Labour must not retreat to the comfort of being a “members’ club” and must remain focused on being an election-winning machine despite the huge majority achieved in July, Pat McFadden has said.
The senior Labour minister, who was the national campaign co-ordinator in the build-up to the July 4 victory, said it was important to maintain the coalition of voters that got Sir Keir Starmer into No 10.
In a strongly worded message to Labour’s left at a party conference fringe event in Liverpool, Mr McFadden said “don’t go back” to the old ways.
Setting out how the party changed between the 2019 defeat under Jeremy Corbyn and Sir Keir’s landslide, Mr McFadden said: “I think we had become too much focused internally, too much focused on internal stakeholder management.
“And so the changes that we made, they weren’t just a little bit of a change in policy or in economics or in a single thing, it was a change in job description.
“Are you a members’ club just in existence to keep your members happy? Or are you an outward-focused, election-winning machine, an election-winning party?
“That’s what we have to be. And so I saw the changes that we were making, whether it’s rule changes at conference and all the rest of it, as a rediscovery of the Labour Party’s job description, something much more fundamental than a change in policy.
“And I’m very clear-eyed about that. And one of the things I say about the future… is don’t go back.
“Don’t go back to the old job description, which we’d fallen into, which was focusing purely on our own members. Stay focused on the public.”
He also defended the cautious approach adopted in the Labour election manifesto.
Mr McFadden said: “The easiest thing in the world is just to say yes, with loads of things, staple them together in a manifesto. Call it radicalism. And then lose, and it changes nothing.
“We had to say ‘no’ to things.”
And he said the party had to work hard to maintain the “intentionally broad coalition” of voters which propelled it to power.
“In the most marginal seats, more than one in five of the Labour voters this time voted Tory in 2019,” Mr McFadden said.
“In the British system, there is no path to victory which doesn’t include Labour reaching out to people who used to vote Tory. The dominance of the two parties means that’s an inescapable truth.
“And I’ve seen all sorts of clever people try to get away from that truth by cobbling together rainbow coalitions here and there and there isn’t a path to victory by doing that.
“So we did that. We’ll have to keep an eye on that in the future.”
Sir Keir’s critics on the left have pointed out that under Mr Corbyn Labour won more votes.
But Mr McFadden said: “The name of the game is to win a majority in Parliament.
“If you’re playing football, the name of the game is to score more goals than the opposite team – it’s not to get more corners or more possession of the ball. It is to score more goals.
“And the political equivalent is to win a majority in Parliament, so of course we focused on marginal seats.”
