How the coalition makes room for Labour

Whoever wins Labour’s leadership, whether it’s a breed of Miliband or Balls, its future will be dominated by its understanding of how it found itself on opposition benches. Philip Gould, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the other progenitors of the New Labour project – were wrong. Their fatal assumption was that their core vote, the working classes, had no-where else to go. Labour, therefore, could reach out the middle classes, broadening their support and thus New Labour was born.

At first their calculations were correct. Two slogans, “Education, Education, Education” and “Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime” brought together the two separate demographics to create a powerful – and seemingly unstoppable – election winning machine.

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Yet, as the 2010 election proved, Labour’s core vote did have somewhere else to go – or rather, they could, if they wanted, simply stay at home – and so they did.