We failed people by losing

Today at the excellent East Midlands Regional Labour Party Conference in Leicester, I clapped enthusiastically at every mention of how Labour must protect people from the tory cuts, how we are the last line of defence for the most vulnerable in society and how we must be the voice which highlights the unfairness and ideology of the tory economic programme.

This is all true!

However, our Labour controlled councils will still be forced to make huge cuts to public services and the tories will still push through their attempts to shrink the size and scope of the state.

Unions will strike, we will march and speak out and oppose in parliament but at the end of the day we will probably have to sit and helplessly watch the tories wreck society, decimate manufacturing and slash investment.

Why will we have to do this? Simple, because we are no longer in power! It’s kind of obvious to say that but sometimes difficult to accept and comprehend.

It’s not the fact that Ed Miliband didn’t explicitly back the strikes that let down people, it’s the fact we lost power nationally back in May last year. That is the point at which we failed people. It’s why I shed a tear on the morning after the general election because I knew how difficult it would be for us to now protect the people we had invested in for 13 years. We failed them, let them down and abandoned them. Not by conscious choice but because of a lack of vision and a view of how we would make people’s lives better.

Our primary purpose now should be to win back power at the first attempt and no Labour person should rest for a single day or hour without thinking what we can do to win politically. This is our only hope to escape from this tory/libdem hell of a government.

We can strike from now until kingdom come but if Labour doesn’t win the next election then all our protests and opposition will have been to no avail and we will have only deluded ourselves that we are protecting people.

We will win by providing an alternative, a credible alternative at that, which captures people’s imagination as to how their individual lives will be better, more fulfilling and more prosperous. We need a vision built on our on core Labour principles but fit to take us all forward in the 21st century and meet the challenges of a globalised economy, of environmental change and a changing political world.