Robin Cook: How Labour can win back 4 million lost voters

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1508471,00.html

Opportunities to reflect on what message voters were sending Labour in the election result have been alarmingly rare since polling day. Instead, the party in government has promptly returned to business as usual. The seas have closed over the result, and the ship of state steams ahead on its previous course as if none of the passengers had expressed any doubt about the direction in which they were travelling.

Labour would be making a big mistake if the fortuitous arithmetic of our parliamentary majority became an excuse for complacency. Just how close we came to losing that majority can be seen in the tight margins by which we won the crucial seats that put us back in power. The cumulative majority in the 34 most marginal seats sums to 29,000 votes. If fewer than 30,000 more voters in those seats had defected to the Lib Dems we would have lost our present majority in parliament. How has Labour mislaid 4m votes since it was first elected? More urgently, how do we get back enough of them to be comfortably re-elected next time?

Let me express the challenge in terms to which New Labour would find it easier to relate. Earlier this week I sat in on a lecture by a marketing consultant on the formula for a modern successful business. I was struck that he kept stressing that the key was product differentiation. How strange that New Labour, which prides itself on sharing the priorities of business, should follow the opposite strategy of triangulation. As a result it has repeatedly stolen the clothes of the Tories, consistently kept quiet about Labour's progressive achievements, such as social justice, and generally tried to narrow the extent to which there is any centre ground left between Labour and its major opponent.

The election result exposed the limits to such political cross-dressing. We ended up convincing a dangerously large number of our supporters that we are to the right of them, and a million of them jumped ship to vote Liberal Democrat on polling day. They will not come back unless they see us embark now on a serious process of renewal of Labour as the natural home of progressive voters and a party with a coherent value-based philosophy. The outcome of the next election may be decided within the next 18 months, depending on whether Labour can renew its appeal to those lost voters.

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1. That's the sort of

independent thought which keeps him out the cabinet!