We won in 2005 with four million fewer votes than in 1997 and with the lowest share of the vote ever recorded for a winning party Fighting on one or two fronts has given way to kaleidoscopic contests where we take on Tories, Lib Dems, Welsh and Scottish nationalists and UKIP or the BNP, plus the Greens in a few places, and of course those 'Independents' in local government elections The national swing that swept away so many excellent Labour MPs did not sweep away our MPs in Edgbaston or Oxford East or Tooting From 2006 to 2009 we lost well over a thousand local council seats, suffered serious setbacks in elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, lost the London Mayoral election, and were beaten by UKIP into third place in the European elections It is why Labour spent the 1980s in the political wilderness, sent into internal exile by the voters for putting our obsessions ahead of their concerns