leads prompting the party to put reassurance on fiscal policy and immigration at the heart of the campaign launch."
These polls, which were unpublished and prepared for Labour, suggested that this plan had worked through the opening weeks of the campaign.
Labour had, they suggested, pulled ahead in the English marginals following Mr Miliband's performances in the debates and after the announcement about non-doms. The final poll of the campaign in late April, however, "told a different story".
Mr Morris said: "As focus groups showed the SNP attacks landing, we had Labour behind in the marginal seats." This was, he said, despite the fact that "a public poll in a similar set of seats at the same time showed a three-point Labour lead".
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He continued: "The campaign strongly toughened our stance on the SNP before the final Question Time [TV appearance for Mr Miliband], but it was not enough. The Tories successfully used the fear of Scottish influence as a way of catalyzing pre-existing doubts about Labour in a way that had not been possible earlier in the campaign. Labour's unexpected post-referendum collapse in Scotland transformed the election across the whole of Great Britain."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32606713
So a number of factors were at play, the demonizing of the SNP (which Labour played along with rather than countering) being an easy one to plump for if you're looking for glib explanations. Whether or not that was a decisive factor, something else would most likely have been. Focusing on the SNP's role (How dare they campaign hard on the basis that they'll do their utmost to serve the interests of their electorate?!) sidesteps the more telling issue of trust, epitomized by the late re-emergence of Cameron waving Liam Byrne's "I’m afraid there is no money" note. I'm highly skeptical of Morris's claim above that "Labour had got past the issues that sunk the party in 2010."
However, the SNP is hardly likely to have been a factor in the concurrent English local elections, where Labour also did badly, whereas I'd normally expect an anti-incumbency vote at local level at this stage in the election cycle. It looks more like the Tories managed to hive off any such backlash to the Lib Dems:
:large
I don't think you can run an effective campaign on the basis that "Our opponents are right, don't vote for them!"
This stretches from buckling under UKIP's and the Tories' scaremongering focus on immigration,
to the continued fetish for austerity while the deficit continues to balloon, to Ed Balls saying he wouldn't change anything in the Conservatives' budget.
Labour increased their lead nicely in the seats they already held; The Tory lead in their safe seats stayed about the same. But the Tories were competitive in the marginal seats - Labour did well in some, but the Tories improved in others. And that was despite an average 10% gain by UKIP in those seats.
Here's the average swing to the Tories in the seats, divided up into the deciles based on the Tory lead in 2010 - ie the safest 10th of Labour seats are on the left, going to the safest Tories on the right. The figures at the bottom give the range of the 2010 Tory lead for that decile:
In the 4th decile, where the really tight marginals were, Labour did improve, but not by much, and the 5th decile, with the Tory lead from 1.8% upwards, that Labour would have needed to take, the Tories did better.
Whether that was because the Tories ran a better campaign in the marginals, or if their policies and image did appeal better to swing voters, is up for argument.
The Tories also had an inevitable advantage from the collapse of the Lib Dems. Labour and the nationalist parties won every Lib Dem seat that one of them were second in (and Cambridge, where Labour leapfrogged the Tories to win it; and the SNP took 4 LD seats the Tories were 2nd in) apart from Ceredigion and Orkney & Shetland (which had LD 22% and 51% leads in 2010). That gave Labour 12, and the SNP 10, but the Tories took 27 Lib Dem seats, and they were always like to take more than Labour - they had 18 targets where they were within 10% of the Lib Dems, and took them all. Labour only had 8 within that range (and 2 were in Scotland, where the SNP took them).
The only way for Labour to become larger than the Tories was to beat them well in the English marginals, and they didn't come anywhere near close.
