When Losing Is Better Than Winning

From The Guardian yesterday:

Then there is Peter Hain talking today, apparently loyally, about how election 2010 could be like 1992 when the Tories pulled it off against all the odds.

But Hain will know that the Tories had a relatively new leader then, a fresh fellow called John Major on his soap box who somehow clicked with voters (at least for long enough to win that election). Labour has Brown, who looks stale as stale can be.

Yes, quite. Hain can talk as much as he likes about this coming election being like that one many moons ago, but the truth is this election increasingly resembles 1964 or 1979, not 1992. Brown isn't a John Major, he is a Jim Callaghan. Or an Alec Douglas-Home. Except without the limited charms of either of those two.

Yet strategically I wonder whether Labour should even want to win the next election. It is irrelevant which party wins the General Election next year; they are going to have to be responsible (to use the parlance of one Nick Clegg) for "savage cuts" just to try to stop the country from sinking. The Tories will be able to get away with that; they have been marginally more open about the need to deal with the spending issue facing this country, and can always blame Labour if all else fails. However, Labour will have to go back on their (ever-changing) position on spending cuts, and all this talk of Tory spending cuts could end up like George H W Bush's "Read My Lips" pledge. If they won, they would have to go back on their rhetoric and this time, people would remember. They would be classified by one and all and beyond all reasonable doubt as liars. It would cost them dearly at the 2015 election.

And if they win next year, then Gordon Brown will stay on as their leader. Now, even if he did manage to sneak a win next time out, it wouldn't change the fact that Gordon Brown is a terrible, terrible leader. And a pretty awful person. People would have another five years of the Ghastly Gordon show, and the ongoing rumours about his physical health, his mental well-being and his egregious personality would come to define the Labour party absolutely.

Plus, there is no way that Labour could gain seats at the next election. Even if they managed to win, it would be a scraped victory. And given the current infighting within the Labour party, the party would be able to pass very little of its programme and we would see a run of embarrassing defeats for the government as it tried to govern. After all, Brown has been defeated by the current Labour majority of well over 50. If it was reduced to 20 or even 10, he and his Cabinet would be paralysed. In fact, I doubt the administration would last the full five years. It would be brought down by a no confidence motion long before it had a chance to run its full course.

Also, Labour is exhausted at the moment. It is ideologically bankrupt and there is an embarrassing dearth of talent at its head. Another government would require a new Cabinet from the dilapidated and reduced Parliamentary Labour Party. Meaning that the whole country could see just how poor the Labour talent pool is these days. The government would be shown for what it would have become - a lacklustre rump of a party, desperately clinging to power for no good reason.

If Labour should take anything away from the 1992 election, it is that the Tory win ended up being a pyrrhic victory. For the next five years, their squabbled their way into a deep sea of electoral oblivion, and ended up decimated in the Commons. They were booted out of power for well over a decade, and couldn't even act as a capable opposition for a good seven years. Had they lost in 1992, then they would have been returned to government in 1997, or 2001 at the very latest. By winning in that year, they condemned themselves to 13 years out of government.

Realistically, the Tories are going to win in 2010, but probably not with a huge majority. Conceivably, Labour could win in 2015 and would definitely be credible players by 2020. If they were to win next year, then the ensuing government would be a national disaster that would destroy the Labour party utterly. They would be out of power by 2015 at the latest, and would be in the wilderness for decades to come.

Labour won't win the next election. The irony is that if they did scrap a win, it would probably be worse in the long run for them than losing.