Madam, - The recent deliberations at Labour Youth's Tom Johnson Summer School, as reported in your edition of July 16th, are a welcome development for the Labour Party and its supporters. As most of the speakers acknowledged, the outcome of the recent election was indeed disappointing and will require quite a lot of thought and consideration. Those who spoke in Galway rightly said that such an analysis needs to go well beyond the consideration of electoral strategy - it needs to look at what Labour's project is about.
As a long-standing member of the party and former full-time staffer, I would like to offer a few thoughts to contribute to this discussion. Firstly, other progressive parties around the world have faced similar problems yet have recreated themselves and gone on to be successfully elected and re-elected. They have also created successful social market economies which are typified by high-quality public services and low levels of inequality - in particular the Scandinavian countries, as both Michael D Higgins and David Begg explained at the weekend.
Labour's circumstances now are not as bad as they might seem. While party support is becalmed and the left's vote is down on the 2002 election, the combined support for left-wing parties is considerably higher than it was 30 years ago. At the 1977 general election, the percentage vote for the left was in the mid-teens; it was 25 per cent in the last election, almost 10 points higher. In 1987 Labour was clinging on for dear life. We emerged from Government with 12 seats and a 6 per cent share of the vote. We were in the midst of a bitter internal civil war over electoral strategy and hope seemed hard to come by.
However, things did change for the better - largely due to our own efforts. In particular, the Commission on Electoral Strategy, which was established in the mid-1980s, helped to provide the basis for future growth by its role in solving the battle over electoral strategy and providing unity where there had been bitter division before. Indeed, we need to remind ourselves that while there are very definitely different views on the best way forward for the party, the current debate is being carried out in a largely comradely way, unlike our discourse of the 1970s and 1980s.
I believe Labour should now do as we did in the 1980s and establish a broadly-based commission to look at what the party needs to do to put in place a proper political strategy for the next 10 years or so.
Such a commission should be composed of both party and sympathetic non-party members; represent the different strands of work and opinion within Labour and avail of the wide range of expertise in the Party; examine the current social, cultural, political and economic context in Ireland and how this is likely to change over the next 10 years; analyse how like-minded parties and movements have dealt with similar challenges overseas; engage with people in different parts of the political left as well as fellow campaigners for a more equal society in the trade union movement and within the community and voluntary sector; engage with the wider public through public hearings and engagements.
The focus of such a Commission's work would be to paint the picture of what Labour is for - presenting a detailed vision of the fair society - as well as outlining the policies necessary to deliver it and the steps the party needs to take to recruit support for this vision. It should take 18 months to complete its work, just in time for debate at the party conference due in spring 2009. It could lay the platform for a revived and rejuvenated performance at the 2009 local and European elections, as well as the next general election, whenever that occurs. - Yours, etc,
PAT MONTAGUE, Wellpark Avenue, Drumcondra, Dublin 9.