You've read Karl Marx & you've taught yourself to dance

Julian Ware-Lane warns against drawing a false sense of comfort from Labour's recent run of good polls. The party has much more to do to if it is to become electable again.

Good polling between elections gives succour only to the delusional. Whilst everyone enjoys seeing their party ahead mid-term, being ahead at the business end of the electoral cycle is what matters. I state this as I look back at events nine months ago, to a defeat and to reflections on what went wrong. It is tempting, looking at poll leads that would translate into healthy majorities if maintained at a General Election, to argue that not much is wrong with my Party. Yet, I repeat, taking comfort from mid-term polling is delusional.

In 1997 New Labour took us into dreamland with a whopping majority and left a Conservative Party in disarray. Subsequent elections saw the erosion of our support that finally delivered victory to our opponents. The Conservative victory, if you can really call it that, was less to do with their resurgence and more to do with our unpopularity. I put the reversal in recent polling more down to the Coalitions unpopularity than to the electorate falling back in love with Labour, again.

So why did it all turn sour? From its inception in 1994, New Labour were saying and doing all the right things. They reached out to areas of the electorate that had previously been immune to the charms of democratic socialism. Perhaps it was this wooing that allowed traditional supporters to feel neglected, although some disastrous policy decisions were unhelpful.

A party really is doomed when it believes it is right and the electorate is wrong. Labour's refusal to acknowledge the disaster that was Iraq had hubris written all over it. Choosing a leader without election (and I was a Brown supporter) smacked of control freakery. The ten pence tax fiasco and the realisation that our MPs could be as avaricious as anyone (as exposed in the expenses scandal) all helped destroy the special relationship that Labour had with ordinary working people.

All the very good things we did somehow shone less brightly than our mistakes.

Labour has become, or appears to have become in its Westminster incarnation, a party of professional politicians for whom life experience is what other people have. To get on, it would seem, is to only have worked in a political environment. Is it any wonder that ordinary people have no empathy with MPs? It is all fine and dandy to impose AWS, but this is a useless exercise if the chosen female is already one of the club.

Our campaigning methods, brilliant in the run-up to that glorious May Day in 1997, refused to acknowledge the reality of election results that saw our support resemble islands in the Pacific. See the two maps at http://www.southernfront.org.uk/p/southern-councils_12.html. One reason the Alternative Vote is vital to us in the south is that this will force a change in the way we run elections.

I have witnessed the law of diminishing returns in our canvassing methods, allowing whole swathes of our towns and countryside to be given over to our opponents, virtually unchallenged. My horror at marching past row upon row of houses to reach the isolated 'promises' was pooh-poohed as unrealistic. Yet our data was not always accurate, and we allowed those houses and their voters to only speak to other parties.

Of course, there is the electoral tide as well. I do not see the British as likely to elect a Government in perpetuity. Defeat, at some point, was always going to happen. Thirteen years is a long time to store up grudges. The declining turnout was in part down to our support finding enough reasons to be busy last May 6th.

If there is any crumb of comfort in defeat it is that we are not riven with splits, that we did achieve a better return of MPs than looked possible at one point, that we have a new leader who looks like he wants to listen to his party, and we have a government who has ended its honeymoon in double quick time.

History suggests that we will not win the next election; one-term governments are unusual. However, this is not written in stone, and if we can restore our activist base, get back in touch with ordinary voters, choose real people as candidates, and adopt some humility when we clearly get it wrong then victory will come.

Julian Ware-Lane was Labour's parliamentary candidate for Castle Point in 2010. He blogs at http://warelane.wordpress.com