Labour's future: please, no more hatchet-men or aping the rich and greedy

Well, there’s going to be an indefinite spell in opposition. When I was blathering just now along the usual lines of “a short interval to regroup and reassess”, a friend replied: “Like 1951 or 1979, you mean?” Touché. But, despite the unprecedented move to fix the date of the next election in 2015, a spread bet on when it will actually happen would be quite interesting.

So Labour has to elect a Leader for opposition, and keep its powder dry in case things in Downing Street go pear-shaped. First, of course, the fairground spectacle of the leadership contest. The sooner the personality-cult stuff is dispensed with the better. It’s only a pity the process takes so long. Young Miliband seems to be taking the initiative; let him have it, for all I care. There’s no especially attractive alternative. So long as he brings Jon Cruddas into the team; I doubt Cruddas has the necessary profile to land the job himself, but he has retained the ability to think for himself (which the Brown inner circle will painstakingly have to reacquire) and he is able, almost uniquely, to locate his constituency without recourse to Google Maps.

Then of course there’s a strategy to develop. Clearly there will be much fun to be extracted from the gyrations of the Cameron-Clegg pantomime horse; but Labour must not be too clever in scheming to create or magnify splits. (Someone sit on Lord Mandelson, please.) Labour can’t allow its approach to the agenda to be too reactive; but it can’t try too hard to set it either. (Macmillan’s “events” will do that.)

More important than either personalities or detailed policies will be the style and tone. In government we were not popular, and not pretty. I believe Gordon Brown was a good man, but to say he lacked the popular touch is somewhat of an understatement. And it wasn’t just his personality; it was the perception, justified or not, of his style of government. We don’t want any more hatchet-men or hatchet faces; people who know where you live and will waylay you in dark alleys if you step out of line. We want MPs who know their constituencies and have channels through which local views, however uncomfortable, can be fed into the centre. The next party leader must be properly prepared for Mrs Gillian Duffy.

We need to face up to the changing face of employment; yes, we can now blame our woes on the Tories and Lib Dems, but we’ll need to argue convincingly that we could do it better. We need trade unions which concentrate on improving their members’ pay and conditions, not on power-broking within the party like the old 1970s barons. In fact we need smaller unions to serve the smaller and more diverse workplaces of today, not the recently emerged megaliths with their six-figure executive salaries.

We need an end to clinging to the coat-tails of the rich and greedy. Even if we’re no longer soaking the rich, we don’t need to ape them. That lay at the heart of the expenses scandal. If we see sound economic reasons for allowing and encouraging the acquisition of great wealth, then we must be absolutely clear that Labour people do not belong in such circles. Nor is there much point in chasing their votes: our own people have hundreds of times as many. If we can get them out, which we almost didn’t this time.

The new Government will face plenty of opportunities to fail the ordinary working people of Britain. They’re bound to take some of them. Labour, under whatever leadership, must make sure that it puts itself in a position to benefit.