Will NZ Labour repeat UK Labour’s mistakes?
A fascinating article in The Guardian which details what went wrong with UK Labour’s campaign, based on interviews with many insiders.
An extract:
The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in which opposing voices cancelled one another out. Greg Beales, the campaign’s director of strategy – and the keeper of the party’s polling – was convinced that, above all, the party needed to address the distrust of Labour’s legacy on the economy and immigration. He insisted that they should confront these issues directly, or else the specific “retail” offers to the electorate that tested well in focus groups, such as the energy price freeze, would fall on deaf ears. By contrast, the more cerebral Stewart Wood, a former politics tutor at Magdalen College Oxford, pressed Miliband to make an ideological break with New Labour, and concentrate the campaign on a promise to make society more equal, through reforms to banking, markets, and post-crash capitalism.
Here we have NZ Labour focusing almost exclusively on “equality” and not confronting the elephant in the room that people don’t think Andrew Little and Grant Robertson can manage the economy as credibly as John Key and Bill English.
Axelrod was appalled by the low quality of the ideas being discussed, which he derisively characterised as “Vote Labour and win a microwave”
We may see that become policy here!
Miliband had first ruled out a coalition with the SNP on 16 March, but it was not until 26 April that he also ruled out a confidence and supply agreement between the two parties. Even then, the question refused to go away. Shadow ministers were being asked whether there would be implicit understandings between the two parties, or whether they would even speak to SNP MPs in the corridors of Westminster. The party’s focus groups also showed that voters did not believe Miliband’s denials, since they did not think he would ever spurn the chance to be prime minister.
Same here as Cunliffe ruled out coalition with Internet-Mana, and then confidence and supply but people didn’t believe him because he never ruled them out entirely, as in he would not form a Government if dependent on them for a majority.