Eliminate short-term errors and adopt a new long-term strategy.

Rt Hon Charles Clarke MP, the former Home Secretary, writes for Progress on how Labour recovers from its election defeat.

In his article he says:
Throughout the dreadful Thatcher years we had a poster in our house called ‘What Does Labor Want?' The answer was a quote from Samuel Gompers of the American AFL/CIO trade union confederation written in 1893: ‘We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals, more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime, more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact more opportunities to cultivate our better natures.' Prehistoric Labour, perhaps, but no less powerful for its values and sense of purpose. They should still be central to Labour today.

The aim of Labour's progressive politics is to build a fairer, more equal society which improves the lives of millions of people in this country and elsewhere. And it's this group who were the greatest losers from Labour's disastrous defeat last Thursday. They are now vulnerable to Conservative values, Conservative practices and Conservative people, including those who have disguised their reactionary ideology under flaxen hair and unthreatening buffoonery.

Ahead of every other consideration, Labour's all-consuming priority must be to ensure that we do not repeat this defeat at the 2010 general election.

So, first, he believes we have to change the conduct of our politics. We should discard the techniques of ‘triangulation', and ‘dividing lines' with the Conservatives, which lead to the not entirely unjustified charge that we simply follow proposals from the Conservatives or the right-wing media, to minimise differences and remove lines of attack against us.

Instead we need to be authentic, frank and direct as we answer questions and explain what we are doing; we should respect politics and elected politicians with proper transparent funding arrangements and accountability for what we do; and we should govern openly and confidently on the basis of a programme which properly expresses Labour's values and beliefs.

Second we should focus upon the long-term issues which will enable our country to succeed in an increasingly challenging modern world. Immediately before the 2005 general election he proposed to Tony Blair a long-term strategy which he thought Labour needed to follow after the successes of our first two terms. Those goals should be to:-
• Establish a radical, holistic commitment to sustainable transport and energy.
• increase both public and private investment in effective, fair and locally accountable public services;
• relate taxation and charging more closely to expenditure, and reduce our profligate and bureacracy-promoting public administration;
• secure a stable constitutional settlement across the UK, by completing our reforms;
• strengthen public confidence in the criminal justice system;
• reinforce the UK's relationship with the European Union to improve the EU's capacity to act on the environment and security.
He believes that the British people would support a framework for forward-looking and progressive government.

Third, we have to address the short-term errors which week-by-week erode confidence in Labour's competence and capacity:-
• The prime minister's pledge to solve the problems arising from abolition of the 10p tax rate must be fulfilled in detail and soon. The subject will resonate until there is clarity. There may now be a case for an early mini-Budget to establish a clear sense of economic direction and strengthen economic confidence.
• We should abandon proposals to increase the period of pre-charge detention to 42 days. This Parliament settled the matter in March 2006 at 28 days and, though I will support the government's proposals, I believe that it would be best not to consider them again during this Parliament.
• Patricia Hollis has put forward progressive proposals on women's pensions which are supported by the House of Lords. The government should accept them. Its current opposition will lead to defeat later this summer.
• The government should suspend the current over-bureaucratic review of post offices in order to consider properly the Postal Services Commission's proposals to give the Post Office PLC greater commercial freedom and allow subpostmasters to expand and develop their services.
• The Labour party has to end the historically unprecedented situation where we have not had a general secretary for over six months.

We do not have much time to reverse the damaging shifts in opinion against Labour which we have seen both in opinion polls and in last Thursday's elections.

We must robustly reject those who say that defeat in 2010 is inevitable. Such people - often relatively comfortable themselves - have no right to condemn whole communities to a decade or more of Conservatism. However their predictions could come true if Labour does not clearly resolve its direction and approach well before this year's party conferences. Everyone in the Labour party and outside will be constantly alert to progress we are making in this respect.
We should start immediately by winning the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. Some seem to have accepted defeat already but I think that we can most certainly hold the seat if we
communicate a clear and attractive sense of political purpose.