The prominent question dominating Labour thinking was ‘If not now, when? If we cannot win in a recession, when can we?’.
Defeat led to questions of electoral reform, the tabloid press, the working class and whether to move further towards the centre ground:
‘Our sense of disappointment must be balanced by the achievement that we took so many seats in different parts of the country. But it was too much to do’
‘We should have had a commanding majority of over 100 seats but the whole party has moved too far to the right. Too frightened to challenge vested interests’
The victory was ‘a bad day for democracy’. He argued that ‘The Tories have fought a pretty dirty campaign and its paid off’.
He claimed ‘we need to have a debate on policy rather than be plunged into an immediate leadership election’
‘We got into bed with Jaques Delors and the rest of them (EU)’ over Maastricht. ‘The British punters can see Trouble with a capital T’ in the Common Market. ‘What we need is a bit of class politics’
‘Labour was seen as having lost its soul, its identity and its integrity’.
‘We drafted our policies and then froze them in aspic three years before the election’
Liberal Lord Jenkins said the result raised questions about whether the Labour Party ‘could ever win a majority on its own’
Instead with ‘a bold position on electoral reform we would have done better’.
PR ‘would be better than five year’s majority Tory government. I hope we will be able to make an early change’.
‘How by changing the electoral system will the Labour Party win more votes and attract support for the ideas and programme it puts forward?
At the end of the day that is what wins elections. Not providing an electoral device’
‘I’ve been sick to death of hearing Dr Death, Shirley Poppins and Woy of the Wadicals and now Paddy Backdown about how we should collaborate’
Alastair Campbell took to Breakfast TV to defend him against the press onslaught:
‘He has saved the Labour Party from oblivion and made it – we thought – electable. It just didn’t happen. It is very very sad’
Labour would never win being the ‘better managers of capitalism’ than the Tories.
‘The trouble is that we have accepted the Sun in its evaluation of the nature of these people’
‘The party did not offer the electors a radical, credible and democratic alternative vision of the sort of society which it wished to create’
‘from the battles for social justice that were forced on the trade unions, local councils, anti-poll tax campaigners and even those who opposed the Gulf War’
She claimed he was ‘notably more vindictive to his erstwhile left-wing colleagues’ in the party and that ‘if you live by the sword you die by the sword’
‘Kinnock will go down as the worst leader Labour ever had’
‘Kinnock is the best leader since Clement Attlee. He leaves the party more united than it has probably ever been’.
Kinnock ‘reformed it, pulled it from despair to renewed confidence, revitalised it and made it a serious contender’
‘Kinnock’s achievements in modernising the Labour Party have not been in vain. They will be carried forward
‘it is about time we had the courage to argue for what we believed in rather than endlessly anguish about image’
‘Too many prefer the old style certainties to the new agenda we must now adopt. Unless we are prepared to make changes we will not be able to excite the voters after 1996’
‘Major cannot be caricatured as an old-style Tory saloon bar racist…Labour can no longer take black and minority ethnic voters for granted’.
‘Our tax proposals appeared to set a cap on people’s aspirations, particularly in the south of England where we need to attract support’
‘If you want to give higher pensions and child benefit and give more cash to schools and hospitals, you have to find the money for it’
‘I am not prepared to sit back and watch Labour lose again’. He said ‘John Smith is the beneficiary of a democratic carve up’
He wrote in his diary that Gould ‘is a barrister who got on to the media through Thames Television’ and Smith ‘a right-wing Scottish Conservative, a passionate European, who I know and like, but profoundly disagree with’.
‘The party must take control of its own affairs and not let it go to others who feel they can run it. They are wrong’.
‘What we can do without is an internal debate about a constitution which has no bearing on our popularity with the electorate, which is substantially unknown to the majority of people in Britain’.
‘We have to recognise that we live in a different culture where lifestyles are more individual and more varied; and where it is good that they are, since it is the freedom to make such life-choices that socialists fought for’
‘The party itself is not historically redundant but it must be trusted as a vehicle for achieving its objectives in the modern world. It means having credibility: people must identify themselves with Labour
‘Hope of victory lies within itself: to learn from history rather than be shackled by it and never to equate change with betrayal. Not to change is to betray. Our people deserve something better than the Tories. We must see that they get it’
Tides of History 