To think the labour party faces a serious battle for survival.

[sunshield]

The Labour party is in a unwinnable battle, Scotland has gone forever, for any 'English/Welsh' party of any description. There are only a few Labour seats south of Warrington (Merseyside is of course out of sync with most of England). The Labour Party are almost extinct in the South West/East. It could not pick up seats in Derby/Nuneaton which are areas of Skilled/Semi Skilled Workers . s controlled by Liberal Oxbridge Educated academics , who believe they know better and expect the "plebs" to do as they are told and vote for them , without allowing them to ask questions (It is not for them to ask Questions of their betters!".

The Labour Party refused to listen to people like Frank field , opting to go down the left wing path to destruction, coming up with 'targeting' 50-100 thousand Nom Doms" for dogmatic and sound bite reasons, not for any sound financial reason. The same can be said of the Mansion Tax idea )what the hell is Stamp duty , if it is not MANSION TAX. If that idea had been carried out , suddenly you would have found a drop in house price values, or a slow down of purchasing of expensive housing, meaning a drop in revenue from stamp duty as well as "Tourists" non doms putting their houses up for sale and making plans for relocation, causing restaurants , hotels serious issues meaning job losses. The biggest issue though would of course of been all the people employed by the rich foreigners to look after them in the UK Nannies/Gardeners Cooks /Drivers. Rich People who place no demands on the state they use private schools Private Health Care their own Security. Why have policies designed to drive "tourists" out of your Country. The answer to that of course is that this policy plays on the "Envy" of people, not on benefit to the country and that is crutch of the problem for the Labour Party, instigating policy ideas based on crass assumptions about their "voters" ideas or what they have read in their studies at Oxbridge.

They have less understanding about normal people and their lives, views aspirations than the "BULLINGDON" lot. This is because they at least understand who to market products or "seduction" because their own Businesses that need to earn money.

The Labour Party is doomed unless it can realise , nobody outside specific inner city areas or union leaders are interested in tired old sound bites about rich people.

I don't agree entirely with your whole post, but labour do need to do alot of work to get back in, jn 5 years.

I am sorry but i can't take Ed Miliband or Ed balls seriously when they talk about the tory toffs while owning massive expensive properties, privately educated etc.

I actually expected a bigger turnout. I thought Labour might inspire people to come out and vote in protest against conservative. But they didn't.

Labours campaign has been based on how awful everyone thinks the Tories are. And seemingly that's not true. Or not quote as they thought it was.

I also think whoever advised Ed to be interviewed by Russell Brand and on the plinth incident, made bad decisions.

During this last campaign I actually thought they came across badly. I think Ed Miliband lost the election at the Leeds debate. I only saw nick and Ed and even said to my dh 'Ed just lost the election'

Labour really need to look inward to see where it went wrong. Stop blaiming everyone else, but understand where and why they failed to get their message across and why they failed to get the majority of the country to trust them.

I don't particularly think they are finished in Scotland either. We don't know how the snp will perform. I suspect there may be some major issues which could see the vote swing back, resulting in snp being the next elections lib Dems. I may be wrong, only time will tell.

I don't think we'll know until the next election tbh. It didn't go well for Labour and there are any number of explanations, some more credible than others.

I should imagine that they're looking very hard in to what went wrong and no doubt there will be a new strategy. Likely they'll end up with Blair Mk II, another charming populist who knows the right things to say at the right time.

BTW, rich people do have demands on the state, they use roads, airports. The justice system protects their assets and intellectual property, a stable government that can be bought persuaded to make laws that allow for the accumulation of vast amounts of money.

They are at a crossroads and if they make the wrong choices they will spend years in the wilderness. Labour do best when they are left of centre. A hard left approach it is clear can't deliver a working majority.

They also need to rid themselves of the idea that they are the good guys and the Tories are the bad guys and for that reason alone they are entitled to victory. To those of us who are not committed party hacks, Labour and Conservative are both the same - they are political parties and which one gets our vote depends on the policies being put forward and the vision they can impart.

The threads started by Labour supports on MN give a fair indication of the problem. Without exception they are about benefits and the NHS. There is more to governing Britain than that but did we hear a word from Labour about defence, foreign relations, the EU, constitutional change - if we did then I missed it.

Labour could, if they do it right, build a party that could have a landslide in 2020, but given their track record (Foot, Kinnock, "the longest suicide note in history" etc) I wouldn't put money on it.

Rich people are often heavy consumers of state resources as pointed out above, and indeed, if their riches came from business rather than just being inherited, they profit from the healthcare and education systems that enable the country to furnish their companies a skilled and healthy workforce.

Not to mention that many rich people are in receipt of considerable state benefits, directly in the form of housing benefit, indirectly in the case of tax credits that allow them to pay low wages.

And it will be very difficult for the labour party to turn it around without winning over one of the right wing newspapers, like Blair did with Murdoch.

Someone somewhere pointed out that this election was more Murdoch vs Leveson than Cameron vs Milliband and they had a point ...

I thought Labour might inspire people to come out and vote in protest against conservative.

Yeah, under the most incompetent PM of my lifetime (and I go back to Anthony Eden) they couldn't even manage that.

yabu

Half of the London seats are labour for a start, why are you wittering on about Warrington?

They just need someone in charge who can put a coherent plan together.

They need a different leadership team. Ed was never popular with the electorate, I honestly think that's the main reason they lost.

They need to look at why so many of their traditional voters voted UKIP too.

I wonder why so many people think Ed Miliband was privately educated? He went to the same school as Tulisa from N-dubz and you don't see many people calling her posh.

The reason I mention Warrington North constituency is because if you look south of that line Labour are almost extinct outside Large urban areas This means they can't win County towns or large towns below Warrington North This is now where the North/South divide is (certainly In political) but probably in economic terms as well now.

So. Hove. That was taken by Labour and there's not much south of that.

Labour are where the Tories were in 1997. No seats in Scotland and seemingly deserted by the electorate. Reports of the demise of the Labour party are greatly exaggerated.

I dont think its the divide in economic terms.... you obviously have never been to Nuneaton.

I live in a midlands county town, one of the seats apparently in a battle ground (labour/ conservative marginal). It was labour to 2010. We got given a labour candidate who didn't even live in the constituency and hasn't gone out of her way to even be seen in it. Incumbent conservative was everywhere during campaign time and must have worn his shoes out trudging the streets..... guess what happened????

So it's either that all is lost or more work (and picking better candidates) that is needed along with a coherent plan.

Personally I think the reason the conservatives won is pretty simple really and has less to do with the basics of who Labour are than the amount of money spent on the elections an the amount of money each part receives generally:

Actual spending on election in 2015 -
Of the £31.5m spent by parties,
£16.7m was spent by the Conservatives,
£8 m by Labour
£4.8m by the Liberal Democrats.

Obviously a bit more complicated than this but fundamentally the Conservatives spent twice the amount of money on the campaign than Labor did. The message from the conservatives (fundamentally a negative one, ie. Labour did/will ruin the economy, beware the SNP etc) got through because they ran a good PR campaign. Simple really

see here for more detail:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/generalelection/general-election-2015-explained-who-finances-the-parties-who-gets-the-most--and-how-much-does-the-campaign-cost-10186008.html]

Actually given the fact that Labour spent so much less, they didn't do too badly really in my view. Not much consolation I know. It is difficult for an opposition party to win an election until people really are fed up with the incumbents (usually takes 2-3 terms for that to happen) mostly because of the fact that opposition parties are generally not well funded.

Personally I thing we need less hand wringing and just accept that Labour will only come back into power when people really have had enough of this government. As happened after Thatcher and after Blair really

sorry link again

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/generalelection/general-election-2015-explained-who-finances-the-parties-who-gets-the-most--and-how-much-does-the-campaign-cost-10186008.html

Labour had the wrong party leader. Ordinary people could not imagine him as the Prime Minister. Ed made serious public gaffes e.g. the tablet of stone and meeting Russell Brand. Most people do not have an encyclopaedic knowledge of election manifestos or indeed economic plans. They vote for the party which makes them feel safest economically. Labour's elite are seriously out of touch with ordinary voters.

derxa, you are so right there. At the end of the day its a popularity contest - Cameron had good advisors, he says, does and looks like the real deal and being in Murdoch's pocket helps ( as Blair proved in19 97). I am no Tory , the smear campaign on 'Red Ed' was relentless, but at the end of the day they lost the war. They need to re-group, a new outlook and leader, lick their wounds and just get on with things. politics is brutal. At least him and Nick Clegg are still MPs. many of their parties MPs are not and really are out of work ( not that I feel sorry for them, but that must hurt) But if you choose that career, then I guess you have to be ready for all the knock backs.

DH thinks they will really struggle to come back from this election defeat. I wasn't really listening when he was talking about it though so will have to ask why he thinks this later

NRomanoff It's a bit silly to have a go at Labour leaders for being privately educated; that wasn't their choice. Blame Mr and Mrs Attlee, Gaitskell, Crossman, Blair, and many others.

Of course Diane Abbott sending her own children to a fee-paying school is another matter: about as rich a piece of hypocrisy as you could imagine.

If they choose Diane Abbott then they really are finished. The Tory press will have a field day with her from day one. Sorry to say about it about a fellow woman, but she isn't the right choice at all and Im not sure who is either. They need to really think long and hard this time around if they want to keep on going.

The80sweregreat I'm not suggesting they would think of choosing her; I mentioned her because hers was the first name I thought of when I tried to remember which Labout pols have paid school fees. Falconer was the second but he is not an MP.

In 1983 one of my University contemporaries (Labour) was trying to be selected for a seat and got grilled by a selection committee because his stepchildren were at public school. In the end they accepted that their father was paying the fees and was not going to pull them out to forward his political career. He told me that it was just as well they did not know that the children spent some weeks every year with their father - in South Africa!

I don't think they will struggle if they pick a decent leader.
After 10years of Tory austerity, Cameron (who comes across as a moderate Tory) gone, problems with 5yrs of slim majority and SNP, division within conservative hardliners and the more moderate face over tough topics such as Europe will hurt the popularity of a party who will no longer have their coalition partners to blame, they will also find it harder to do the blame labour for everything thing the longer they are in power. As there is no way the system will change to PR in that time, labour will still be the other major party so should bounce back.

hey, I know, the BBC brought up a list of names. Diane tried and failed before, so its a long shot anyway. In this media age they need someone to walk the walk etc etc. its sad, but a lot of them are career politicans anyway so it cant be that hard to find someone. For all Blair;s many many faults, he won them 3 elections and speaks volumes on how it all works. and that was before the internet was as big as it is now.

I just couldn't identify with Ed Milliband at all, he just seemed like another David Cameron but still learning the ropes . I identify with the likes of Alan Johnson , the working classes all have personal stories like he's . But ed milliband how out of touch and posh and patronising .