Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 9 July 1999
I suppose I shouldn't go back to the Euro-elections after all this time, but everyone I know is still talking about them — and I still have an overwhelming urge to have my say.
The reason is simple. The 1999 European Parliament election was a disaster for Labour. It saw the party running its most risibly incompetent campaign in a UK-wide election since 1983. All that was lacking was an election broadcast featuring a swaying Denzil Davies in a kipper tie, valiantly attempting to put his point to camera in a force ten gale.
Labour has come up with all sorts of pathetic excuses for its failure. The official line, it seems, is that the voters were simply too content to bother to turn out. Radical dissidents from the line — well, actually, Margaret Beckett and Pauline Green — have blamed the crisis in Kosovo. The first-past-the-post mob have had the temerity to claim that no one understood the new electoral system, which in fact was easier to grasp than the national lottery. It's only a matter of time before someone blames the miserable performances of various national sporting teams.
The truth, however, is that Labour dug its own grave. Everything it did from the point at which it started to think about the 1999 Euro-elections might have been designed to undermine the enthusiasm of its activists and supporters.
First, it arranged an electoral system for the European elections that gave voters no option but to choose among lists dictated by parties, with no possibility of discriminating among individual candidates. Then it ensured that Labour Party members were given only the most nugatory role in choosing their candidates – and no role whatsoever in ranking them on the party's lists. The result was Labour lists in which independent-minded candidates, whatever their support in the party, had at best an outside chance of winning. What a brilliant way to enthuse the members!
Next, to put the icing on the cake, Labour decided to run a Euro-election campaign that was low-key and – insofar as it existed – entirely concentrated on domestic political concerns as divined by the focus group 'experts'.
The party put next to no effort into the campaign. It did little to mobilise its core working-class voters. It did little to persuade its middle-class voters not to vote Liberal Democrat, Green, Plaid or Scottish National Party. It did little even to persuade its members that the elections mattered.
I'm not saying that everything would have been OK if Labour had been a bit more traditionalist. PR means that every vote counts, so it's necessary to bring out the core vote. But by the same measure it's crucially important to hang on to Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman. Tony Blair is right to reject calls to adopt a "class against class" politics.
But something has to change. The Euro-elections showed the Millbank apparatus utterly incapable of handling its most basic task, of getting the party to mobilise for an election. It is amazing that heads have not rolled.
It is almost as incredible that the "solution" most touted for Labour's failure is the return of Peter Mandelson to overseeing the party's election campaigns. Party members know his role in instituting the regime of control-freakery and focus-group fetishism that led to the debacle.
As for the calls of the first-past-the-post lobby to ditch any thought of PR for the Commons, they are laughable. Labour's haul of seats in the Euro-elections would have been no better under FPTP than it actually was under PR, so dismal was the party's showing. The principle that you shouldn't win a majority of seats even when you don't have a majority of votes still applies as much as in Margaret Thatcher's pomp.
And it would be daft for Blair now to recoil from putting the case for British participation in the single European currency. Euro-sceptic parties did relatively well in the Euro-elections, but they managed to secure the votes of less than 10 per cent of the electorate. Rather than suggesting that the case for joining the euro faces is necessarily doomed to defeat, this should encourage supporters of British participation to increase their efforts to persuade the people.
The one heartening thing about the Euro-elections was the performance of the Greens. I am of course sad that they beat Carole Tongue and Shaun Spiers in London and Anita Pollack in the South East. They are three of the best MEPs Labour has ever had. But I have hopes that Jean Lambert and Caroline Lucas, the Greens who won in London and the South East respectively, will prove themselves just as forthright and just as independent-minded. And they'd better make sure they keep a finger on the Labour heartbeat. I voted Labour for Tongue and Spiers, but nearly everyone else I know, including Labour Party members, sneaked out to vote Green. The new Green MEPs have a lot of Labour hopes riding on them.
