How much can really be said on Question Time? Flickr/UK Parliament. Some rights reserved.
This article offers reflections on what happened in the general election campaign and on the significance of its outcome. Its argument is linked with analysis developed by various Soundings authors (including Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and myself) of the causes and nature of the financial crisis which occurred in 2007-8, and whose effects are still being felt over much of the world. This larger argument was framed in the terms of a Gramscian approach to political ‘conjunctures’ and the underlying structures of class relations which underpin them.
Labour’s strategic errors
Alan Johnson has observed that ‘the die was cast’ in the general election when Ed Miliband was virtually booed by the Question Timeaudience on 30 April, a week before election day, when he denied that Labour’s overspending was the cause of the economic crisis of 2007-2008. But of course this moment was not the cause of Labour’s defeat – it merely revealed the underlying problem of credibility that Labour has been carrying ever since it lost power in 2010. During election night, as the significance of the exit poll sunk in, two other senior Labour figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, added their view that the failure to combat the Coalition’s economic narrative had indeed been the central millstone round Labour’s neck during the whole campaign. About this, of course, they were right.
