Back in May 2020 I wrote a post summarising some of the points I’d taken from Labour’s leaked report (now on archive.org). At the time admitting to having read or downloaded the leaked report was disciplinarily problematic, let’s say – never mind discussing its contents – so I changed all the names of the organisations involved and reskinned the whole thing as sf. With the Forde Report now being available, I think this degree of circumspection is no longer called for. So here’s what I was actually writing about.
– We’re here to consider some problems that have recently surfaced in the Labour Party. Take this, for instance.
“OK. So, what we see here is that there was an election coming up, and one individual with responsibility for election-related and other forms of campaigning within the Labour Party writes: Let’s hope the Liberal Democrats can do it. I’m sorry, what?”
– The person in question appears to hope that the Liberal Democrats will win the election in question.
“Thankyou, I had got that far. But the person in question is responsible for the Labour election campaign. You wouldn’t expect them to have any doubts about who to support.”
– Or to express those thoughts to Labour colleagus, on a Labour communication channel.
“Good grief. Were they – all of them – actually working against their own party? Why?”
– Firstly, not all of them, but quite a few – up to and including the then General Secretary. As to why… well, let’s look at the next piece of evidence. So, here’s somebody who enjoyed ridiculing the leadership…
“The Labour leadership?”
– Yes, their own leadership – there’s going to be a lot of this, so I should get used to the idea; they enjoyed ridiculing the leadership and dismissed anyone who supported them as Trotskyite subversives.
“Trotskyite… I did read about this. Meaning… very marginal to the Party and very bad?”
– Meaning a whole variety of things – but yes, in this context the main meaning was ‘very bad’.
“And why do we care about this unpleasant and disloyal individual?”
– Mainly because they came under suspicion. Not from the leadership – from their colleagues; they were suspected of being a bit of a Trotskyite on the quiet.
“You mean to say, people in responsible positions at the Labour Party were so obsessed with the threat of these… Trotskyite tendencies… that they ended up working against the leadership of their own Party – and even dismissed anyone who didn’t agree with them completely as a Trotskyite in their own right? How did they ever get those positions of responsibility? How did they keep them? Were they just astonishingly good at their jobs?”
– Here we come to the question of antisemitic abuse.
“Ah, I remember the part about antisemitism. So at this stage our traitorous office-holders are dealing with… sorry, how many? In a party with half a million… surely there were more cases than that? And they’re taking… what? Why are they taking so long? And they haven’t got a process for tracking cases? None at all? Sorry, that’s a lot of questions.”
– All good ones.
“Ah, but weren’t these… Trotskyites, was it… weren’t they also supposed to have trouble with Jews? Maybe the reason those people weren’t processing complaints was that the leadership were slowing them down.”
– Actually, no. The leadership appears to have washed their hands of some close allies and personal friends, if those people seemed to be using antisemitic language or getting close to it.
“I’m confused now. The Party was dealing with them?”
– Ah, no. I said that the leadership washed their hands of them, not that they were promptly removed from the Party itself. This note here, for example, shows that one prominent individual’s case was allowed to drag on for two years. Jewish groups were up in arms about it. And, since this person was politically and even personally close to the leadership, naturally people suspected that the leadership was responsible. But they weren’t; if anything they were pushing for expulsion.
“Let me get this straight. People working within the Party, with responsibility for membership and discipline, believe that the leadership are all Trotskyites, and Trotskyites are all antisemites. A friend of the leadership makes statements seen as insulting to Jews. The leadership cuts this person off, but the Trot-hunters – who are the ones with the power to kick them out of the Party – do nothing about it, for…”
– For two years, yes.
“Were they just very, very inefficient? What’s this say – they had a very basic system for tracking complaints about members, which they then replaced it with another equally basic system, which they didn’t consistently use? Again, whyever not?”
– Very hard to say – not using a system doesn’t create much evidence. But it doesn’t seem to be an antisemitism-related thing, if only because all sorts of complaints were being dealt with just as slowly and just as inefficiently. As far as we can see the only time these people really sprang into action was when there was a leadership election, and a chance of party members deposing the leader.
“I suppose they would want to help that along.”
– It’s more that they hindered the people who wanted to vote for the leadership. Lots of Labour members suddenly discovered they were ex-members, or else that they’d been suspended for the length of the contest.
“They used membership of the Labour Party as a political tool?”
– To be granted and withheld as they saw fit.
“Ah well. At least it didn’t work. Still, you’d think the leadership would have noticed what was going on; you’d think they’d complain about having people in charge of membership who were good at kicking out allies of the leadership and bad at kicking out actual antisemites. I mean, assuming there were any actual antisemites in the Party to begin with, and it wasn’t just part of the big Trot hunt…”
– Let me stop you there. Antisemitic prejudice has deep historical roots, takes many different forms and can be found in all the main political parties, the Labour Party included.
“I just thought, seeing that so few of them were being expelled, perhaps there wasn’t enough…”
– Oh, there was plenty of evidence. After the General Secretary – well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Anyway, to answer your question, the leadership were well aware that their membership and discipline specialists were kicking out far too many of the wrong people and far too few of the right ones – not least because some pro-Jewish activists made sure that they knew about it.
“That’s where this [REDACTED] individual comes in, is it?”
– Yes. Quite suddenly the membership people are being bombarded with hundreds of vague, half-formed accusations against people who may or may not have been in the Labour Party to begin with. And they deal with this in two ways.
“Let me guess – number one is ‘very badly’?”
– And number two is ‘by reporting that everything was fine’.
“This all looks quite efficient, though. They’d had this many complaints from the [REDACTED] account; they’d all been investigated; this many were against Party members, and investigation had led to this many expulsions. What’s wrong with that?”
– Read this part.
“None of it was true? And we know that none of it was true – the data was right there and they… they lied about it? Even though they were all in favour of getting rid of antisemitic activists, even though it had the potential to embarrass the leadership – which, as we know, they wanted to do?”
– I suppose visibly failing to deal with the antisemitism problem had the potential to be even more embarrassing to the leadership. Or they may not have thought that far ahead; they may just have been extraordinarily inefficient.
“At anything other than kicking out allies of the leadership and other suspected ‘Trots’.”
– Yes. The Party was a hard organisation to get kicked out of, if you weren’t an ally of the leadership. You could post antisemitic propaganda or various other forms of bigotry online; you could even advocate joining the Conservative Party. If you were reported once, it was an isolated occurrence; if you were reported twice or three times, your case had already been looked at so there was no need to do anything else.
“That isn’t sectarianism, though – just rampant inefficiency; these people seem to have treated senior jobs in the Party as if they were sinecures requiring only that they turn up for work, and gone on acting that way even when there was vitally important work to be done.”
– Let’s not lose sight of the broader picture. It would be fair to say that these individuals exhibited both sectarianism – in opposition to their own leadership – and rampant inefficiency. There is a happy ending of sorts, though: at this point here, there’s a new General Secretary, and almost all of the other people mentioned here resign. The disciplinary process becomes considerably more efficient as a result, as you can see here.
“A ninefold… no, a tenfold increase. No, wait. A factor of 25. In fact, in one sense it’s a factor of 45. It’s a big improvement, anyway.”
– But there’s more. If you’ll just watch this programme…
“Unwritten guidelines… leadership interfering… antisemitic sympathies… obstructing their investigations… This just isn’t true! It can’t be true.”
– I’m afraid witnesses’ veracity can’t always be relied on.
“Clearly. Apart from anything else, if the leadership had the power to impose these ‘guidelines’ which supposedly slowed everything down so much, how could all of those leadership sympathisers have been excluded? And how could the process of dealing with the antisemitic element have got so much better when the leadership had a new General Secretary and new people in place? What they say here simply cannot be true. One can sympathise with them in a way – nobody likes being reminded of how inefficiently they’re working, least of all when they have ceased to support the goals of the organisation they’re working for. But this reaction is… excessive.”
– Some would call it a pack of lies.
“I dare say they would. So, remind me, what’s the remit of our investigation?”
– We’re to investigate the content of this leak.
“Quite right too.”
– Also, the circumstances under which it came to be leaked. Oh, and we’ll be working with individuals nominated by the Party under its new leadership, specifically including one known supporter of the former General Secretary –
“I’m sorry, the former General Secretary?”
– If I might finish – one supporter of the former General Secretary, and one individual who was actually a staff member in this period and whose name appears in the leak.
What does Labour’s victory in the Wakefield by-election tell us about “Red Wall” seats more generally, and about Labour’s prospects in the next General Election?
1. Where We’re Coming From
Drawing lessons for Labour from previous elections is horrifically difficult, for (at least) four reasons. The first is the fact that the whole field is bitterly contested, so that discussions are likely to be distorted by partisanship. There are some (among whom I’m sure I wouldn’t count you, dear reader) who turn a deaf ear to any attempt to identify positives about the Corbyn period, typically pointing out in a discussion-ending tone that Labour didn’t win in either 2017 or 2019, whereas we did win in 1997, 2001 and 2005. (Good to know. I’ll make a note.) On the other hand (secondly), 2017 shouldn’t be taken as a model, either: some elements of the 2017 campaign went well and could usefully be repeated, but other elements we could do without. Polarisation, for example. Opponents of Corbyn will sometimes say that the only reason Labour did so well in 2017 was that Theresa May’s Conservatives were so weak, but if anything the opposite is the case. The only reason Labour didn’t do even better (and, e.g., win) was that the Conservative result was so strong: in 2017 the Conservative Party got its highest vote share since 1987, and took more votes than Labour did in their landslide victory of 1997. So it was a big success for mobilisation of the Labour vote; another time we just need to work out how to get our voters to turn out and theirs to stay at home. Demobilisation of the other side seems more like a Blair-era achievement, but – thirdly – if the Corbyn period isn’t to be discounted, the Blair victories shouldn’t simply be celebrated. You’d think it’d be reasonably easy to draw lessons from the most recent period when Labour did win general elections – three in a row, I’m reliably informed – but examined in detail the New Labour electoral record is rather qualified, not to say flukey. If we want to improve on 2017’s “40% of the vote and a hung parliament”, saying that we should be pitching for 2005’s “35% and a majority of 66” isn’t very helpful. And that leads on to the fourth reason – but I’ll save that for later. (It’s a corker.)
Here, anyway, is how the last few elections look, UK-wide.
Dark blue: far Right; purple: UKIP/BXP; green: Green/independent Left. %s shown when 3% or above.
Red line: Lab – Con vote %, right-hand axis.
We can see some trends here.
2010: Labour vote drops by 6% in the wake of the 2008 crash; some of those votes go to UKIP, the far Right and the Lib Dems (“I agree with Nick”), but most go to the Tories. Hung Parliament leading to Tory/Lib Dem coalition.
2015: Lib Dem vote drops by 15% after the Coalition; Labour and Tories pick up some of their vote and the Greens pick up more, but by far the biggest beneficiary is UKIP. Given the lack of common ground between the Lib Dem and UKIP manifestos, it seems that quite a lot of people had been voting Lib Dem on general “sod the lot of ’em” principles. Either that or the Tories have gained the adherence of a lot of former Lib Dems, while losing an equally large number of their own voters to UKIP. In any case, the result is a Tory government.
2017: The previous election’s Green and – more dramatically – UKIP votes vanish like melting snow in a heavily polarised election. The Tories’ vote share rises by 5.5%; Labour’s share rises by 9.6%. Tory minority government.
2019: Almost 8% of that Labour increase disappears again, to the benefit of the Lib Dems, the Greens, the Brexit Party and the Tories. Between people who didn’t trust Labour to deliver a second referendum, people who didn’t trust Labour to deliver Brexit and people who thought that if they wished hard enough they could vote for a hung parliament, Labour’s vote got driven down in many different places, for many different reasons and entirely to the benefit of the Conservative Party. Tory government.
2. The Fall of the Not Actually A Wall Actually
So that’s the baseline. Were things different in the Red Wall, though?
Hmm. [FX: Grits teeth] Red Wall, is it? I find it hard to believe how firmly that term’s ensconced in the political lexicon, having being coined less than three years ago and repeatedly redefined since then. But it looks as if we’re stuck with it now. In practice it means a whole variety of things, but usually when people talk about the “Red Wall” they’re talking about long-term Labour seats that went to the Conservatives in 2019, generally in post-industrial or semi-rural areas, generally in England but north of Luton, and which are thought to have gone to the Tories for primarily ‘cultural’ reasons. Either that, or seats that Labour still hold but which qualify on the other criteria and might turn out to be vulnerable next time round – a decidedly malleable definition.
Even if we confine ourselves to seats Labour actually lost, though, there are problems. What do we mean by a “long-term” Labour seat – one that’s been Labour since 2010, say? (Twelve years is a long time for most people.) Should we look for continuous holds since 1997? Since 1983? Longer? And what do we do about constituencies whose boundaries have been redrawn in that time? (The longer we go back the more likely that is to have happened, making “long-term” Labour seats harder to identify than you might think.) As for seats “going to the Conservatives”, surely we want to focus on seats where there have been substantial changes in absolute and relative vote share, not just a change in who tops the list. A seat that’s 39% Labour and 38% Tory at one election and 38%/39% at the next has “gone to the Conservatives”, after all, but hardly anyone there has actually changed their mind. The picture’s even more complicated when a seat has a strong Nationalist presence, and show me a Scottish seat that hasn’t; even Plaid Cymru’s ~10% presence in Wales makes them a bit of a wild card. So for simplicity we really need to confine ourselves to England.
With all of this in mind, in an earlier post I looked at all Labour’s losses in England in 2019 and categorised them as
big wins (Labour continuously since 1979, decisive win in 2019)
narrow wins (Labour continuously since 1979, but not a decisive win in 2019)
marginals (had changed hands at least twice since 1979)
I defined a “decisive win” as one where
the Labour vote in 2019 fell 10% or more relative to 2017 and was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001, and where the eventual Tory majority was 5% or more
I then took some averages of the three groups, which worked out like this:
1
2
3
Diff 1
Diff 2
Lowest Labour vote %, 2019
24.4
39.3
36.9
12.5
2.4
Highest Labour vote %, 2019
39.8
44.5
46
4.7
1.5
Average Labour vote %, 2019
34.8
41.7
41.1
6.3
0.4
Biggest Tory majority in %, 2019
31.4
12.6
15.7
15.7
3.1
Biggest drop in Labour vote %, 2017-19
24.9
15.7
18.1
6.8
2.4
Diff 1: difference between 1 and either 2 or 3, whichever is closer
Diff 2: difference between 2 and 3
Essentially there’s not a huge amount of difference between the ‘marginals’ and the ‘narrow wins’ (Diff 2), whereas they’re both quite distinct from the ‘big wins’ (Diff 1). Which makes sense: even in a seat that’s been held by one party for a long time, you can score a narrow win by putting on a few hundred votes and driving the other side’s vote down by 5-6%. That – like a marginal changing hands – is the kind of thing that happens in any good election campaign; and the Tories in 2019 had a very good election campaign.
The big wins, though, really are different. So that’s my first finding, in terms of the reality of the Red Wall: yes, there was a group of long-term Labour seats that fell to the Tories in 2019 by really big margins, with really big drops in the Labour vote. And yes, they were Up North, if you define that term loosely enough (Derby and Durham are both in the North, but you wouldn’t want to walk it). There were only about 16 of them, though, meaning that if Labour had held every one of them and lost all the other seats they lost, the Tories would still have gained a big majority.
(Wakefield wasn’t in this group, although arguably it’s on the borderline: the Labour vote in 2019 fell by 9.9% relative to 2017, and Mary Creagh’s losing vote share of 39.8% was higher than her winning share of 39.3% in 2010.)
The analysis of big Tory wins ended up overlapping with something I wrote some time ago, analysing trends in Labour vote share in General Elections since 2005 in Labour seats in England. Having heard some Labour MPs bemoaning Corbyn’s leadership as electoral poison, and having seen Labour surge pretty well everywhere in 2017, I wanted to know whether there was any truth to that negative perception even at a local level. Was there a substantial group of seats where Labour’s vote share, relative to the Tories, had actually fallen in 2017? (Clearly there were some, as we lost six seats (while gaining 36) – but a handful isn’t really enough to generalise from; weird things do happen in elections.)
I compared 186 English Labour seats (as of the 2017 election) across the last five elections. The metric was simple: if we compared this election’s comparative vote share – “Labour % – Tory %” – with the previous election, had it gone Up or Down? I identified 50 seats where comparative vote share had in fact gone down in 2017, in all of which it had also gone down in 2010. In 39 of the 50, relative vote share had gone up in 2015 (so Down, Up, Down or DUD); in the other 11, vote share had gone down at all three elections (=DDD).
Remember those “big wins”? On inspection, almost all of them fitted the DUD pattern, and the remainder were all DDD. So there genuinely was a group of long-term Labour seats – a minority, but a substantial minority; around one in five – where the election campaign led by Ed Miliband seemed to deliver the goods in a way that 2017 didn’t; where the end result of that amazing May of campaigning was a sitting MP holding on with a smaller majority. And a lot of those seats were vulnerable, given a hearty shove in 2019, to going Tory in a big way.
But how?
3. None Of The Above: The True Story
Here’s what happened in one of the “big win” seats, Don Valley. (More detail in this post.)
2010: Nationally, the Labour vote drops by 6%, about half of which goes to UKIP or the BNP; here, the drop is double that, and it all seems to go to anti-political candidates of the Right and far Right: UKIP, the BNP and the English Democrats.
2015: Nationally, a big drop in the Lib Dem vote and a rise in UKIP’s. Here, again, it’s the same but much more so: the Lib Dem vote doesn’t drop so much as collapse; Labour picks up some Lib Dem votes, but UKIP takes a big chunk from the Lib Dems as well as absorbing the far Right and taking some from the Tories, finishing in a close third place. (It’s possible, as suggested above, that there were two big vote flows rather than one – Lib Dem to Tory, Tory to UKIP – but in this seat the numbers involved make it doubtful: more than half of the people who voted Tory in 2010 would have had to switch to UKIP and be replaced by former Lib Dem voters.) The division of the Right vote leaves the Tories looking substantially weaker; if all you were focusing on was the comparison between the winning Labour vote and the Tory runner-up, it would look like a big improvement.
2017: Nationally, a big shift to two-party polarisation, with a substantial UKIP vote collapsing and Labour’s vote going up about twice as much as the Tories’. Here, the UKIP vote in 2015 was only a couple of points shy of the Tories’, and it disappears completely in 2017 – no candidate on the ballot paper. Labour’s vote goes up, but not twice as much as the Tories’ – it’s the other way around. Labour’s vote increases by nearly 7%, but its majority falls by nearly 10%.
2019: Nationally, Labour’s vote drops by 8% with compensatory gains by multiple different parties; here, the drop is closer to 18% and the main recipient of Labour votes is the Brexit Party – although it’s the Tories who take the seat.
A few conclusions, quoted from that earlier post.
There’s a substantial anti-political, “none of the above” vote in this seat: 10-20% of the vote at every election since 2001
The Lib Dems profited from this, until they didn’t: joining the government was the kiss of death, and the Lib Dems have effectively been irrelevant (at least in this seat) since 2010
Parties of the Right and extreme Right are legitimate in this seat as a repository for anti-political votes; the strength of the BNP and ED vote in 2010, and the extent to which UKIP built on this, is not to be underestimated
UKIP/BXP is strategically ambivalent, operating as a pure protest vote (2010, 2019), as a more respectable alternative to the far Right (2015) and as an ante-chamber to voting Conservative (2015, 2019?)
Without Corbyn, the 2017 result would have been much worse for Labour: Labour’s acceptance of Brexit and Corbyn’s image as an anti-system outsider both prevented the 2015 UKIP vote transferring to the Tories en masse
However, 2017 looked worse than 2015 for the sitting MP (Caroline Flint), as – with higher Labour and Tory votes – Labour won by a much narrower margin; this supported the narrative that a decline in Labour’s vote had continued or even accelerated under Corbyn (whereas in reality it had begun to be reversed)
What lost the seatin 2019 was the strength of the anti-system vote up to 2015, the Tories’ success in converting 2015’s UKIP protest vote to 2017 Conservatives, and Labour’s inability in 2019 to pre-empt the appeal of the BXP protest vote, due to the ambiguity of Labour’s Brexit positioning and the tarnishing of Corbyn’s image.
Wakefield? Here you go:
The angles are shallower but the shape of the line’s the same: Wakefield’s a DUD. It all looks very much the same, albeit on a smaller scale – Wakefield wasn’t a big loss in 2019, and it hadn’t ever really been weigh-the-vote territory before then (it was a bona fide marginal back in the 1980s, albeit one that the Tories never actually took). Still, the key indicators are all there. The drop in the Labour vote in 2010; the far Right presence (the BNP saved their deposit in 2010); the Lib Dem vote collapsing in 2015, with UKIP the main beneficiary (directly or indirectly); the uneven redistribution of the UKIP vote in 2017, leading to a larger absolute Labour vote share with a smaller majority; and then the hoovering up of disaffected Labour votes by the Lib Dems and the Brexit Party, to the benefit of the Tories.
2010: disaffection with Labour, legitimation of anti-system parties. 2015: disaffection with the Lib Dems, rise of UKIP. 2017: collapse of UKIP, diversion of some anti-system votes to Labour under Corbyn, conversion of most anti-system votes to the Tories. Then in 2019 we’re back to disaffection with Labour and legitimation of anti-system parties, this time with some diversion of anti-system votes to the Tories under Boris Johnson (portrayed – absurdly but effectively – as an anti-system figure). It was blowing much harder in the Don Valley, but the same wind was blowing in Wakefield.
Some of these trends were operating nationally to a greater or lesser extent, admittedly. Labour’s vote share fell across the country between 2005 and 2010, having also fallen between 2001 and 2005; indeed, considering that turnout was lower across the board, Labour’s vote in 2010 was two million down on its level in 2001 – and that was nearly three million down on 1997. (And that epoch-making result was itself substantially below the 55%+ that Labour had been polling when the election was called. 55%!)
The key difference in this sub-group of seats was what happened in 2017, where the national trend was for Labour’s vote to increase substantially more than the Tories’ relative to 2015. The seats where the Tories picked up more votes than Labour in 2017 seem also to show some relative rather than absolute differences from the national trend: a bigger fall in the Labour vote between 2005 and 2010; a bigger rise in the far Right vote in 2010; a bigger fall (a more complete collapse) of the Lib Dem vote in 2015 and a bigger rise in the UKIP vote.
4. What’s Really Happening?
We’ve reached the point where we can identify the three key driving forces of the last election result for Labour. The first – which is arguably one of the key driving forces of the last twenty years of politics – looks back to those five million voters Labour lost between the two victories of 1997 and 2005, and all the people who thought like them. That’s a big bloc of actual and potential Labour voters shaken loose from the party. Over time many, perhaps most, will have got the habit of staying at home at election time, but many will have taken the opportunity in 2005, 10, 15 to cast an anti-system, “sod the lot of ’em” vote – for the Lib Dems, for the BNP, for UKIP. (The British public also had an opportunity to cast an anti-system vote in 2016, of course. How’s that working out?) Roll that bloc of voters forward to 2017 and 2019, and the only question is how many of those people will be open to Corbyn’s anti-establishment appeal, and how many will prefer their anti-system politics with a definite Right-wing stamp.
Which brings us to the “Red Wall” question – why did some Labour seats go particularly heavily for the Tories? – and here we see the second key factor at work in 2019: the greater strength, and legitimacy, of the far Right in some areas than others. This is a factor that feeds through from 2005 on, first in higher votes for far Right parties, then in substantially higher votes for UKIP – and then, in 2017, in blunting the edge of Corbyn’s “anti-establishment” appeal. Local factors will be involved here; I can’t put the blame on Tony Blair, as much as I’d like to. What I will say, though, is that the BNP got more than 8% of the vote in eight constituencies in 2005 and twelve in 2010, including five in both – and they were all Labour seats. If I ran the Labour Party, having a fascist party even retain its deposit in a Labour constituency would be grounds for deselection; it doesn’t exactly suggest an assertive local party. To be fair, Labour didn’t go on to lose all of those seats – just a little over half, eight out of the fifteen – so it’s not an exact science. Anyway, we couldn’t go around holding the threat of deselection over good socialists like Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn, Margaret Hodge and checks notes Ian Austin, could we? That would never do.
Have I looked at the data? You bet I’ve looked at the data. Here’s “total far Right vote in 2010” vs “rise in UKIP vote between 2010 and 2015”, Labour constituencies only.
(I tried it without the zeroes; very little difference.) And here’s that rise in the UKIP vote, 2010-15, vs the total Labour vote in 2019.
I don’t bandy R-squared values around a lot, but those look pretty chunky to me.
(Interesting point for anyone else who wants to run some numbers: the relationship between the changes in Lib Dem and UKIP votes between 2010 and 2015 did not look like these charts. It’s actually a (very weak) direct relationship: a big drop in the Lib Dem vote makes a big rise in the UKIP vote slightly less likely – or rather, knowing that the Lib Dems did really badly in a seat makes it slightly less likely to be a seat where UKIP did really well. Three-way traffic, I guess, or something more complicated than that.)
Are those factors really relevant to 2019, though? 2019 wasn’t 2017, and Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-establishment appeal was wearing pretty thin by election night. Actually that just makes those two factors more effective: if you didn’t want your anti-system radicalism with a Glastonbury ribbon on top, you certainly weren’t going to want it wrapped in allegations of antisemitism. Which is to say, those two factors applied along with a third: an anti-Labour campaign of a scale, viciousness and shameless mendacity that I’ve never seen before in British politics (and I remember Bermondsey), much of it emanating from people Labour should have been able to count as supporters or allies. (Or, y’know, as members, officers, elected representatives – people like that.)
The significance of this last point, in the present context, is what it implies for Wakefield, and for all the other seats Labour lost which didn’t tick all of the ‘Red Wall’ criteria I’ve set out. Past voting figures suggest that Wakefield, like many other constituencies, didn’t have that big a deracinated ex-Labour bloc from the mid-2000s on, and nor did it have that big a far Right bloc later. So, while those first two factors operated to depress the scale of Labour’s vote gain in 2017 – and depress Labour’s majority – the effect wasn’t that big (Labour’s majority fell by 1.4%). What really made the difference was that third factor – which hopefully won’t be a factor at the next election. Even without the Tories conveniently falling apart as they did at the recent by-election, a relatively normal election campaign for Labour – without the relentless negative campaigning of 2019, other than from the Tories – should be enough to keep Wakefield in the fold, and win back quite a few of 2019’s other losses.
5. The Fourth Reason
So that’s nice. Whether that will be enough to win a general election, though, is another question, and it’s a question to which the answer is No. This brings us back to the fourth reason why it’s hard to draw lessons for Labour from past elections, as promised earlier: it’s a fact that everyone knows but that tends to be quietly ignored. The fact is that Labour, by and large, doesn’t win general elections. Eleven Labour governments have been formed after an election, the first being Ramsay MacDonald’s first government in 1923. Eleven in a century doesn’t sound that bad, even if five of the eleven only added up to seven years between them. But consider: three of the eleven were minority governments (1923, 1929, 1974/Feb), and another three had majorities of five of less (1950, 1964, 1974/Oct). Of the remaining five, three were second- or third-term governments (1966, 2001, 2005) – which is to say that Labour went into the election with all the advantages of an incumbent government. That only leaves two – and one of those, the 1945 landslide, saw several of the leading figures of the wartime coalition remaining in office (Churchill’s Deputy PM Clement Attlee not least), meaning that it too was effectively a second-term government.
So that’s one Labour government, with a workable majority, formed after an election won by the Labour Party in opposition: one out of eleven; one in a century; one, not to put too fine a point on it, ever. Mr Tony Blair, come on down! 1997 wasn’t just unusual for Labour, it was – literally – unique. It follows that when people talk about Labour winning the next election, they’re not talking about competence and putting the grownups in charge and getting back to business as usual – at least, they certainly shouldn’t be, because that’s not going to do it. And when they talk about 2017 as if the only salient fact about that election was that Labour didn’t form the next government – as if a solid majority over the Tories was there for the taking by any half-decent Labour leadership, so that any campaign that failed to win outright deserved only contempt – they’re talking “absolute tripe”, as Michael Foot and my father used (separately) to say. (Born the same year, those two. Inter-war slang, I guess.)
New Labour’s victory in 1997 had many parents. The property crash of 1992 dislodged many natural Conservative voters from their party; standing at 45% in mid-1992, the Tories’ polling average had dropped below 40% by the end of the year and below 30% by the end of 1993, only beginning to recover in the months before the election was called in 1997. This fed through into both vote-switching and abstention: the Tory vote was down 4.5 million in 1997 relative to 1992, while Labour’s vote only increased by two million. (Yes, ‘only’. We put on 3.5 million between 2015 and 2017.)
Labour was polling 15-20 points ahead of the Tories when John Smith died in 1994. A new-broom leadership was meat and drink to political commentators, who seemed equally dazzled by Tony Blair’s personal style and his bite-sized political philosophy. Taking no chances, Blair and Brown were in any case assiduous in getting the media (as well as the City) on side. Meanwhile the “cash for questions” scandal was undermining the credibility of the Conservative government even further, enabling political commentators to pick up and amplify popular disaffection from the Tory Party under the general heading of “sleaze”.
As for the other parties, the Lib Dems were tacitly operating as New Labour’s small-L liberal outriders, in the (forlorn) hope that their contribution to victory would be rewarded. (Don’t get fooled again, eh?) Scotland was in the bag before campaigning began: the SNP finished as the third largest party in Scotland in 1997, just as they had in 1992. On the Right, the Referendum Party stood 547 candidates and took 2.6% of the vote; UKIP (est. 1993) stood 193 candidates and got 0.3%. (The only UKIP candidate not to lose their deposit was a Mr N. Farage; wonder what happened to him.)
You get the idea. 1997 really was a perfect storm: a confluence of multiple wildly different factors, some of them not of Labour’s doing, some of them downright impossible to recreate now. (O my 20% Lib Dems and my 20% (in Scotland) SNP of yesteryear!) And 1997 is the only time Labour’s won a working majority from opposition. Not the biggest or the most enduring or the most elegantly arranged – the only one.
So when people talk about Labour winning the next election, they really aren’t talking about getting back to business as usual; what they’re talking about is replicating a single, bizarre and unparallelled combination of circumstances. Or else they’re thinking – or they need to start thinking – in terms of striking out in a new direction, and pulling together some other combination that might prove equally effective. (We could try populist rhetoric attached to radical policies, perhaps, with a likeable figurehead and a credible pitch to young people. Worth a shot.)
I get the impression that the current leadership team believes that a competent campaign and a halfway friendly press will win Wakefield and seats like it, but that they need to reposition Labour – as patriotic, fiscally responsible, tough on crime and so on – in order to get the true “Red Wall” seats back. They also seem to believe that once the Red Wall comes back, the country will come with it. I agree that Wakefield’s probably staying Labour next time out, and some – perhaps as many as half – of the “Red Wall” seats will probably come back. But Don Valley and seats like it are almost certainly gone; that damage has been done, a long time ago. And – more importantly – where the “Red Wall” goes, goes… nowhere else in particular. Neither of those two groups of seats are big enough, or typical enough, to mean that winning them would be enough to win the election.
What will? One thing we know is that we aren’t going to have another 1997 – the preconditions for it aren’t there. That in itself means that something fairly dramatic is going to be needed – something a great deal more dramatic than talking about tax cuts and waving the flag. Unfortunately, unless there’s a big change in the leadership or (less probably) in leadership style, Labour just isn’t going to have the kind of inspirational appeal that enables the party to make new inroads into Tory territory. (I mean, it’s not as if people were oh say for example spontaneously chanting Keir Starmer’s name, is it.)
Wakefield or no Wakefield, on a national level it all adds up to another loss. I’ve got a nasty feeling that the leadership’s already working on that basis, and that the next election will see Starmer, well, doing a Kinnock – putting a brave face on a few gains and arguing that the gains the party didn’t make just show that his work is not yet done.
If it does come to that, I just hope that some of the people who backed Starmer on the basis that Corbynism was a vote-loser will draw the right conclusions.
Actually filtering that chart into "2017 losses trying to regain" versus "Ye Olde Laboure Heartelandes" would be useful (as would a split of incumbent Labour MPs between "absolute danger expelled from Labour party" and "absolute danger not yet expelled from Labour party")
The chart referred to is a list of the top 60 Tory targets in the 2019 election, ordered by the size of swing required (which effectively means by the size of the incumbent party’s majority over the Tories, but the figures look smaller). 24 are Labour seats, in England, with majorities of less than 5%; in the event the Tories took 19 of them (step forward Battersea, Bedford, Canterbury, Portsmouth South and Warwick & Leamington – good work, lads).
Here are all the gains the Tories made from Labour in England – well, almost all; the map doesn’t extend far enough south to show Ipswich, Stroud and Kensington, so there are 45 seats here instead of 48.
Following Dan’s suggestion, the colour coding on this map based on how many successive elections each constituency had had as a Labour seat when it was taken by the Tories. Pale blue are 2017 Losses, seats that Labour took in 2017, or in two cases in 2015. (Labour made quite a lot of gains in 2017, didn’t they? Wonder if anyone’s drawn any lessons from that.) The deep blue are Ye Olde Laboure Heartelandes, seats that had been Labour since at least 1983; most of them go back to February 1974 (the first general election under the current franchise). Medium blues are Labour going back to 1997 (or in one case 2001); lastly, greys are seats whose Labour election count stood at zero, as they had gone into the 2019 election with an MP who had already left Labour – and who was, in all these cases, actively campaigning against their old party. (I’m referring to John Woodcock, John Mann, Ian Austin, Ivan Lewis and Angela Smith. Any resemblance between this list and a list of “absolute dangers expelled from the Labour Party” is for the reader.) I don’t usually set much store by the Ned Lagg Effect – people tend to vote for a party, not an individual, as individuals ranging from Jim Sillars to Ivan Lewis have discovered to their cost. But 2019 wasn’t a normal election; in a campaign one of whose dominant messages was Are You Going To Hand Britain Over To Terrorist Communist Traitors?, the discovery that your own (formerly) Labour MP was actually endorsing the whole Communist-terrorist thing must have shifted a few votes in those constituencies.
First impression: there’s a lot of pale blue. There’s also a fair bit of deep blue, but it’s scattered all over the map and consists very largely of spread-out, semi-rural constituencies. But we can do better than that. Here’s a map from the previous Red Wall post – now revised and updated, incidentally, and featuring the definitive description of the Red Wall courtesy of its original inventor (tl; dr interesting, but I’m still not impressed). This map has 51 constituencies on it: the (only) 50 Labour constituencies where the Labour vote share went down in 2017 relative to 2015, and Scunthorpe (I’ll explain why Scunthorpe in a minute).
Edit 13/2 Thanks to the reader who pointed out that I’d misidentified Scunthorpe as Hartlepool. No idea how I did that – it’s not even on the coast! Corrected.
The colour-coding here is the version used in the previous post: the deep blues are long-term Labour seats where the 2019 Tory majority was 5% or more and the Labour vote had fallen by 10% or more relative to 2017 and the Labour vote was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001; the mid-blues are other long-term Labour seats that went to the Tories in 2019, while the reds are seats that Labour held in 2019. (Scunthorpe, in purple, is a ‘deep blue’ seat that doesn’t strictly qualify to be on this map, as Labour’s vote share rose between 2015 and 2017 – by half of one percent.)
Now, let’s tidy up and simplify a bit. I said at the top of the post that there were 24 seats where Labour’s margin over the Tories was 5% or less, and that the Tories took 19 of those. Let’s say for the sake of argument that any party having a good election is likely to have successes at that kind of level: if what we want to explain is why the Tories got such a big majority, or why Labour’s seat total fell so low, the sub-2.5% swing seats aren’t the place to look. So we’ll eliminate those 19 seats from the first map, to give 29 gains instead of 48, of which the map shows 29 instead of 45 (the three southern seats omitted from the map are among the 19).
As for the “long-term Labour, vote share down in 2017” map, let’s take out the Labour holds – we’re not interested in those right now – and, again, take out the 19 sub-5%-majority seats. We’re left with a fairly sparse map showing only 20 seats.
And here are those two maps.
Spot the similarity.
As I said, there are 20 seats on the right-hand map and 29 on the left; the set of Tory gains from Labour in England overturning a majority greater than 5% isn’t identical with the set of long-term Labour seats where Labour’s vote share fell in 2017. But it’s close. The left-hand map (Tory gains against a >5% majority) includes all 20 of the seats in the right-hand map (long-term holds, relative vote share down in 2017); of the remaining nine, five are pale blue (only taken by Labour in 2017), three are mid-blue (1997 gains) and the ninth is grey (step forward Ivan Lewis).
My conclusion here is pretty much the same as the conclusion to the previous, big post (have you read the big post, by the way? recently? it’s revised and updated, you know). In five words, Red Wall: real but small.
The phenomenon people refer to as the Red Wall was the unexpected, large-scale loss of Labour votes to the Tories, apparently caused by long-term Labour voters deciding that they’d liked Labour in the old days but they couldn’t be doing with all this here political correctness, and taking place in the North the North-East and North-West the North-East, parts of the North-West and parts of Yorkshire the North-East, parts of the North-West and parts of Yorkshire, the East Midlands and some places around Birmingham the North-East, some of the more rural parts of the North-West and Yorkshire, the East Midlands, some places around Birmingham although not Birmingham itself, and also Stoke a whole bunch of places which really don’t have much in common other than being south of the border and north of Luton. I’m caricaturing, but I do actually think this is a real phenomenon: look at those two maps. But it’s only one phenomenon, and it wasn’t what won the 2019 election for the Tories – arguably it was only because the Tories were already winning the 2019 election that the Red Wall effect really kicked in.
If we’re interested in the Red Wall phenomenon, we’re interested in something that (a) genuinely happened and (b) happened up and down the country, but (c) only happened in a small number of places. Labour needs to make a lot of gains next time round, but whether it needs to make precisely those gains is more debatable – and whether the kind of Labour campaign that would win back Ashfield and Great Grimsby would win the country is very dubious indeed. Apart from anything else, look at the sub-5%-majority places that Labour did hold in 2019 – Portsmouth South, Bedford, Canterbury; look what happened to Labour’s vote share in 2017 in the south-east (scroll down, and brace yourself). If you were thinking tactically for Labour, which area would you concentrate on – the one where Labour lost vote share despite intensive campaigning and national media attention, or the one where Labour gained vote share with hardly anyone even noticing?
So if we are interested in the Red Wall phenomenon, at this stage we’re interested in it partly for purely historical reasons (something unusual did happen in those seats), and partly on a secondary tactical level. Nobody should be asking “how might learning from the Red Wall be useful for Labour?” – but “what errors might the belief that the Red Wall is useful for Labour lead to?” is an interesting and potentially useful question, as is “what biases and presuppositions are likely to have led people to believe Labour should learn from the Red Wall?”. And I think the answer is going to come from a closer look at those 50 seats. (Or 51 if you count Scunthorpe.)
The pollsters – J L Partners – hail from Downing Street, no less; James Johnson was previously a SpAd to Theresa May and Rory Stewart.
What I found particularly interesting about this was the reference to “45 Red Wall seats” – the constituencies in which the polling had been carried out, presumably. Could this be a definitive answer to the old question, what is the Red Wall?
Well, (a) it’s not that old a question, and (b) yes it could, sort of – although this is, to my knowledge, the fourth distinct version of the “Red Wall”, so it could all change again. (Update 15th February: it turns out that this was actually the sixth version; seebelow for details.)
Let’s go back a bit. (NB Some overlap with my earlier series of posts, but at least this way it’s all in one place.)
Red Wall v0: to August 2019
The Red Wall as we know it is the creation of a right-wing think-tanker, an FT writer who previously worked for the Telegraph and the Spectator and an FT dataviz specialist, with additional contributions by Downing Street advisors. And the Red Wall is something we didn’t know – at all – until relatively recently. Up to the middle of August 2019 – less than four months before the election where the Red Wall would feature so prominently – the Red Wall as a political concept didn’t exist; the only people who talked about a Red Wall on a regular basis were Wales football supporters (not shown here).
And then there was
Red Wall v1 (August 2019)
In August 2019, James Kanagasooriam of right-wing think tank Onward identified four groups of seats where the Conservative Party tended to under-perform relative to what the demographics of the area would lead one to expect. One of the four was
a huge “red wall” stretching from N Wales into Merseyside, Warrington, Wigan, Manchester, Oldham, Barnsley, Nottingham and Doncaster. When you talk about cultural barriers to voting Tory – this is where it is. This entire stretch shouldn’t be all Labour but is
This Tweet was accompanied by a map showing 46 constituencies. Removing one Lib Dem seat and a number of seats that had either changed hands multiple times or only been formed relatively recently – and where, either way, we can’t presume those “cultural barriers to voting Tory” applied – gave 39 seats. Here’s what happened to them in December 2019:
Five of the 39 went Conservative, one of them (Leigh, in paler blue) quite narrowly – and one of the remaining four was Bassetlaw (chequered), whose sitting MP had left the Labour Party and was actively campaigning against it at the time of the election. Cultural barriers one, demographics nil.
But the really odd thing about this, first version of the Red Wall, at least in retrospect, is how little traction it got: nobody really picked up on it at all.
Red Wall v2 (October 2019)
Not, that is, until the end of October, by which time the December election had already been called (and was less than six weeks away). It was then that Kanagasooriam – in the context of a report about something else entirely – revived the Red Wall; now it referred to
a belt of sixty seats in the North and Midlands which the Conservatives have never won. They include places like Wakefield, Great Grimsby and Penistone and Stockbridge. Termed elsewhere as the ‘Red Wall’ by the framework’s author James Kanagsooriam, it is made up of a mixture of constituencies which for demographic reasons have always been quite marginal but have consistently remained Labour; constituencies where the Conservatives significantly increased their vote share in 2017 but didn’t win; and a scattering of seats with five figure majorities but which could be become marginal because of voters’ strong pro-Brexit views.
This more expansively defined group was itself said to be one of three groups of seats which would be determinant of the election result, totalling 109 battleground seats – 60 ‘Red Wall’, 38 ‘Uniform National Swing’ and a cluster of eleven seats in Wales. It’s not clear which were seen as the Red Wall seats, though; while the JRF report listed all 109, it didn’t break them down into the three sub-groups. Sebastian Payne’s book Broken Heartlands does include a table supplied by Kanagasooriam and itemising the ‘Red Wall’ and ‘Uniform National Swing’ seats; however, the table only lists 43 ‘Red Wall’ seats, and several of those listed are not named in the JRF report. In search of a definitive list, I put the two lists together and took out any seat listed under ‘Uniform National Swing’ and anywhere south of the Midlands, then did a bit more tidying-up. It seemed to me that if we were going to talk about seats that the Conservatives have never won, “never” ought to mean something; strictly speaking a seat that was created in 2010 and won by the Tories in 2017 had never been won by the Tories up to that point, but it’s not the impression that word gives. So I removed any seat that had come into existence since 1983, and any seat that had been held by the Tories or Lib Dems at any time between 1983 and 2017.
At the end of all that I didn’t have a list of sixty seats, but I did have 45; and here they are. I give you the Red Wall, version 2, late October 2019. The dark blue seats (14 of them) are big Tory wins; the mid-blues (11) are narrow wins; the chequered area is Bassetlaw, whose sitting Labour MP was campaigning against the party by the time of the election; and the remaining 19 are bricks in the Red Wall that unsportingly stayed red.
It’s… not that much of a wall, really, is it? It’s an awfully long way from Birmingham Northfield to Blyth Valley – 230 miles, in fact – and neither of them has much in common with Blackpool South, Don Valley or Great Grimsby, or Workington for that matter. Apart from being (a) Labour seats up to 2017 and (b) Up North, that is.
Shortly afterwards it was decided – by Kanagasooriam, James Burn-Murdoch of the FT or both – that anything called a ‘wall’ really ought to look a bit like a continuous series of blocks leading from A to B. The FT duly publicised a third iteration of the Red Wall, which is partly a Lancashire/Yorkshire/Midlands slice out of the map above and partly… not. As you’re about to see.
Red Wall v3 (November 2019)
This is what the FT described as “a near-contiguous span of 50 Labour-held seats stretching from the Vale of Clwyd in North Wales to Great Grimsby on the East Coast”. The 43 English seats shown on the FT‘s accompanying map are above, colour-coded according to what would happen in December. Again, grey chequers indicate a seat whose former Labour MP was campaigning against the party; again, deep blue is a big Tory win (9 constituencies), the mid-blue is a narrow win (7) and the red are Labour holds (15). The remaining 12, in the pale blue, are seats that went Tory in 2019 but hadn’t consistently been Labour since 1983 – and consequently didn’t feature in previous versions of the Red Wall. The point of the Red Wall rhetoric, let’s not forget, was that these were Labour strongholds which were now tumbling due to the waning of tribal loyalties. The mid-blue seats – many of which are constituencies where the Tories squeaked a win, as parties having a good election campaign often do – are already a poor fit with this model; the pale blue seats depart from it altogether. In this iteration, “Red Wall” didn’t mean much more than “Conservative targets north of the Wash and south of Morecambe Bay”.
Red Wall v4 (December 2019)
(Updated February 2022) Up till now I’ve somehow missed this morning-after Telegraph story – variously headlined “The 24 Labour heartland seats lost to the Tories for the first time in decades” and “The 24 Labour heartland seats lost to the Tories for the first time” tout court (as we’ll see, the latter is actually more accurate). The seats (22 in England, two in Wales) are listed in a table headed “Fall of the Labour wall”, so I think this listing deserves its place in the genealogy of the Red Wall.
22 wins, right enough; but they weren’t all big wins, they weren’t all seats that had been Labour for longer than a decade or so, and some of them were won with assistance from the former MP. Also, with the exception of Stoke-on-Trent (whose politics have been decidedly troubled for some time), these constituencies look less like “Labour heartlands” than rural and semi-rural seats where Labour supporters had been in the majority for historical reasons. (Which, to be fair, was more or less what James Kanagasooriam was getting at to begin with, even if he later helped bend the concept out of shape.)
Red Wall v5 (The Definitive Red Wall)(September 2021)
(Updated February 2022) It’s been brought to my attention that James Kanagasooriam has not only identified the seats making up the Red Wall but explained how they were selected, in an article in Political Insight co-written with Elizabeth Simon and modestly entitled “Red Wall: The Definitive Description”. All right! Let’s get some political science on this thing!
The Red Wall, in this telling, began with a demographic model predicting the level of the Conservative vote in a given constituency – factors such as deprivation (negatively correlated), higher education (also negatively correlated but less strongly) and the proportion of residents in managerial positions (positive correlation). Constituencies not held by the Tories in 2017 were assessed according to whether they had an anomalously low score on this model, as well as three other factors: a Conservative vote share over 25% in 2017, a swing of over 5% to the Conservatives between 2010[sic] and 2017, and a greater than 55% Leave vote.
70 of the 269 eligible seats hit all four criteria. This group was then winnowed down by excluding seats outside England (and perhaps making other unspecified “geographic exclusions”), as well as excluding seats “deemed too unlikely to switch allegiance”; this gave 28 seats. From the pool of constituencies meeting only three of four factors, another 11 were “designated part of the Red Wall through qualitative selection” (Kanagasooriam doesn’t mention how many were in this pool); finally, “a further three seats, which met two or less of the criteria, were also included based on geographical proximity to other Red Wall seats”.
The 42 included the Speaker’s seat of Chorley; excluding Chorley gives 41 seats, as follows.
That’s 30 out of 41, although only 13 of the 30 are big (dark blue) wins – and again, the East Midlands excepted you’d be looking at that map a long time before you thought you were looking at a ‘wall’ of any kind.
In the discussion section of the paper, Kanagasooriam suggests that his results would have been even better if he’d trusted the data more: none of the three seats that were added on “geographical” grounds (despite only ticking one or two boxes) went to the Tories in 2017, while two of those that hit all four marks but were excluded as “unlikely to switch allegiance” – Leigh and Redcar – did. It’s nice to see a researcher own up to fudging the data, but Kanagasooriam’s suggestion that an unfudged version would have been more accurate isn’t borne out by the data he presents.
The problem is that, as soon as any judgment calls were made on inclusion or exclusion, the whole sample was fudged (to put it euphemistically). What we really need to know is the content (and hence the hit-rate) of all the subsamples – the 28 constituencies that were judged to be ‘true’ Red Wall seats; the 42 that weren’t despite hitting all four marks; the 11 that qualified on three criteria and were added to the sample; the unknown number that qualified on three criteria and weren’t added to the sample; and, of course, the three erroneous ‘geographical’ choices. If all the judgment calls had been omitted, Leigh and Redcar would certainly have been on the list, but none of the 11 added at the third stage would have been. In any case, the list would have numbered 70 constituencies – which, given that the Tories only made 48 gains from Labour in the whole of England, would be bound to bring down the Red Wall’s hit rate and hence its predictive accuracy.
Red Wall v6 (the pollsters’ Red Wall) (January 2022 and doubtless earlier)
So far the December election result has seen the Tories win 5 out of 39 Red Wall seats, 26 out of 45, 28 out of 43, 22 out of, er, 22, and 30 out of 41. The changing meaning of the concept is clearly closing in on the actual result – although the big, eye-popping, “dude where’s my core vote?” victories account for 3 of the 39, 14 of the 45, 8 of the 43, 12 of the 22 and 13 of the 41. (Needless to say, there have been varying degrees of overlap between the 39, the 45, the 43 and the 41.)
You may well be wondering how it can be that opinion polling shows the Tories potentially losing all but three of their 45 Red Wall seats. The three they’re projected to hang on to are familiar enough – Dudley North, Bassetlaw and Great Grimsby, or one former deep blue seat and two chequered in defectors’ grey (interesting in itself) – but where had J L Partners found another 42 Conservative gains? Particularly since, as just noted, the Tories only made 48 gains from Labour in the whole of England (and one loss)…
Hold on to that thought. Here’s the pollsters’ Red Wall.
The list of 45 seats published by the pollsters includes one in Wales (Delyn) which I’m ignoring. The other 44 are shown here, with the usual colour coding. And, wouldn’t you know it, the Tories won all 44! Anyone wondering if there was perhaps a touch of the Texas Sharpshooter about one of the earlier versions can relax – that’s all this is. Red Wall = Tory gain, Tory gain = Red Wall, with a handful of exceptions – in fact the only Tory gains in England not forming part of the Red Wall are Kensington, Stroud, Ipswich and Peterborough, which presumably weren’t considered “Northern” enough. (Scare quotes used because Peterborough is actually on this map – by latitude it’s slightly North of Birmingham.)
The phrase “Red Wall” now means nothing more than “one of the seats the Tories won from Labour in 2019” – which is to say, it means nothing.
Postscript: Is there a real Red Wall?
No. No, there isn’t. Stop it now. Put the psephological buzz-phrase down.
What there is – and what is quite interesting – is a relatively small group of seats which had genuinely been Labour for a long time, and which genuinely went Tory in a big way in 2019. The ‘deep blue’ seats in all the above maps are defined as long-term Labour seats where the 2019 Tory majority was 5% or more and the Labour vote had fallen by 10% or more relative to 2017 and the Labour vote was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001. These three criteria do seem to identify a real phenomenon, setting these seats apart from the ‘mid-blue’ seats (long-term Labour seats won by the Tories in 2019 but where one or more of those factors don’t apply). The highest Labour vote in 2019 in a ‘deep blue’ seat was 39.8%; the lowest Labour vote in a ‘mid-blue’ seat was 39.3%.
On investigating the deep-blue seats more closely I found that almost all of them showed a similar pattern over the previous three elections, with Labour’s margin over the Tories going down in both 2010 and – most unusually – 2017. There are, in point of fact, only 50 Labour constituencies (of 232) where Labour’s margin fell in 2017 – anyone who looked at that election with a degree of objectivity would have to say that 2017 was a good result in lots of ways (as long as they can silence the nagging voice saying yeah but we didn’t win did we…).
Here are those 50 seats.
Key: as before, except that seats with defectors aren’t singled out any more. There’s also one seat – Scunthorpe – in deep purple; this was a ‘deep blue’ where Labour’s margin over the Tories didn’t go down between 2015 and 2017 (it went up by 0.05%).
What does this tell us, though? I think it tells us that, while substantial numbers of people in the East Midlands and the North East (and a couple of other areas) didn’t really feel the love for Corbyn, this only created the opportunity for a major (local) political upset when other factors were present. In a previous post I suggested that the distinctive characteristics of the ‘deep blue’ constituencies were the presence of an sizeable anti-system, “none of the above” protest vote, together with the legitimation of the far Right as a vehicle for protest votes. Both of these localised trends – established in those seats since the New Labour years – made it possible for substantial numbers of voters to switch from the Lib Dems to UKIP in 2015, and for the Conservatives to attract a majority of those voters in 2017. This led to a reduced Labour majority in those seats – and a lot of publicity for some of the affected MPs, who blamed the result on the new leader (although, ironically, under a more ‘establishment’ leader than Corbyn the minority of anti-system voters who returned to Labour might have been much smaller). In 2019, Labour’s Brexit positioning left it looking like the ‘establishment’ party, standing in the way of the Tories’ endorsement of the revolt of 2016; as a result it lost whatever ‘protest vote’ credibility it still had, and lost ground to both the Tories and the Brexit Party. The result, in those 17 constituencies, was a dramatic collapse in the Labour vote.
But note: in those 17 constituencies. The Tories made 47 net gains in England; if they’d made 30 in the entire country they would still have come out with a solid majority. The map immediately above tells us where in England Labour’s margin over the Tories fell – against the current – in 2017, whether or not the Tories won those seats two years later and if so, how well; the map above it tells us where in England the Tories won a Labour seat in 2019, and what kind of a win it was. There’s a lot of overlap, but there are also an awful lot of differences; and lots of the wins – enough wins to make an election victory – were narrow, chancy, unpredictable wins. (They still count, that’s the thing.)
What this whole exercise tells us is that the Red Wall is useful as a concept if you define it tightly enough, but that what it’s useful for is telling us why Labour lost some of the seats it did in 2019 and, perhaps, where similar factors might apply in future. What it definitely doesn’t tell us is “why Labour lost”; this is a small, untypical group of seats, meaning that any reorientation of the party based on the idea of “winning back the Red Wall” would be disastrous.
We can also see that, in practice, the concept of “Red Wall” has steadily converged on that of “Conservative target seat”, to the point where it’s now more or less synonymous with “Conservative gains from Labour in 2019 in England”. (It’s precisely synonymous with “Conservative gains from Labour in 2019 in England, north of 52.4 degrees N, with the exception of Peterborough”, but that’s not quite as snappy.)
Once more with feeling: there Is No Red Wall. If you mean “seats the Conservatives gained from Labour”, say “seats the Conservatives gained from Labour”. If you mean “longstanding Labour seats in the North and the Midlands that the Conservatives gained from Labour by unexpectedly large margins”, say that – but be aware that:
The North is a very big place; it’s 140 miles from Manchester to Newcastle, 115 to Grimsby, 90 to Birmingham. What do you suppose all those places have in common? (Similar distances from London would get you to Southampton, Hereford and, well, Birmingham.)
Our electoral system paints a constituency in the colour of the largest single sub-group of voters, no more and no less than that. If a 38%/42% split between Conservative and Labour at one election turns into 42%/38% at the next, the constituency has certainly gone to the Tories, but the Labour voters haven’t – or rather, only some of them have, and they’re not necessarily the most representative ones.
The story of those longstanding… gained… unexpectedly large seats is an interesting one, but it doesn’t really tell us about anywhere else (e.g. The North, or even The East Midlands), or about anything else (e.g. the overall election result).
Those places have their own political history, which you can dip a toe in by looking at previous election results. You may be surprised by what you see; you may not like what you see. (“Cultural conservatism” doesn’t just mean you aren’t a fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race.)
Not everyone who offers Labour bad news and hard truths is doing so because they want Labour to win. The party that doesn’t have any bad news to deal with – the party whose common sense is the other party’s hard truths – starts at an advantage.
Generalising about Labour strategy on the basis of an imaginary version of the ‘Red Wall’, what it stands for and why it supposedly fell into the arms of the Tories (suit and tie, support our boys and God save the Queen) would be idiotic: basing strategy on fantasy can’t possibly work.
Generalising about Labour strategy on the basis of an accurate understanding of the ‘deep blue’ seats, what voters there believe in and why they actually switched to the Tories would be cynical and unprincipled. And – again – it couldn’t possibly work, outside those seats; it wouldn’t even be a recipe for winning back the other 31 losses or holding Labour’s existing seats, let alone making the additional gains the party needs.
What Labour needs above all is to set its own direction, without looking over its collective shoulder at how policy X might play with demographic Y. A good start would be to stop listening to people offering to feed this habit – and to remember that those people aren’t always friends of the party.
Earlier this year our Labour Party branch held its AGM (online). The main business of the evening was electing officers, or rather re-electing officers: of nine elected positions, seven office-holders were re-elected and an eighth position was taken by someone who had held other positions in previous years (eight other positions, to be precise, in the previous five years). Even the sixteen positions of delegate to the constituency party were mostly taken either by officers or by people who had served as delegate multiple times before.
The secretary, in particular, was elected to the post for the fifth successive time. Back in 2017, when the Left took a run at getting some positions in this branch, we stood a candidate for secretary, but they didn’t really have a chance: incumbents have many advantages over any challenger, and an incumbent secretary has more than most. Everyone who goes to so much as one party meeting knows the secretary; everyone knows he’s efficient and even-tempered, keeps things running and doesn’t wind anyone up. Which is all true. He’s also a member of a clique dedicated to keeping things much as they are, with offices shared between a rotating cast of familiar faces and with the Left kept firmly at arm’s length – but it’s hard to get the vote out on that basis, not least because any Left candidate would need to be able to show that they had the qualities to be a competent secretary. Which I’m sure lots of people do, but it’s difficult for any of them to demonstrate it to members of this branch without first getting elected to something.
A few weeks ago the branch was called on to re-select – or de-select – one of our three councillors. (The ward used to be competitive between Labour and the Lib Dems, but then came the Coalition, which had the usual effect on the Lib Dem vote; our councillors have all been Labour since 2011.) It was the turn of a long-serving, well-liked and not particularly right-wing councillor, and nobody was very surprised when reselection was a formality. What did come as a surprise was the announcement soon afterwards that one of the other two councillors was standing down for personal reasons; a by-election would be called, and we needed to elect a candidate to stand in it. Word was that the favoured candidate was our secretary.
A shortlisting meeting was duly announced to the membership, with a lead time of a few minutes over 96 hours; the same email also announced a selection meeting, to take place four days after that. Seven days, not four, is the minimum interval laid down in party rules; however, the rules also stipulate that the Manchester party hierarchy – like the NEC nationally – can waive requirements like this if it sees fit. I was surprised to see that a list of six candidates emerged from the shortlisting meeting – our secretary, a Left candidate and four others – but less surprised to hear, on the night of the selection meeting, that three of them had withdrawn.
In the mean time candidates had been given an opportunity to send out emails to all members – and, two days after the shortlisting meeting, our secretary and the Left candidate both did so. The Left candidate set out an impressive record of campaigning and activism, both in the party and in the local community. Our secretary for his part offered us a double-sided full-colour flyer, complete with pictures of himself out and about in the area, testimonials from colleagues within the party (“he will be a fresh face on the council and a brilliant councillor”) and five pledges to his (future) electorate – although on closer inspection these consisted largely of itemising the people he intended to “work with” (“our current councillors”, “local traders, businesses and the local Traders Association”, “officers at Manchester City Council”, etc). We also learned that he had been a caseworker for the local MP for the last six years. (A friend asked the Manchester party whether other candidates would have the chance to send out something like this, and was essentially told that there was nothing stopping them – with the strong implication that their candidate and ours started out on a completely even footing, and that neither had any materials or facilities available to them other than what they could rustle up in two days and pay for personally.)
At the selection meeting, two days later, quite a long time was spent on checking the credentials of everyone involved, by the novel method of having one person compile a handwritten list of names (in the order they logged in) and then call them out for checking by two other people who had the membership list, while a third person kept an eye on the chat and called out anything that cropped up there. (Strange that more people don’t attend these meetings, really.) When all that had been sorted out, the three remaining candidates each gave a brief address and answered a selection of questions. Questions on social care and on a local green space campaign gave both the Left candidate and the third candidate the chance to demonstrate principled commitment and engage with the detail of what’s possible locally, identifying specific actions which the council could take. A question on the EHRC report seemed less directly relevant – indeed, one Jewish party member objected to having their identity put up for debate at a council candidate selection meeting – and could have been designed to put a left-winger on the spot. Our Left candidate trod a careful line, neither minimising the problem of antisemitism in the party and society nor acquiescing in the conflation of anti-semitism with anti-Zionism. The third candidate’s answer seemed designed mostly to avoid the issue entirely, although they did begin with the curious assertion that the pandemic had made racism and antisemitism worse. (Whereas in fact antisemitism stopped being a problem in April 2020, of course.)
As for our secretary, his answers to the substantive local questions could not have been blander or more vague; his stress throughout was on damping down expectations of how much could realistically be achieved, and the need to “work with” people – and charities, and businesses – in order to deliver even that. He only really displayed any passion on the question relating to the EHRC report: those were dark times for Labour… how far an anti-racist party had fallen… he was proud to have put his name to a motion to affiliate to the Jewish Labour Movement… it was imperative for us to build bridges with the Jewish community… anyone who didn’t agree with that objective, frankly, he didn’t think they belonged in the party. We shall see if anything comes of that; all I’ll say here is that, considering the high probability of the axe falling on anti-Zionist Jewish socialists (here as elsewhere), talking about swinging it in the name of “the Jewish community” is a bad joke.
So the Left candidate performed well, at least in terms of having good ideas, being on top of the issues and handling a tricky question on the fly. The third candidate was a bit more vague and waffly, and the secretary didn’t really cover himself in glory at all – unless what you want from your local Labour councillor is extreme gradualism and a staunch commitment to one particular position in a century-long dispute within the British Jewish community. Would the voters be swayed?
Well, what do you think?
It was at our last council candidate selection meeting that the similarity between our local party meetings and a wedding first struck me. There were three candidates that night, too; the people the local establishment had turned out voted for their candidate, the people we’d turned out voted for the Left candidate, and the third candidate basically got the votes of the people she’d come with. It would have saved a lot of time to cancel the speeches and just station ushers on the doors where people came in – left-wing challenger side or centre-right establishment side, sir?
I wouldn’t have thought that the voting this time round could be even more polarised, but it was: the Left candidate got about a third of the votes, the secretary got two-thirds and the third candidate got… one vote. Second preferences did not need to be counted. This, for a safe seat on the council; this, for a candidate explicitly offering business as usual (with a side order of war on the Left); this, in one of the biggest ward branches in the city. All this, in a meeting taking place a week and a day after the vacancy was first announced to branch members, and attended by approximately one-eighth – maybe even less – of those members.
And that, children, is where Labour councillors come from.
UPDATE: 'Soft left' NEC member Ann Black has added her signature to a letter raising concerns over the way the ban on groups is being implemented by the party: https://t.co/Q37YKQVYcy
Here’s what I know about politics: people pull strokes.
If you’re working in an organisation like the Labour Party, there’s a gap, in terms of goals and ideals – a normative gap – between what you say is happening and what’s actually going on in procedural or institutional terms. Narrow votes are a particularly glaring example of this gap: you say that the party is united behind your programme, and maybe it is – or maybe you took a vote on the programme committee, your programme won by eight votes to seven and that’s that. Thinly-attended meetings are another: you say you’ve got a large and lively membership firmly committed to Labour victory, but on closer inspection the ‘large’ membership is mainly on paper, the ‘lively’ refers to the two or three new faces who always seem to appear for doorknocking sessions, and everyone’s ‘firmly’ committed because your faction has a lock on any decision-making meetings.
Looking back on Corbynism – a phrase that’s almost physically painful to write – I think a large part of the Right’s failure to comprehend the phenomenon, and a large part of our indignation and outrage in response, had to do with the unexpected narrowness of this gap. We said that there were thousands of us and we were united, and they automatically translated this into a more mundane procedural reality – some bunch of Trots has pushed this whole thing through and got a load of kids to sign up to the mailing list… Hence 2017, of course; by 2019 they’d realised that there were thousands of us and we were united, and stronger measures needed to be taken.
But there’s also another normative gap, between what you say you’re doing in procedural terms and what you’re actually getting away with. Rules very often aren’t written down, and when they are they need to be interpreted; applying a rule at all involves applying a secondary rule of equity and fair play, to the effect of Any rule should be enforced in all cases where it applies, and only those cases. How effectively that rule gets applied is more important than the content of any written rule.
Of course, rules don’t exist, at least in the sense of tangible things in the world: if you’re physically unable to do something, your behaviour in that respect is not being controlled by a rule, and vice versa. (The shopkeeper who takes alcohol off sale outside licensing hours is following a rule; the punter who doesn’t try to buy it in those times isn’t.) Rules only exist to the extent that people observe them – and to the extent that they expect others to observe them and apply pressure on others to observe them. This is particularly true of that secondary rule, the rule that rules should be applied fairly. Anyone who, as an individual, visibly breaks the rules, or pulls strokes in selectively applying the rules, will tend to get stopped by their peers – not because those people are high-minded idealists, but because they know that they would get stopped if they did the same thing.
Rules don’t exist as tangible objects, so people can ignore them – the ‘fair play’ rule in particular – without any immediate or automatic consequences. But rules do exist, in the sense that everyone internalises them and brings pressure to bear on anyone who flouts them – the ‘fair play’ rule in particular. Only when somebody is powerful enough not to fear other people’s social pressure can they really get away with ignoring the rules – and very few individuals are that powerful, at least not for very long.
A group of people, on the other hand, is insulated from social pressure, at least from outside the group. If a group of people, with shared goals in the longer term and shared enemies in the short term, can apply rules to its advantage, there’s every reason to expect that they won’t apply those rules fairly. Attempts to bring social pressure to bear on the group are unlikely to have any effect; all that anyone outside the group can really do is try to stop them. Stop them collectively and stop them altogether, that is, not just stop the bad apples within the group who are applying the rules badly; it’s up to the group to do that – and they’re not likely to do it for as long as applying the rules badly works to the group’s benefit.
This, then, is the first lesson from the story linked to above. If you pass a rule saying that Socialist Appeal is proscribed and anyone involved with it can be expelled, and people are then expelled for being seen at a public meeting held by Socialist Appeal before it was proscribed, it’s perfectly clear that this is not a fair or appropriate application of the rule: to that extent Ann Black is quite correct. The question is, given the factional makeup of the current Labour leadership, what did anyone think was going to happen when that rule was passed? The disciplinary apparatus of the Labour Party hasn’t gone rogue, despite appearances; the people involved are only acting this wildly because they’re acting with factional, and leadership, endorsement. Social pressure won’t reach them; they can only be stopped.
How to stop them is another question – and this is the second lesson. The current frenzy of expulsions wouldn’t be happening if those responsible couldn’t get away with it. If we could stop them, we would have stopped them by now; in particular, if organising against expulsions could stop them, it would have worked by now. (One of the organisations proscribed was Labour Against The Witchhunt, for goodness’ sake.) These expulsions are a kind of random, symbolic punishment beating for the Left, administered in the hope of getting us to shut up and/or leave. We can resist – at least by not leaving – but we can’t, at the moment, stop them happening.
There are times when bullies overreach, usually because their victims are stronger than they wish to acknowledge. That’s not what’s going on now, though. This is just plain, ordinary bullying, and it’s being done because we’re weak. Nothing is going to change for the better until that changes.
On April the 6th, as you’ll doubtless recall, I started a series of posts called In Search of the Red Wall, in which I was sceptical of the thesis that Labour had lost in 2019 because, ultimately, we’d lost the old working class vote, and specifically because we’d lost a huge tranche of culturally conservative “heartland” seats in the North of England. Having traced the development of the concept – which followed a surprisingly tortuous and disjointed path – and shown how fatuous it basically was, I concluded by proposing to analyse what had actually happened in 2019.
This takes us up to the 21st of April. On the 28th I returned to the topic and began the explanation of what happened – and what didn’t happen – in December 2019, in a post ending with these pregnant words:
Something big happened to Labour’s vote in 2019, and it happened right across the country – and it wasn’t a swing to the Tories, despite the Tories benefiting from it in a big way.
But what was it?
Here we are in June – not even the beginning of June – and still no ‘part 2’. I will get to it, and I have got some idea of what I’m going to say – at least, I’ve got some numbers, and any amount of charts – but I’ve not found it easy to get around to, and not just because I’ve had other stuff on.
I suspect that one underlying reason is the reason why I didn’t do much to analyse the figures straight after December 2019: it’s just too damn depressing. And not ‘depressing’ in the ‘why I’d rather not watch Schindler’s List with my takeaway’ sense – depressing in the will-depleting, immobilising, what was I trying to do never mind don’t suppose it matters sense of the word.
Which is also, frankly, why I haven’t been having a lot to do with our local Labour Party. Last year – just pre-pandemic – I wrote about the ward AGM which had been due in the Autumn of 2019 and was postponed to February 2020. I went along, but I wasn’t hugely impressed:
several officers either stayed in post or moved sideways, and several posts were uncontested. … looked at from outside it might seem odd that, in a ward branch with a membership nudging four figures – the size of some entire CLPs – it’s only possible to find one person interested in any of the officer positions.
We met in the same place as last year, and I think we were pretty much the same people as last year; we were certainly in very similar numbers to last year, viz. around 70 … Which also helps explain the uncontested elections. Seven days (the notice period required when calling a branch AGM) is not a very long time – and membership secretaries don’t hand out contact lists to anyone who might want to do a quick bit of phone-banking. This is all according to the rules, of course, but these ‘home team’ advantages (and others created by officers’ role in the AGM itself) mean that the likelihood of anyone disrupting the orderly self-perpetuation of the dominant faction is pretty slim. … The result is a kind of political Sealed Knot, an annual reunion of the office-holders and their factional activists on one side and the diehards of the excluded group(s) on the other. They might as well take allegiances at the door, like ushers at a wedding, and declare the results straight away.
This year… sorry, it just looked too much like hard work. But it looks as if I’m not the only member locally who felt like that. The email announcing this year’s results opens
Thank you to the fifty members who attended our online Annual General Meeting on Monday 7 June 2021. It was great to see so many people.
Oh, the people!
Viewed with a colder eye, even without the barrier to participation of having to turn out and sit in a church hall, attendance was down from 70 to 50 – which is to say, down from about one in 14 of the 2020 membership to about one in 20. (Although the 2021 membership may also be lower, of course.)
As for the business of the meeting, here’s a summary:
Chair: re-elected x1, former x4
Vice Chair: re-elected x1, former x3
Vice Chair: former x8
Secretary: re-elected x4
Treasurer: re-elected x3, former x1
Membership Secretary: re-elected x3, former x3
Women’s Officer: new
Political Education Officer: re-elected x1, former x2
Diversity Officer: re-elected x1
Delegates to the constituency party General Committee: 16 candidates, all elected unopposed (Chair, both Vice-Chairs, Treasurer, Membership Secretary, Diversity Officer, plus two delegates re-elected x4, four re-elected x2 and four new members).
“Re-elected” = re-elected to the post; x2 (etc) = re-elected for the 2nd time (etc); “former” = held one or more elected post in one or more previous year. (My data only goes back to 2016; the re-election counts for some of these candidates will certainly be too low.) Note also that last year’s GC delegates included five members from the Left of the party, none of whom stood this time – so the four new members are unlikely to add to the ideological diversity of the delegation.
It’s not, as they say, a good look. As I said in 2020,
what kind of membership are we building, if members keep seeing the same names in the same posts, or else (for a change) the same names in different posts? … I’ve always believed that uncontested elections and musical-chairs rotation of posts were signs of a local party in decline – not of one that’s going from strength to strength, as ours apparently is. Perhaps the problem is precisely the apparent absence of factions – or rather, the impossibility of multiple factions arising when a single faction dominates for long enough. Perhaps what we’re seeing is how unchallenged factional dominance sows the seeds of decline.
It’s certainly not motivating.
So, anyway – what happened in 2019? One contributing factor to Labour’s defeat in 2019, it seems to me, is that self-perpetuating cliques like the one I’ve just described threw away the enormous asset created by the party’s increased membership, because it wasn’t an asset that served their factional purposes – and threw away any slim chance to get a Labour government elected, because that wouldn’t have served their factional purposes either. In this they acted entirely logically – mobilisation of the membership would inevitably have threatened their position, and another 2017 (or better) would certainly have increased the demand for mobilisation – and really, all they can be blamed for is valuing local posts within a political party more highly than the possibility of a Labour government.
But that’s an impressionistic explanation, and one from a source that may not be entirely reliable (embitterment can do that). What else happened in 2019?
THE STORY SO FAR: The “Red Wall” was defined, in October 2019, as “a near-contiguous span of 50 Labour-held seats stretching from the Vale of Clwyd in North Wales to Great Grimsby on the East Coast”: Conservative target seats in the North West, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, in other words. In December 2019, the Conservatives did in fact make several gains in this belt of seats. Thanks in part to an earlier use of the “Red Wall” label – which had defined the Red Wall as a belt of Labour constituencies with demographics typical of Conservative seats – it has been widely assumed that “Red Wall” seats were solid Labour seats, and that the very culture and traditions that had made them Labour had somehow made them all the more vulnerable to the Conservatives. In reality, most Conservative gains – in the Red Wall and elsewhere – were either marginals without a long Labour history or were won narrowly and/or with a relatively small drop in the Labour vote; in other words, they were precisely the kind of gain we would expect a party to make in a good election campaign, without any need for a more elaborate explanation (and 2019 was, for the Conservatives, a very good election campaign).
So, was there ever a Red Wall?
Here, again, is a table summarising the characteristics of Labour’s losses in England in 2019. In ascending order, group 3 are relative marginals, which had changed hands at least twice since 1997; group 2 are long-term Labour seats, won narrowly in 2019; and group 1 are long-term Labour seats, won solidly (a Tory majority of 5% or more and a drop in the Labour vote of 10% or more relative to 2017 and a Labour vote lower than at any time since (and including) 2001).
Now groups 2 and 3 contain 31 seats, group 1 17; since the Tories went into the 2019 election nine seats short of a majority, groups 2 and 3 on their own would have sufficed for a solid parliamentary majority. Which in turn means that the factors which produced Tory victories in the seats in groups 2 and 3 are the only factors we need to consider, if we’re asking how the election was won.
I think that needed restating. But still… what did happen in group 1?
1
2
3
Lowest Labour vote %, 2019
24.4
39.3
36.9
Highest Labour vote %, 2019
39.8
44.5
46
Average Labour vote %, 2019
34.8
41.7
41.1
Biggest Tory majority in %, 2019
31.4
12.6
15.7
Biggest drop in Labour vote %, 2017-19
24.9
15.7
18.1
That first column makes pretty horrific reading. There were seventeen Labour seats – Labour since 1997 or longer – where Labour got between 24.4% and 39.8% of the vote in 2019, the Labour vote having fallen by somewhere between 10% and 25%, and where the Tories took the seat by a majority of somewhere between 5% and 31.4%. These figures bear no resemblance to the figures in the second and third columns. There’s something going on here – something that needs explaining.
One final map. Here they are: here are all the Red Wallgroup 1 seats, from Workington to West Bromwich.
Seventeen seats: a single block of five seats, plus three pairs and six on their own. A wall it ain’t; James Kanagasooriam’s original intuition – that constituencies in the same region might have a shared set of cultural values, so that a shift in that culture could see several seats at once going to the Conservatives – only looks like being borne out in Derbyshire (and even there neighbouring constituencies – Doncaster, Chesterfield – seem to have remained immune).
Something happened in these constituencies, though, and something worth investigating – arguably all the more so given how widely separated they are. You would not think to look at them that Newcastle-under-Lyme and Bishop Auckland were sisters under the skin, or Don Valley and Dudley North. But perhaps there’s something going on out there.
Here are some election results, going back to 2005.
Here’s what happened in Don Valley.
In 2005 – the post-Iraq election – Labour held the seat easily, taking over half the votes with the remainder divided between the Tories and a substantial Lib Dem vote. (As this was, by some way, the highest Liberal [Democrat] vote in the constituency since 1983, it’s reasonable to assume that the circumstances of 2005 had something to do with it – and the key circumstance at that election was surely Iraq.)
In 2010 – in the dying days of New Labour, post-Blair and mid-crash – the Tory and Lib Dem votes held firm, but Labour lost about a quarter of its vote to anti-political protest candidates of the Right and far Right: UKIP (in purple) took 4% of the vote, the BNP and the English Democrats (in dark blue) another 9%. As a result, Labour’s lead over the Tories – the line overlaid on the chart – fell from above 20% to below 10%.
In 2015 – the post-Coalition, pre-Brexit election – the voters punished the incumbent government again: the Tory vote fell slightly but the Lib Dems, no longer appearing a principled alternative to the main two parties, saw their vote collapse. The Labour vote recovered substantially, but the main beneficiary was, again, on the far Right: UKIP ran the Tories a close third place. The rise in the Labour vote share and the fall in the Tories’ (to the benefit of UKIP) meant that Labour’s lead over the Tories rose again.
In 2017 – the election of maximum polarisation – the Labour and Tory candidates were the only ones that counted; the Lib Dems were squeezed further, and UKIP didn’t even stand. The Labour vote recovered again, taking about a third of the 2015 UKIP vote, but the Tories took the other two-thirds and recovered more strongly. As a result, while the Labour vote share rose again – to reach the levels of 2001 and 1997 – the Labour lead over the Tories fell again.
Lastly, in 2019 – the election we may as well just call The Disaster – the Tories’ vote share held firm at its 2017 level, while Labour lost a sliver to the Lib Dems and a substantial chunk to the Brexit Party (still in purple). As a result, of course, Labour lost the seat.
This is quite a simplistic reading of the data; doubtless there were cross-currents and three-way shifts going on as well, particularly in 2010 and 2015. But let’s assume that I’ve just described the main trends. If that’s the case, a few conclusions seem to follow.
There’s a substantial anti-political, “none of the above” vote in this seat: 10-20% of the vote at every election since 2001
The Lib Dems profited from this, until they didn’t: joining the government was the kiss of death, and the Lib Dems have effectively been irrelevant (at least in this seat) since 2010
Parties of the Right and extreme Right are legitimate in this seat as a repository for anti-political votes; the strength of the BNP and ED vote in 2010, and the extent to which UKIP built on this, is not to be underestimated
UKIP/BXP is strategically ambivalent, operating as a pure protest vote (2010, 2019), as a more respectable alternative to the far Right (2015) and as an ante-chamber to voting Conservative (2015, 2019(?))
Without Corbyn, the 2017 result would have been much worse for Labour: Labour’s acceptance of Brexit and Corbyn’s image as an anti-system outsider both prevented the 2015 UKIP vote transferring to the Tories en masse
However, 2017 looked worse than 2015 for the sitting MP (Caroline Flint), as Labour won by a much narrower margin; this supported the narrative that a decline in Labour’s vote had continued or even accelerated under Corbyn (whereas in reality it had begun to be reversed)
What lost the seatin 2019 was the strength of the anti-system vote up to 2015, the Tories’ success in converting 2015’s UKIP protest vote to 2017 Conservatives, and Labour’s inability in 2019 to pre-empt the appeal of the BXP protest vote, due to the ambiguity of Labour’s Brexit positioning and the tarnishing of Corbyn’s image.
So that’s Don Valley. One down, sixteen to go! Hope you’re sitting comfortably. Here’s what happened in Wolverhampton North East:
Well, that’s saved me some typing. There are a couple of differences with Don Valley: UKIP did stand in 2017, and the Brexit Party weren’t significant in 2019 – Labour lost a sliver each to the Lib Dems and BXP, and a substantial chunk to the Tories (whose vote rose substantially from 2017). So there’s one conclusion that needs modifying:
What lost the seatin 2019 was the strength of the anti-system vote up to 2015, the Tories’ success in converting 2015’s UKIP protest vote to 2017 Conservatives, the Conservatives’ manipulation of the Brexit crisis so as to present a vote for the government as a protest vote, and Labour’s inability in 2019 to pre-empt the appeal of the pro-Brexit protest vote, due to the ambiguity of Labour’s Brexit positioning and the tarnishing of Corbyn’s image.
But otherwise it all looks pretty similar (check out the ‘Labour lead’ line). How about… let’s head up to the other end of the country and check out Workington (where men are men).
This is getting spooky. How about Blackpool South?
(Checks notes)… yep. (Note that the fash were already standing a candidate in 2005. We should have taken this stuff more seriously.)
Great Grimsby?
One more qualification: Labour took less than 50% of the vote in 2005. Still a pretty solid majority, though. Labour heartland innit.
Dudley North (Ian Austin’s old seat)?
That’s a 9.7% vote for the BNP in 2005; in the neighbouring constituency of West Bromwich West they got 9.9%. (If I ran the Labour Party, having a fascist party retain its deposit at an election in a Labour constituency would be grounds for deselection; it doesn’t exactly suggest an assertive local party.) Exactly the same trends as the others, though.
How about that other odd couple I mentioned earlier, Bishop Auckland and Newcastle-under-Lyme? Let’s take them both together.
That’s different at least – in both of these seats, instead of rising in 2015, the Labour lead over the Tories falls at all three elections from 2010 to 2017. Does this suggest a different narrative or other conclusions?
In 2005 Labour held the seat easily, taking over 40% of the votes with the remainder divided between the Tories and a substantial Lib Dem vote.
In 2010 the Tory and Lib Dem votes held firm, but Labour lost about a quarter of its vote to anti-political protest candidates of the Right and far Right.
In 2015 the Tory vote fell slightly but the Lib Dems saw their vote collapse. The Labour vote recovered substantially, but the main beneficiary was UKIP.
In 2017 the Labour vote recovered again, taking about a third of the 2015 UKIP vote, but the Tories took the other two-thirds and recovered more strongly.
In 2019 the Tories’ vote share held firm at its 2017 level (or rose), while Labour lost a sliver to the Lib Dems and a substantial chunk to the Brexit Party (and/or the Tories).
The big difference is 2015 (perhaps unsurprisingly); far from a drop in the Tory vote and a substantial rise in Labour’s, these two seats saw a rise in both main parties’ votes, with the Tories’ actually rising more than Labour’s. The overall picture is so similar, though – and the numbers involved (as we’ll see) so small – that I’m tempted to call local factors in aid. What do we call a local Labour Party that can’t make political capital out of five years of Liberal/Tory austerity, and/or can’t put boots on the ground at the subsequent election?
Otherwise, the same conclusions seem to apply:
There’s a substantial anti-political, “none of the above” vote in all of these seats
The Lib Dems profited from this until 2010, but have been irrelevant since then
Parties of the Right and extreme Right are legitimate in these seats as a repository for anti-political votes
UKIP/BXP is ambivalent: a protest vote, an alternative to the far Right and an ante-chamber to the Tories
Without Corbyn, the 2017 result would have been much worse
However, 2017 looked worse than 2015 for the sitting MP, as Labour won by a much narrower margin
Most importantly – and this would seem to apply to all the seats we’ve looked at –
What lost these seatsin 2019 was the strength of the anti-system vote up to 2015, the Tories’ success in converting 2015 UKIP protest voters to 2017 Conservatives, the Conservatives’ manipulation of the Brexit crisis so as to present a vote for the government as a protest vote, and Labour’s inability in 2019 to pre-empt the appeal of the BXP (and Conservative) protest vote, due to the ambiguities of Labour’s Brexit positioning and to the tarnishing of Corbyn’s image.
So that’s it – that’s your Red Wall. We can call off the dogs: that’s where it went, that’s how it was lost.
Oh, didn’t I say? It’s not just the eight(!) seats shown above; I’ve looked at voting patterns for all seventeen of the “deep purple”, “group 1” seats up above – which is to say, all the longterm Labour seats that Labour lost heavily in 2019. Twelve of them follow the first set of trends above, the “Dudley North” or “Don Valley” model; another four follow the “Bishop Auckland” pattern. (In the seventeenth – Scunthorpe – Labour’s lead over the Tories was (slightly) higher in 2017 than in 2015; that wasn’t an uncommon occurrence generally, but Scunthorpe’s the only “group 1” seat where it happened.)
NEXT: Yes, but is this unusual? And does it matter?
In the next post I’ll get into some analysis of what I’m going to be calling the real Red Wall – which is neither red nor a wall, but what else is new? Before that, a confession and a reality check.
First, the confession: I’ve been avoiding saying very much about “the Red Wall” with the current connotationsof that phrase. This hasn’t made the argument I want to develop any easier to articulate. However, when myths are abundant it’s important not to add to them – and it’s almost impossible to say anything about the “Red Wall” without at least perpetuating some myth or other. And myths about the way people think and behave are extraordinarily powerful: they tell people not only what to look for, but how to understand what they find.
That’s not to say that what people look for and find isn’t real – it is; that’s the problem. It’s a standing joke on the Left that the rank-and-file workers quoted in the party press always turn out to have unusually clear and well-articulated views on the class struggle, but the joke only goes so far: perhaps “Jim Slack, rank-and-file member of the Fire Brigades Union” is better known to you and me as Jim Slack, local branch secretary of the Uniquely Correct Trotskyist Party, but the guy still is a firefighter. Even if you picked a rank-and-file union member completely at random, you’d have some chance of picking a Uniquely Correct Trotskyist – and if you went out looking for an articulate and committed trade unionist, the odds would shorten quite dramatically. Whether Jim is a typical trade unionist is another question, but nobody asked that – we wanted a union member, we got a union member, and here’s what our union member said. (Apparently the perspectives of the Uniquely Correct Trotskyist Party are, in fact, uniquely correct. Who knew?)
The mainstream press, of course, does exactly the same thing, although they’re considerably more likely to go looking for devotees of Farage and Johnson than of Marx and Lenin. What you look for you will, with a bit of persistence, usually find; what you don’t look for, you almost certainly won’t. As I wrote shortly after the 2017 election,
Any one of us can assemble a mental image of the white working-class voter motivated by social conservatism and unavowed racism. It’s a social type we’ve become familiar with through all those endless UKIP/Le Pen road trips and exposés, but – more importantly – it’s a type that we already knew about; it goes back to Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death, and to the dockers marching for Enoch. But here’s the thing: we can just as easily assemble a mental image of the working-class voter demanding better pay and conditions, the young idealist getting fired up by radical ideas, the middle-class liberal getting involved in campaigning and moving leftwards … All those social types were right there in the collective consciousness; if John Harris wasn’t going to go out and find them, at least Owen Jones could have had a go. But nobody did; everyone assumed that those people weren’t out there any more, just like they assumed that the working people of Britain had had their heads turned by Farage and Brexit.
I’m sure there are people out there who fit the “Red Wall voter” template – by which I mean (he added reluctantly) socially-conservative voters, middle-aged or older, whose loyalty to Labour went back decades but was associated with attitudes and beliefs for which Labour no longer stood under Corbyn’s leadership (and perhaps still doesn’t under Starmer), as well as with a class identity which for them had grown less salient and/or meaningful, so that they could switch to voting Conservative en masse without any perceived transformation of their beliefs and values, turning Labour strongholds into safe Conservative seats as they went. I’m sure you can find people like that to talk to if you look. Whether those people are typical or representative of the people whose voting choices actually ensured that the Tories won the last election is another question. While we’re about it, we could also ask whether – even if there were, as a matter of fact, a number of big Tory victories in decades-old Labour strongholds – a comfortable Tory victory could have been delivered without any of them happening, and if so what this tells us about the election and its outcome more generally. We could even ask if the centre-left campaign to abandon Labour under Corbyn had any effect on the result (it would be odd if it had none at all).
Or we could just carry on talking about the Red Wall. The big problem with the “Red Wall voter” story, and the reason why I’m reluctant to add to it, is the space that it occupies. Indeed, by now it’s more or less been accepted as a starting-point, so that any actual information about voter behaviour in 2019 fits into it as an extension or clarification (“so that’s what Red Wall voters really care about!”).
Hence the need for a reality check.
Before:
Not shown: Ipswich, Stroud, Kensington
After:
Not shown: Ipswich, Stroud, Kensington – or any of the 68 seats south of Birmingham that Labour held or gained
Blue for Tory holds, red for Labour, white for the Speaker, mustard for Tim Farron (remember him? he used to be the leader of the Liberal Democrats (remember them?)). Orange for Labour (re-)gains, shades of purple and grey for Tory gains: deep purple = a big win of a solid Labour seat, mauve = a narrow win of a solid Labour seat, lilac = a marginal, grey = a seat whose sitting MP helped things along by deserting the Labour Party.
It’s bad, no question about it; those were very bad results, with far too many seats lost. But what kind of seats? Look at the purple seats and then compare them with the red ones, the seats where a plurality of voters stayed with Labour. Are we really saying that the semi-rural sprawl of Sedgefield and Bishop Auckland is Labour’s heartland, and small, densely-populated seats like South Shields and Jarrow aren’t? Are we saying that the Birmingham seats Labour held are somehow less “Labour” than the seats they lost in Wolverhampton and Dudley? Are we saying that Stoke-on-Trent was a Labour stronghold (although its MPs are now all Conservatives) and Hull wasn’t (although its MPs are all Labour)?
Let’s look, one more time, at the seats lost in the supposed “Red Wall”.
NEXT: we look, one more time, at the seats lost in the supposed “Red Wall”.
In the next few posts I’m going to ask five questions about the “Red Wall”:
which English seats did Labour lose in 2019?
why did we lose them?
which long-held English seats did Labour lose badly?
and why did that happen?
The third and fourth questions are about “Red Wall” seats – now entrenched in political discourse as northern, working-class, socially-conservative, Brexit-supporting Labour strongholds, that were held by Labour for generations but tumbled like polystyrene bricks before the Tories’ 2019 campaign bulldozer.
There is a grain of truth in this cliché, but only a grain. The key fact about the “Red Wall” – the one thing everyone who refers to the Red Wall ought to realise – is that those seats are only a subset of Labour’s losses in 2019; plenty of other Labour constituencies also elected a Tory. Hence the fifth question, which is:
are the “Red Wall” seats typical of the seats Labour needs to win, and the seats we need to retain?
This last question is crucial. If the answer is Yes, happy days – if we can identify what turned a sizeable number of Red Wall voters off Labour and reverse it, we can win the next election. If the answer is No, things are more difficult; it could be that we need to look elsewhere to reverse the majority of our losses and retain the seats we hold. Come to that, it could be that adopting positions that do play well with the missing Red Wall voters would cost us votes and seats elsewhere, either directly or by demobilising the activists who power Labour’s ground game.
So let’s look at Labour’s losses more broadly. Labour lost 48 seats in England (along with six each in Scotland and Wales), and here they are. 38 were in Derbyshire and points north:
The other ten were further south. (Look closely and you can even see Kensington – our only loss in the capital.)
In line with the previous maps, I’ve divided these lost seats into three groups:
big wins (Labour continuously since 1979, decisive win in 2019)
narrow wins (Labour continuously since 1979, but not a decisive win in 2019)
marginals (had changed hands at least twice since 1979)
There aren’t any dark grey constituencies on this map; why dwell unnecessarily on the treachery of the renegades Austin, Lewis, Mann, Woodcock, Smith and Williamson? Those six constituencies have been treated as Labour seats and allocated to one of the three groups. (Penistone and Stocksbridge – the seat Angela Smith held under five different party labels before abandoning it in the vain hope of finding somewhere safer – doesn’t strictly belong on the list, as it was created in 2010; however, its main predecessor constituency, Barnsley West and Penistone, had been Labour since 1979.) As before, a “big win” is defined as one where the Labour vote in 2019 fell 10% or more relative to 2017 and was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001, and where the eventual Tory majority was 5% or more; narrow wins are those that qualify on fewer than three of these criteria.
If we look at these three groups collectively, this (if you’ll pardon the expression) is what we find:
1
2
3
Lowest Labour vote %, 2019
24.4
39.3
36.9
Highest Labour vote %, 2019
39.8
44.5
46
Average Labour vote %, 2019
34.8
41.7
41.1
Biggest Tory majority in %, 2019
31.4
12.6
15.7
Biggest drop in Labour vote %, 2017-19
24.9
15.7
18.1
Group 2 and group 3 look remarkably similar. What’s more, losses along these lines don’t seem wildly surprising. An aggressive Tory campaign, with a Brexit Party assist, pushes the Labour vote down to the low 40%s or slightly below, enabling them to squeeze out a 5% or even 10% majority in a former Labour seat: it’s bad, but it seems like the kind of thing that could happen in any bad election campaign. And – returning to question 2, above – 2019 was a really bad election campaign. The party’s support had been softened up beforehand by sustained attacks on the leadership from the centre and centre-left, relieved only by a brief truce in 2017 (after it turned out that what they were offering was in fact quite popular). In 2019 Parliamentary stalemate over Brexit was parallelled by internal conflict over Labour’s position on the EU; meanwhile, exaggerated and politicised charges of antisemitism on the left of the party ran riot, to the point where a grotesque and libellous falsehood – the allegation that Corbyn was personally prejudiced against Jews – became common currency, a comedy punchline. The delegitimation of Corbyn and his party culminated in the New Statesman‘s sage eve-of-election advice that readers should do nothing that might risk putting Corbyn into Downing Street, but should instead vote “tactically” to deprive the Tories of a majority (Luciana Berger! Sarah Wollaston!). The mentality is a kind of cargo-cult imitation of tactical voting – you don’t vote tactically for a third party because it’s a credible challenger, you proclaim your vote for a third party is tactical and thereby make it credible. There was a lot of this about in 2019; the combined vote for the Lib Dems and Greens was 50% higher than 2017 (4.5 million from 3 million), for a grand total of one fewer MP. It’s hard to imagine that anyone genuinely, rationally thought it would work. Revisiting the NSarticle now, I see that it concludes by outlining an alternative “political dispensation”, then concedes that “[t]he election will not open the way for this alternative settlement”. Which is probably the closest thing to a mea culpa we’re ever going to get.
Tactical non-co-operation from centre parties also ensured that the Labour Party’s great achievement of 2017 – depriving Theresa May of her majority – led to deadlock in Parliament rather than any constructive result; binding votes on an alternative to a hard Brexit were lost for the want of votes from the SNP and (absurdly) Change UK. This in turn played into an equally successful pre-election softening-up campaign from the Right, to the effect that Labour politicians were timewasting obstructionists, doing nothing for their MPs’ salaries but block the will of the people. (I heard this more than once when I was canvassing, in constituencies Labour went on to lose.)
Pushing Labour’s vote down a few points and the Tories’ vote up by a similar amount was all that was needed to take quite a few constituencies. (And, please, let’s not forget that very little has actually changed when a constituency goes from a 48/45 Labour/Tory split to 44/45 – and not very much has changed when a constituency goes from 50/40 to 42/45.) The attacks I’ve described – peeling off a few % of furious Brexit believers on one side, a few % of earnest centre-leftists on the other – were quite enough to do all of that, particularly when combined with the absurdly permissive media environment in which the Tories were working. And groups 2 and 3 add up to 31 seats, which would have been enough to give the Tories a majority of 40 even if the whole of group 1 had stayed Labour.
So, is there anything here to explain? Are there any lessons to draw on how to fight the next election? Apart, that is, from the ones we really ought to have drawn already:
Lesson for Labour Party representatives: Don’t systematically undermine the leader under whom you’re going to be fighting the next election (even if you think you might do well out of it longer-term). (Also, do question the motives of anyone outside the party who seems to want to help you undermine your leader. This rarelyendswell.)
Lesson for the Left: Don’t entrust your political legitimacy to some of your most entrenched and unscrupulous enemies. Also, don’t duck difficult questions, and (relatedly) don’t respond to smears with platitudinous reminders that you are, after all, good people who believe in good things (which must mean that the people saying these nasty things are mistaken). Been tried. Doesn’t work.
Lesson for the centre-left: Don’t screw your eyes up tight and tell yourself that if you stick to your principles that’s all that matters – and you couldn’t live with yourself if you compromised – and besides it’s not impossible that Labour might lose and the Tories might lose as well (“very, very unlikely” isn’t the same as “impossible”, is it?) Get a grip. How do you think the Left has felt about voting Labour all this time?
But the time for the second and third of these has probably gone, sadly. Which – on the positive side – should mean that the future is bright: we can stick to pretty much the same policy platform we had before, perhaps slimmed down and reorganised a bit, and – without a constant barrage of attacks from the centre-left, without a relentlessly hostile media environment, and without an unresolved Brexit hanging over us – the next election should be a breeze. Shouldn’t it?
The story so far: the Red Wall was originally defined (in August 2019) as a contiguous group of Labour seats, mostly in the Northwest of England, whose demographics suggest that they ‘should’ be Conservative. Nobody really went for this definition. It was redefined (in October) to include Labour seats in the Northwest and Yorkshire where the Conservative vote had increased and/or where there was a large majority for Brexit; nobody really went for this one either. A journalist writing in the Spectator then used the term to refer, more impressionistically, to a “block” of solid, long-term Labour seats in the Midlands and the North (some a hundred miles apart), which had somehow turned into winnable Conservative targets by virtue of the popularity of Brexit and the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn.After that, things got a bit silly.
“One measures a circle, beginning anywhere” – Charles Fort
In November the Red Wall appeared in the FT. This article suggested that even the Spectator definition had been too restrictive: it refers to the “red wall” of Labour seats in working-class areas of the Midlands, Wales and the North of England. Red because Labour, a wall because… there are a lot of them, in some parts of the UK which aren’t on the Underground? (Cheap shot, I know, but when people talk about “the North” as if it were a single area (“Bolsover, Bishop Auckland and Ashfield”) it does look like metro-provincialism.)
Then we got – as promised in the previous post – the proof. I once saw a review of a book on ley lines which noted that the book included several different maps, all with alignments of ancient sites duly marked, and concluded that the authors had provided definitive proof that it was possible to draw straight lines on maps. In a similar spirit, here – courtesy of Sebastian Payne and John Burn-Murdoch, the FT‘s indefatigable data guy – is The Red Wall: The Proof.
They said it couldn’t be done… hang on, they said it shouldn’t be done.
I can’t argue with that: if one measures a large enough ellipse on a map of Britain, it will contain a lot of different Labour constituencies. And – what actually is potentially interesting – we can see a few contiguous belts of Labour seats. Using the excellent (and free!) MapChart tool, I’ve reverse-engineered Burn-Murdoch’s graphic as follows:
Not shown: Wales. I don’t know what went on in the Vale of Clwyd, but it’s highly unlikely to be the same thing that went on in Derbyshire, particularly if flags were involved in any way.Also not shown: Blackpool South, which was a Tory target (and is on this map) but didn’t fall within the Burn-Murdoch Ellipse.
This doesn’t look a lot like James Kanagasooriam’s original Red Wall, for the simple reason that that was defined in terms of the underlying demographics of the constituencies involved; this is defined in terms of the seats being (a) held by Labour (b) quite close together and (c) er, that’s it. At best it’s a map of Conservative targets in the Northwest, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. I want to stress this point before we go any further. Looking at the original Kanagasooriam map and then looking at the seats which actually went to the Tories, we know something we didn’t know before: those six seats had certain demographic characteristics, and it’s possible that in 2019 those characteristics outweighed the cultural and historical factors which had been keeping them Labour. (Although in the other 34 seats on the map – which stayed Labour – that plainly didn’t happen.)
By contrast, if we look at this map, then look at the seats which went to the Tories, we know… that the Tories won some, perhaps many, of their target seats in the Northwest, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. That’s all it really tells us.
But let’s do it anyway.
Red Wall crumbling, am I right or am I right? Andy Burnham, Dennis Skinner, Mary Creagh, your boys took a hell of a beating!
Well, perhaps. (I’m not saying we didn’t lose all those seats – look at the government’s majority.) But let’s remind ourselves, again, of what we know about the Red Wall, in this iteration of it (which, sadly, is the one that’s stuck) – and what we don’t know. Do we know that these are all Labour seats with “Conservative” demographics? No, we don’t know that. Do we know that they are all socially conservative areas with big majorities for Brexit? No, we don’t. Alternatively, do we know that these are all seats that had been Labour “for generations” (K. Balls) before the Labour vote collapsed in 2019? No, we don’t. Do we know that the Labour vote hit an all-time low in all of these seats in 2019, or that the Tories won them all with a substantial majority? Also no.
All we know about the purple seats is that they were Labour going into the election; the Tories won them; and they form a belt running across the country – most of it, nearly – at approximately the latitude of Southport. And that third fact, in itself, tells us nothing – let’s face it, everything has to happen somewhere.
What if we were to distinguish between Labour seats that actually had been Labour for a while – since 1997, say – and those that had been Labour in 1997 but changed hands (twice) since then? Out of the remainder, we could also distinguish between big wins for the Tories and narrow wins, the kind of seat gains that happen in any election when the tide is running strongly in one party’s favour (as, I think we can all agree, it was for the Tories in 2019). Having looked at the data, I’m defining a “big win” as one where the Labour vote in 2019 fell 10% or more relative to 2017 and was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001, and where the eventual Tory majority was 5% or more. Comparing these factors against the (losing) Labour share of the vote, I found that the lowest Labour vote of any constituency in the “narrow win” group (where at most two of these criteria are met) was 39.8% – all the rest had a Labour vote of 40% or above. Conversely, every constituency in the “big win” group (ticking all three boxes) had a Labour vote below 37%. (Some other “big win” seats, outside the Burn-Murdoch ellipse, had higher Labour votes than that, with one – Wolverhampton North East – hitting 39.8%; none reached 40%, though.) This suggested to me that I was on the right track: intuitively – and thinking back to the first post in this series – a seat where 40%+ of people still vote Labour is not one that’s “gone Conservative”.
So here’s a revised map. The pale lilac constituencies are those Tory gains which had already changed hands twice in the previous twenty years; the mauve ones are the “narrow wins”; and the white one, as before, is the new Speaker. Lastly, the constituencies in dark grey are those Tory gains whose previous MPs, by the time of the election, had left the Labour Party and were campaigning against it, in one case actually calling for a Conservative vote. I don’t know how much weight to give to this – it isn’t a factor one usually has to take into account – but it can’t have done Labour’s chances of holding those seats any good.
This map looks a bit different from the one above. West of the Pennines – in fact, West of the Derbyshire Dales – Labour’s losses are almost exclusively seats that had been lost and regained by Labour within the last twenty years (Bury North, Burnley) or narrow wins by the Tories (Ashton-under-Lyne, Hyndburn; Bury South, in grey, is also in this group). Again, I’m not saying that Labour didn’t lose all of those seats, or that we haven’t got a mountain to climb next time round. I am saying that a world in which thirty Labour strongholds have suddenly turned into Tory strongholds (say) is a different world, and calls for different strategies, than one where this has only happened in ten Labour strongholds (but the Tories have squeaked a win in another ten, as well as re-taking ten Labour marginals).
The idea of the Red Wall – as we’ve come to know it – makes a great story: Labour heartland voters, left stranded by the decline in heavy industry and the rise of social liberalism, abandon their decades-long loyalties to vote for the party of Britain and Brexit! But we need to deal with the problem we’ve got, not with a problem that would make more dramatic sense. I’m not saying there were no “Red Wall” seats (in the sense of that label that’s now accepted) in the 2019 election; on the contrary, some seats fit the profile very well. The question is how many there were, and how typical they were – both of the seats Labour lost and of the seats where Labour needs to campaign. The question is, to put it bluntly, whether the true “Red Wall” seats were Labour’s heartland at all – and, if not, whether basing party strategy and policy on the imperative of regaining those seats might do more harm than good.
I’ll go into this in the next post. For now, here’s another map. Rather than being based on Tory targeting, this one shows all Labour seats in the region going into the 2017 election, including the ones we held. (Plus two – Birkenhead and Nottingham East – that we took back from squatters. Frank Field and Chris Leslie both stood in 2019, under their new colours; relative to 2017, when they held those seats for Labour, their votes dropped by 59.7% and 67.9% respectively. Cheers, guys, nice knowing you.)
Yes, that Red Wall of Labour constituencies is certainly… well, it’s got some gaps in it now, so there’s that…
Funny how it’s mostly the big square constituencies that go to the Tories while the small squiggly ones stay Labour, isn’t it?
One last map: here (below) is London. One loss (courtesy of Tory defector Sam Gyimah and a really disgraceful campaign to portray a divisive third-place candidate as a unifying winner); one seat reclaimed from a squatter (Mike Gapes, whose vote dropped by a magnificent 68.5% compared to 2017); and one gain. (Since the gain is Putney, which hadn’t been Labour since 2005, this offers a partial and belated confirmation for James Kanagasooriam’s original analysis: he’d cited Putney as an example of the kind of seat that the Tories held despite its demographics suggesting it “ought to” be Labour.)
There are also, of course, an awful lot of small squiggly red holds. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that Conservative strategists, and Conservative-leaning commentators like Balls and Kanagasooriam, preferred to concentrate on the wide open spaces of the Northsouth Yorkshire and the East Midlands, and make out that the Tories were winning the seats that really matter. There are – or were – gains to be made up there, of course; there was a Tory majority for the taking, and by God they took it. But if you’re looking for a real Red Wall – if you’re looking for “traditional Labour seats” in “working-class areas”, and plenty of them – look at how, even now, you can go from the Fylde Coast to Saddleworth Moor without setting foot in a Tory constituency, or cross the whole of Greater London (either way, Heathrow to Dagenham or Barnet to Croydon).
Despite what had happened in the true (and increasingly ironically named) “Red Wall” areas, and despite how disastrous the results were overall, Labour’s starting point after 2019 should have been (in the immortal words of Granny Weatherwax) “WE ATEN’T DEAD”. The big “Red Wall” losses – the purple constituencies – were serious, but they weren’t typical; by treating them as if they were, we ran the risk (at best) of losing momentum and having to run to catch up when people began to mobilise again, at worst of facing in the wrong direction and becoming irrelevant.
PS On a side-note, I’ve referred a few times to former Labour MPs who stood against Labour in 2019. Here are all of them.
Name
2017 %
2019 %
As TIG
As LD
As Ind
Luciana Berger
79.5
31.9
Frank Field
76.9
17.2
Mike Gapes
75.8
7.3
Roger Godsiff
77.6
8.1
Chris Leslie
71.5
3.6
Gavin Shuker
62.4
9.2
Angela Smith
45.8
11
Chuka Umunna
68.5
30.7
Chris Williamson
48.5
1.4
Chris Williamson’s performance must be some sort of record for former MPs standing in their own former constituency. Then again, it’s only a drop of 46.9%. In that respect, Roger Godsiff – the only MP actually to be deselected under the Corbyn leadership, trivia fans – leads the pack with a 69.5% plummet in his personal vote; the last two TIGers aren’t far behind, though. Which is worse, Mike Gapes dropping 68.5% of his vote, or Chris Leslie losing 67.9% and his deposit? Either way, those are quite the performances. Even in 1983 – the big shakeup which the ChUKers were surely hoping to emulate – the biggest comparable fall I could find was from 61.5% to 11% (Arthur Lewis, Newham North West). (Labour retook the seat comfortably; nice to see that some things don’t change.)
On a side-note to the side-note, it’s rather striking that only one of the eight ex-Labour members of Change UK – Angela Smith – had received less than 50% of the vote at the previous election; indeed, only one other (Joan Ryan) had had less than 60%. The role of safe-seat complacency in decisions to defect – not to mention vanity and general Ned Lagg-ery – shouldn’t be understated.
The next few posts are going to include a lot of maps; specifically, constituency maps. By way of introduction and caveat, this post is about misreading constituency maps.
Political commentators, particularly at the TV news end of the trade, routinely talk about constituencies being “won” and “lost”, or “going” Labour or Conservative. Constituency maps play into this way of thinking, of course. For example, here’s High Peak constituency:
Here’s High Peak from 1997 to 2010, and again from 2017 to 2019:
And here’s High Peak from 2010 to 2017, and again (oh noes!) from 2019 to the present:
The message you get from those images is that everyone, the length and breadth of this large, irregularly shaped tract of land, was Labour during the first two time periods, and that everyone was a Tory in the second two. Or if not everyone, certainly an overwhelming majority – enough people to set the tone firmly and consistently, and to make it chancy to strike up a conversation for anyone who wasn’t on the right team. Some places are like that, admittedly – in the Liverpool Walton constituency in 2019, Labour took 84.7% of the vote – but it’s not the way to bet. In High Peak specifically, 45.4% of the vote went to the Tories in 2017, when Labour won; in 2019, when the Tories won, Labour took 44.8%. Considered as an area where people live, High Peak didn’t in any meaningful sense “go Conservative” in 2019; it wasn’t in any meaningful sense “Labour” from 2017 to 2019. (If the residents of a street between them own nine cats and ten dogs, and a family moves in with two cats, has the street “gone cat”?)
What is meaningful, of course, is that this area on the map returns one MP to Parliament, elected by a simple plurality – and it elected a Labour MP in 2017 and a Tory in 2019. But I think we should resist the siren call of common sense for a bit longer. We – for values of “we” including political commentators – do tend to talk as if a constituency electing one MP rather than another amounts to a root-and-branch transformation. It’s shorthand at best, an error at worst, and either way it’s helped along by visual aids like constituency maps.
I don’t think the underlying motivation is just convenience, either. Think of how it feels to win a vote in a meeting: it’s great when 70% or 80% of the room is with you, but there’s a different kind of satisfaction in winning a vote by the narrowest possible margin, right down to 50% plus one. You put the motion, we voted, the motion was carried – that’s the end of it! Let’s move on! This branch (now) supports Jeremy Corbyn/an all-out strike/free broadband, and there’s nothing the opponents of the motion can do about it. Doesn’t matter if the vote was won by a single vote, doesn’t matter if four people who would have voted the other way got to the meeting a minute late and were refused admission; the vote’s been taken, it’s done, and that’s our policy. Boom!
I’m not saying we shouldn’t get a kick out of those times when we manage to stitch up the Right instead of getting stitched up by them – I’m not a complete spoilsport – let alone that we shouldn’t do it; “but today the struggle” and so forth. But I do think we should be aware of the bad faith involved – or, if this isn’t too meta, that we should be aware that we are aware of the bad faith involved. When we win by pulling strokes, we say we’ve won fair and square; when we focus (or are made to focus) on the strokes we’ve pulled, we say the other side does worse, and anyway it’s time to move on to the next battle. We do know what we’re doing, though – and we get a bit of a kick out of getting away from it.
Which, getting back to my subject, is also how the “Labour Takes The North” / “Labour’s Strongholds Crumble” stories work, emotionally speaking. We know perfectly well that very little has actually changed when a constituency goes from a 48/45 Labour/Tory split to 44/45; and we know that an electoral system with plurality-based single-member constituencies offers democratic representation only to a minority of voters. We also know (or can find out very easily) that 20 of the 27 general elections since 1918 have given a single party a two- or three-figure majority of MPs, and that three-quarters of the twenty have produced a Conservative majority. All of this suggests that there’s something unsatisfactory about claiming that High Peak “went” Conservative in 2019 – particularly considering that the “defeated” Labour candidate took more votes than the winning candidate in any of the elections from 2001 to 2015. But no – those are the rules, the vote was won fair and square, that’s the end of it! Move on! There’s a sneaking satisfaction in the unfairness of the result, and in the perversity of insisting on treating it as fair and valid – not just for Tories (in this instance), but for anyone who’s got a professional or personal investment in this (freakishly antiquated, absurdly unrepresentative) electoral system.
So don’t listen – or listen with a large pinch of salt – when you hear that the Tories are making inroads into Labour’s heartlands; or that they’re laying siege to Labour strongholds; or that the Red Wall is crumbling.
A few thoughts on Labour’s abstention on the Overseas Operations Bill. (And a thought on initial caps, which is that I’m in favour – I’d read the Graun story twice looking for the title of the bill before I realised that the “overseas operations bill” they referred to was in fact the Overseas etc. I’m not a fan of this wrinkle in the Guardian style guide. Apart from anything else, there could in theory be any number of “overseas operations bill”s; there have certainly been any number of “terrorism bill”s, mostly not entitled Terrorism Bill. But anyway.)
1. Good principles make good tactics
I owe this point partly to noted ex-blogger Dan Davies, on the Twitters. Two things are true about the distinction between issues that fall under the heading of day-to-day political tactics and matters of firm political principle. One is that the gap between the two is obvious to all; it’s not a gap so much as a gulf – an unbridgeable, fathomless chasm. The other is that no two people agree on where it is. Everyone agrees that some things are up for grabs while others are beyond any possible debate – and most people agree most of the time on which side of the line most of those things are – but in any given discussion it’s possible that the person you’re talking to will think your unshakeable commitment ought to be treated as political small change, or vice versa. In practice, a lot of political argument is about making sure an issue is parked on the Principles shelf, out of reach of any possible argument, and stays there.
It seems pretty clear that Labour was whipped to abstain on the Overseas Operations Bill primarily so as to draw a line between Starmer’s “new management” and the Corbyn-era party, and incidentally between Starmer loyalists and the left-wing holdouts who broke the whip; certainly Starmer hasn’t been slow to use the split to this effect. (Given that this was a one-line whip – “Considered advisory, providing a guide to party policy on an issue” – the sacking of Nadia Whittome, for example, has to be seen as a deliberate choice.) In the light of the previous paragraph, though, the question isn’t whether shielding British soldiers from prosecution for war crimes is an issue of principle which should never be instrumentalised in this way. Clearly this can be argued either way, clearly it has been, and some guy with a blog isn’t going to settle the debate for the ages. The question is where you get to if you argue one side or the other, and which way you end up pointing.
To put it a bit less cryptically, you can make a coherent argument that war crimes are among the things the Labour Party quite definitely opposes, and voting against a bill which would make them harder to prosecute is therefore the right thing to do. You can also make a coherent argument that, for the Labour Party in 2020, expressing opposition to war crimes is less important than expressing opposition to Jeremy Corbyn – or if that’s too blunt, that it’s less important than telling former Labour voters that one of their reasons for not voting for the party no longer applies, precisely because the party under Corbyn would have voted against this bill.
Now, these are very different positions, and they express very different commitments – which is to say, they commit the party to different directions of travel. And, while we can take a guess at which one is more ‘principled’ and which more ‘opportunistic’, that doesn’t in itself tell us which one will work – in any sense of the word. There’s certainly no guarantee in politics that you’ll come out ahead by doing the principled thing, but there’s also no guarantee that you won’t. Raw tactical opportunism may pay off in the short term, but it’s liable to bring its own policy commitments with it – if only because people like to make sense of what they’re doing and fit it into a bigger framework – and you may end up committed to a course that you (or your supporters) can’t bring yourself to take. If you avoid that trap (“no, honest, I’m a pure opportunist!“), opportunism may land you with an incoherent bricolage of incompatible commitments. Some combination of these two outcomes accounts for what happened to Yvette Cooper’s career, and to a lesser extent Andy Burnham’s, after they did the smart, tactical thing and abstained on the Welfare Reform and Work Bill in 2015. (And we know what happened to the one candidate for leader who broke the whip and opposed.)
The decision to whip Labour MPs to abstain on the Overseas Operation Bill may have been wrong in principle (I think it was); the decision, as well as the disciplinary actions taken since, was certainly petty and vindictive; and it may have been a tactical mistake.
Also, it may have been doomed to failure.
2. Not weak enough
So far I’ve been talking about ‘tactical’ actions in general terms, but clearly not all tactical moves are alike. If there were a big vote coming up, in a hard-to-fix electorate like the party membership, it might make tactical sense to discredit the Left of the PLP (or engineer a situation where it discredits itself), and the leadership might judge that it was worth burning the odd principled commitment to achieve that.
But that’s not what’s going on here; the NEC election isn’t till November, apart from anything else. With the exception of losing Leftists from three very junior payroll positions – an equivocal gain for the leadership, as the loss frees those MPs to speak out – nothing obvious was either gained or lost through the leadership’s tactical move. This was a particular kind of tactic; one defined in terms of image and credibility.
Credibility can mean two things. To begin with, let’s take the more obvious meaning – let’s assume that being “credible”, for a political party, means being recognised as a legitimate political actor by other political actors. Making tactical moves, potentially at the expense of principled commitments, in the hope of restoring credibility (in this sense) has two closely-related problems. Both were amply visible in the Conservative Party’s response to the vote:
Hashtag Same Old Labour; no change, no credibility gained. But that’s the thing about credibility: like respect, it isn’t granted automatically, it has to be earned. And the thing about earning respect from the Conservative Party is, what kind of idiot are you? To put it another way, if your problem is the school bully calling you names, you’ve actually got a bigger problem than that, which is that he’s the school bully and you can’t stop him calling you whatever he likes.
So: the trouble with taking policy commitments off the Principle shelf, and treating them as expendable for tactical purposes, is that by doing so you are actually making a policy commitment, and one which may not sit well with other commitments – or voters – you want to retain. And the trouble with doing this for the sake of credibility (in this sense) is that your credibility is largely in the gift of your enemy.
Which brings me to those two closely-related problems. The first problem with trading principles for credibility is that there’s no limit to what you may be asked to do, how far you may be asked to go, what existing principles and commitments you may be asked to burn – and this is (a) true in the abstract, (b) doubly true of the Conservative Party, which has never been renowned for playing fair and (c) have you seen the Conservative Party lately? I was reminded of this forcibly by some of the responses to the abstention the other night, to the effect of well, obviously this is something that the Left would want to oppose, that’s just why it’s an obvious trap – this, of a bill which is counter to Britain’s obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture and has been criticised by the EHRC and Amnesty International.
If the Tories want to make minimal adherence to international human rights law the bar that Labour has to limbo under, they will; that doesn’t mean that it’s smart politics to oblige them. Particularly not given the second problem I mentioned, which is, of course,
that they have absolutely no obligation to grant us any credibility if and when we do pass their test, and every reason not to.
There is another way of looking at credibility, however. This has to do with cost: in the criminal underworld, or in situations where credibility can’t be externally verified more generally (the theory runs), a credible signal is one that carries a cost for the person sending it. If I spend money on a joint venture that I may not get back, or if I grass up an ally of mine so as to make your life easier, you’re more likely to believe that I genuinely want to work with you and that I’m not just looking to rip you off.
Now, Nadia Whittome’s a rising star and someone we’re going to hear a lot more from, but I doubt that finding a new PPS will cost Jon Ashworth all that much, let alone Keir Starmer. What might make the signal Keir Starmer has just sent costly, though, is – ironically – what initially appeared as the whole reason for sending it: the fact that it will at best strengthen the Left both numerically and politically (where the Left is defined as “everyone who liked the look of Starmer’s ten pledges but is not intending to give him the benefit of the doubt forever”), and at worst alienate the Left from the party altogether. Bluntly, this will cost Starmer support within the party, and could end up costing Labour members and votes. (It’s not the first time I’ve reminded myself that, as a member, I’ve got a reason to hang on until the NEC election in November – but it is the first time that I’ve asked myself how many more times I’m going to have to tell myself that.)
If we follow through the logic of the second section of this post, this just makes Starmer’s tactic look even more ridiculous: he’s deliberately risked throwing away a non-negligible chunk of votes and members, for the sake of gaining credibility by courting the approval of the Tory Party – an approach which has never worked and never will. But this second model of credibility creates a different possibility. Suppose that the potential loss of support – for Starmer personally and even for Labour – is the stake, the price Starmer is willing to pay to drive the message home; suppose that the message is not “look, we’re credible now (even the Tories say so)”, but a simple and straightforward “look, we’re not that any more”. This would also imply that the chosen terrain of international law and human rights (in the red corner, with the British Army in the blue) was just that, chosen; it wasn’t simply the test that the Tories happened to have set for Labour this week.
But if we’re “not that any more”, what is ‘that’? And what are we instead?
This?
4. The Sound of Ideologies Clashing; Also, The Sound of Ideologies Harmonising, Interlocking, Overlapping, Merging, Splitting And Just Plain Co-Existing
Here’s a thought: people have lots of different views about different things, which fit together in constellations of ideas and commitments; I’m talking about ideologies. Another thought: the natural habitat of ideologies is the social group; individuals see the world through ideologies, but we derive those ideologies from the groups of which we’re members, which (in most cases) existed before we joined them and will exist after we’ve moved on. Ideologies – existing in social groups rather than in people’s heads, remember – have their time; they develop, thrive and decline over time, and in particular settings. Two similar societies, separated by geography or history, may be characterised by similar ideologies, different ones or some of each. Also, it’s possible for one person to see the world – and to interpret the news, and to vote – according to multiple different ideologies, depending which seems the best fit to the situation and/or which is uppermost in their mind at a given time. Hence the sexist trade unionist; hence, for that matter, the picket-line-crossing Guardian-reading liberal.
Political parties generate support and mobilise supporters by appealing to ideological commitments, encouraging people to see the world through one set of ideological lenses rather than another – and in so doing they strengthen those ideologies, making them seem more natural and normal. While “Corbynism” was never an ideology in its own right, when he became Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was strongly associated with a couple of ideologies which he’d upheld for thirty years as a backbencher: an ideology of human equality, of every person (anywhere in the world) mattering as much as any other; and an ideology of constructive empowerment, of mobilising people to make the world a better place. As Labour leader he found, probably to his surprise (certainly to mine), that appeals voiced in terms of these ideologies were actually quite popular, despite the mainstream media positioning them – and him – somewhere between Fidel Castro and Jim Jones. It didn’t hurt that, in 2017 at least, his outsider status let him appeal – consciously or not – to another ideology that’s flourished in Britain in the last decade: this combines short-term pessimism with an openness to big, dramatic changes, on the basis that, whatever we’ve got when the dust settles, it can’t be much worse than this.
What happened in 2019 and why it happened is outside the scope of this (already fairly long) post. Suffice to say that Labour has a different leader now, and early hopes of ideological continuity have already been dashed – hopes that were initially encouraged, to be fair, by promises of ideological continuity, made in broad terms but made publicly and repeatedly for all that. But we ken the noo; we know now that the ideologies Starmer is articulating are definitely not those Corbyn championed (call them “Equality Everywhere” and “Let’s Get To Work”). Nor, for that matter has Starmer got any sympathy for the “Big Bang? Bring It On!” ideology which Corbyn tapped into (perhaps the only thing he shares with Boris Johnson, and certainly the only shred of justification for calling him a Brexiter).
What does Starmer believe in? I’ve no idea, and I don’t really care. The important question is, what sets of beliefs is the Labour Party under Starmer giving voice to – what ideologies is it articulating, and thereby strengthening and normalising? It’s early days, but the image above contains a number of clues: the reference, not to the people of Britain, but to Britain as a country, elevated over all other countries; the specific reference to “growing old” as a concern that the audience might have; and, of course, the Butcher’s Apron for backdrop, a choice which ostensibly evokes the UK as a whole but actually suggests that the nation being championed is rather narrower than present-day Britain, or else some way in the past. Put that lot together and you have, I think, something close to the diametric opposite of the ideologies Labour upheld under Corbyn; it combines a sense that some people very definitely do matter more than others with a sense that something should be done for those people, as well as an appeal to how the world used to be. (Never mind when, exactly; the point is to look back. A national flag is only a forward-looking symbol when it’s being raised on Independence Day.)
Is this a coherent ideology? We’ll see, but I think it just could be; I think a lot of the grudges being sedulously borne in our society can be brought together under a heading of “When’s Our Turn?” – yes to patriotism, tradition, the armed forces and support for pensioners (they’ve done their bit); no to internationalism, cultural innovation, human rights lawyers and hand-outs for scroungers (let them do some work for a change). And, if I’m right, that’s the direction Labour is heading.
4. The Radicalisation of Keir Starmer
Let’s talk about radicalisation – by which I mean, let’s talk about grooming. If you want someone to do something that they find repugnant, the first thing you do is work on the repugnance, then bring them round from tolerance to approval and hence participation. A good way to do this is to surround the victim with people who will affirm that the repugnant act isn’t all that bad after all, and encourage them to think of it as normal. It’s differential association, really – the more people the victim associates with who affirm the normality of the act and the fewer who deny it, the sooner they too will affirm that it’s normal.
But the key point about that model is not that somebody is manipulating the victim, nudging them over the jumps; the key point is that there are no jumps – no firebreaks, no step-changes. There’s just a continuum of behaviours, each of which has a lot in common with its neighbours. For a less emotive example, imagine a woman who’s had a particularly sheltered upbringing and has always objected to bad language, and who by a quirk of fate falls hopelessly in love with… a docker, let’s say. A sailor. A trooper. Somebody who swears a lot, anyway. Now, what happens as we go from stage one in this person’s habituation to bad language (“remain seated with hands clenched and eyes screwed shut, resisting the urge to flee the room”) to stages two (“remain seated, concealing shock and breathing normally as far as possible”) and three (“express disapproval and continue conversation”)? The key thing that happens, I would argue, is the passage of time. With time, the shock diminishes; the woman’s original, spontaneous responses cease to be triggered; and her own responses progressively frame the repugnant behaviour as a little less repugnant, a little more normal. Nobody is grooming this unfortunate woman, nobody is pushing her through barriers; there are no barriers. Once a direction of travel is set, one stage leads naturally to the next.
And so it is with ideology. I said in the previous section that I don’t care what Keir Starmer believes in; more to the point, I don’t think he believes in anything, other than that a Labour government would be a good thing and that he knows just the boy to head it. But he is happy to work with ideologies; specifically, he’s happy to pitch to the people who the message quoted above resonates with, and happy to cut loose everyone who identifies more with the ideologies voiced by Corbyn.
Which is where radicalisation comes in. Clearly, Starmer has already gone well beyond clenching his hands and screwing his eyes shut if anyone brings out the Union Flag. More schematically, we can distinguish between tolerating a discourse – allowing it to be used in one’s presence, or indeed in one’s political party’s communications; mimicking the discourse, borrowing its terms to jazz up one’s own arguments; using it, articulating one’s own arguments in those terms (modifying those arguments where necessary); and promoting it, centring it in one’s political practice.
The journey from toleration, through mimicry, to usage and finally promotion is a journey of radicalisation. Passage from one stage to another is not automatic, but neither are there any barriers in its way; given habituation, the passage of time and the continuation of the stimuli that initially led to toleration, it will tend to happen. Moreover, given that ideologies are social productions and do not exist in any individual’s head, the radicalisation of discourse users also strengthens the ideology, making it seem more relevant and hence more powerful – more capable of describing the world and expressing users’ beliefs and desires.
As far as the discourses of “Equality Everywhere” and “Let’s Get To Work” were concerned, Jeremy Corbyn was never in any danger of radicalisation, for the simple reason that he was already radical; he centred those discourses in his practice, and worked to affirm and strengthen them in society, quite openly and unapologetically. With regard to the discourse of “When’s Our Turn?”, however, I sense that Starmer – like Gordon Brown before him – has no particular commitment to it and is planning to use it instrumentally: mostly mimicry, perhaps a little use, definitely no promotion.
We’ll see how successful he is in avoiding radicalisation. Early signs, it has to be said, aren’t good. Ideologies are not the kind of thing one can dabble in; if, as Labour leader, you say that you believe in making Britain the best country in the world, people will tend to believe you – and the people who believe in this kind of thing will tend to be confirmed in that belief, and identify Labour with it.
Radicalisation doesn’t stand still, in other words; the process that has been begun under Starmer’s leadership could end up giving us a patriotic, nostalgic, troops-supporting, pensioner-friendly Labour Party. This would be a disaster for Britain – in itself, because of the alternative possibilities being squandered and because of the cultural and political movements which it would embolden. (And it almost certainly wouldn’t win a General Election. It might win back half the people who told me they weren’t voting Labour last winter, admittedly, but it would repel the other half – and we’d never find out, because it would also repel most of the people who do the canvassing.)
Let’s hope that Starmer reverses course before the damage is done.
Time for a post-NEC-voting-reform, post-RLB-sacking, post-David-Evans update to my earlier post, in which I was – if not cautiously optimistic – at least just plain cautious about Keir Starmer’s leadership.
1. The Pledges and the Backers
which is going to dominate?
pledges are just pledges and can be abandoned any time, or simply revised and qualified into non-existence; your backers are your backers, and you’ve got to keep them sweet.
pledges are pledges, and if Starmer were to break them they could immediately be hung round his neck, causing just the kind of internal strife he most wants to avoid; the people who backed his election campaign are just some people who thought he’d serve their interests, and once elected he owes them nothing.
Sooner or later Starmer is going to have to jump – or at least sidle – one way or the other
Well, he hasn’t actually broken any of those pledges, so there’s that. But he’s avoided doing so by, essentially, avoiding saying anything at all. The people who backed him, though, have been well rewarded. Not looking good.
2. The Front Line and the Second Line
the rapid promotions given to centrist MPs such as Nick Thomas-Symonds suggested a real commitment to building a head of steam behind the “soft Left”, whatever we – or Starmer – may take that to mean.
When the junior shadow ministers were announced, of course, there they were … an absolute raft of Blairite old lags. What does this mean? One, pessimistic, reading is that the old Right is in place to step into the current Shadow Ministers’ shoes when a reshuffle seems urgent – when an election is in prospect, for example.
How real – and how substantial – is the “soft Left”, and how strong is the Right? The answer to the second question can be gauged from the number of times “Labour” commented on education in the voice of Rachel Reeves, or Lucy Powell, or basically anyone but the inconveniently left-wing and independently-minded Shadow Education Minister. The answer to the first lies in the number of memorable and substantive statements you’ve heard from Starmer, Anneliese Dodds and Nick Thomas-Symonds. The various Blairites, rentagobs and Blairite rentagobs who are currently paying their dues in the second line must fancy their chances; I would.
3. Party Unity and the Wreckers
the requirements of party unity rest much more lightly on the Right than on the Left, due no doubt to the former’s greater sense of proprietorship over the party: if we dissent from their leadership we’re betraying the party, if they dissent from ours they’re just trying to stop us betraying the party (from above). …
In the longer term there are three possible resolutions …
Right-wing wreckers kick off, Starmer covers for them in the name of Party Unity; he thus demonstrates that he doesn’t care about real party unity and takes a decisive step to the Right.
Right-wing wreckers kick off, Starmer sacks them in the name of Party Unity; he thus demonstrates that he does care about real party unity and takes a decisive step away from the Right.
Right-wing wreckers don’t kick off, indefinitely, but act like disciplined centrists for so long that they actually learn how to be disciplined centrists.
I’d file this one under “inconclusive but not hopeful”. There hasn’t been a lot of kicking-off, but Starmer certainly seems to be quite relaxed about (say) shadow ministers attacking Rebecca Long-Bailey for being close to the unions or Ed Miliband for being insufficiently business-friendly. Just do it anonymously, eh, there’s a good Wes.
Every day that people like Streeting, Powell and Reeves keep their ministerial positions is a day when the Right’s assumptions can inflect on-the-fly policy-making and the articulation of existing policy … On the other hand, while Starmer clearly isn’t a Corbynite, he does have principles; more importantly, he has a strong motivation to stake out his territory somewhere other than the neo-Blairite Right of the party. This in turn means leaving much or most of the Corbynite transformation of Labour policy unreversed, while declining to pick a fight with the Left qua Left.
Two months on, I’d revise this paragraph in a couple of ways, both pessimistic. Starmer does have a strong motivation to stake out ideological territory distinct from New Labour; what I wonder now is whether he has the ability, either as an original thinker or purely in terms of there being any ideological territory to stake out (see above re: soft left). On the other hand, picking a fight with the Left qua Left may not be necessary; all Starmer needs to do is to delegitimise part of the Left, and then justify any action against the Left as a move against that particular element, which we’ve all agreed to be beyond the pale. And if this involves building up a rare and remediable failing on the Left into a sin that’s both widespread and unforgivable, with the inevitable consequences of false positives and malicious reporting, well, you can’t purge a party without breaking eggs.
Here are some more general Qs and As.
How do you think Keir Starmer is performing as leader of the opposition?
Dreadfully. Look at the state of the Tories, look what they’re doing to the country – under any other leader we’d be twenty points ahead!
In all seriousness, Keir Starmer is not performing as leader of the opposition – he’s offering the government no opposition at all, to the point of strenuously refusing to offer any alternative direction (on the pandemic, on Brexit… even on hospital parking charges). His strategy is transparently to pitch for Tory voters – as a competent leader who would deliver the government’s policies but do it properly – and gamble that the Left will have nowhere else to go.
The trouble is, as of 2020 Tory voters don’t seem to care much about competence; the government’s key policy – a hard Brexit – is one that’s basically impossible to “do properly”, except perhaps in the sense of damage limitation. And if people are voting in their millions for the Let’s Cut Our Own Hands Off! party, are you really going to win them over with a platform of Let’s Take Care To Sterilise The Blade?
So far, to judge from the solidity of the Tory lead in opinion polls, it’s very much not working; it looks as if all Starmer’s managed to do is bring back a lot of 2019 Lib Dem voters – and they could easily be replaced by equal or larger numbers of Labour deserters if the Lib Dems go for the gap in the market and pitch for the Left vote.
Do you feel that Starmer has made the Labour party more or less electable?
We don’t know, but there are good reasons to be sceptical. The narrowing of the Tories’ poll lead is a fact. It’s also a fact that Labour aren’t closing the gap – quite the reverse. Another inconvenient fact is that Labour had similar and better poll figures – and the Tories had similar and smaller leads – many times between 2015 and 2019; if our memory stretches back further than a year, we may recall that the previous leader’s critics treated the fact that Labour was trailing by 5-10% as evidence of how poorly the party was doing and how urgently it needed a change of leader.
In any case, talking about electability in 2020 is academic; electability is about what happens when an election is called. Labour under Jeremy Corbyn went into the 2017 election campaign trailing by 20%, and finished it neck and neck with the Tories. Labour under Tony Blair went into the 1997 election campaign leading by 25%, and finished it leading by 10%. This suggests that what we need at the next election is either a barnstorming campaign that overturns all the conventional wisdom and breaks through the Tory hold on the media, or for the Tories to discredit themselves so thoroughly beforehand that Labour is already seen as a safe pair of hands, and consequently goes into the campaign (with its inevitable barrage of hostile media coverage) with a huge lead.
I see no sign that Starmer has any interest in the first of these, or that he has the capacity to make it happen. Presumably he’s banking on the second, but it hasn’t happened yet – and Starmer isn’t doing anything to help bring it about. If anything, he’s helping to maintain the credibility of the government. His unwillingness to make political capital out of two of the greatest self-inflicted national disasters in British history – the pandemic and a hard Brexit – is genuinely puzzling and raises the question of whether it’s the will that’s lacking or the ability.
Do you have any concerns?
Starmer’s campaign statement and his ten pledges explicitly pitched to the Left of the party and promised that the direction set by Jeremy Corbyn would be maintained. We’re now starting to see how much those words were worth.
Starmer and his entire front bench team seem to be determined to say as little as possible, and to avoid actually challenging the government at all costs. The one principled and independent-minded member of the team was sidelined and then sacked on basically sectarian grounds – the Steve Reed case suggests that what mattered was not taking a consistent stand against antisemitism but getting rid of a potential internal critic, while hanging the label of antisemitism on the Left. The worst of the Labour Right have been appointed to second-rank positions – ready for promotion when the Left has been driven out or beaten into submission, presumably; however junior or marginal they are on paper, the likes of Reeves and Streeting have been welcomed with open arms by the media outlets which never quite accepted the Corbyn leadership. Organisation is key, as both Blair and Corbyn knew. The appointment of old Blairite David Evans and the rigging – sorry, democratisation – of the members’ section of the NEC suggest how Starmer sees his leadership, and how seriously he takes the job of uprooting the Left.
My only consolation is the fact that Starmer quite clearly isn’t Tony Blair – he may have Blair’s ruthlessness but he’s got none of his charisma or his genuine originality – which suggests that his transformation of the party is doomed to fail. I just hope he doesn’t do too much damage to the party – or let the Tories to do too much damage to the country – in the mean time.
Petronius gave a shiver and shook his head like a wet dog. The R-jump itself was (thankfully) imperceptible, but the comedown afterwards never seemed to get any easier. Still, he’d arrived – or rather they had, if you considered a Basic Android Simulation of Intelligent Life to be a person (and if you didn’t, you should probably get yours upgraded).
Petronius’s own BASIL stood alongside him, expressionless and apparently quite unaffected by the R-jump. Time to get down to work.
“OK, Basil. Tell me about this civilisation. Why are we here?”
“Shall I answer the second question first? It might be quicker.”
Petronius sighed. They didn’t call these androids ‘basic’ for nothing. “Go on.”
“We’re here to consider some problems that have recently surfaced in the Triune Foundation. The Triune Foundation is one of the main – let’s say ‘governmental’, although the word is imprecise – organisations in this civilisation; it has held governmental power only briefly, however, the administration generally being steered by the Lilac League.”
“I’m sorry – the Lilac…?”
Basil shrugged. “They’re not important right now, except inasmuch as they keep winning and the Triune Foundation keeps losing. Don’t feel too sorry for them, though, the Trapezoid Bloc hardly ever wins at all.”
“When you say ‘win’… We’re talking about governmental organisations, aren’t we? Are you saying they also engage in some form of sport or competitive exercise, or a contest of ability or skill?”
Basil looked stern, insofar as his near-immobile synthetic facial features permitted. “You are expected to do some preparation beforehand.”
“You’re quite right, and I did see that bit. They run a regular contest whose outcome determines who gets to govern, and it’s decided partly on the basis of an assessment of ability to govern, but also partly on performance in various more or less stylised sub-contests presented to different sub-sections of the population in different media, and partly on simple popularity, which itself is assessed through an elaborate competitive procedure. It’s quite confusing, I had trouble getting my head round it.”
Basil inclined his head. “As you say. And, as I say, we are concerned here with the Triune Foundation, not with the sortition process of which you speak.”
“Except insofar as events within the Triune Foundation may have impacted upon the outcome of that process.”
“And I see that you have done… some preparation. Let’s proceed.”
Basil enabled data visualisation.
“Hold on, what are all all these?”
“Ah. I should have said, in this civilisation it’s still very much the norm to serialise one’s thoughts in alphabetic form. Hence…”
“Hence all… this. How very cumbersome.”
“And yet, evidentially…”
“I’m not sure I see the point you’re making. We could simply ask them, couldn’t we?’
Although Basil’s features didn’t move perceptibly, you would have sworn he had raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, it’s one of those civilisations. Very well, then. It may be just as well that they’ve gone to the trouble of putting their thoughts into numbers.”
“You’ll find it’s letters, mainly, but yes. Take this first example…”
“So, what we’re seeing here is that there’s a sortition process coming up, and one individual with responsibility for sortition-related and other forms of campaigning within the Triune Foundation writes: Let’s hope the Trapezoids can do it. I’m sorry, what?”
“The person in question appears to hope that the Trapezoids will win the sortition in question.”
“Thankyou, Basil, I had got that far. But the person in question is responsible for the Triune sortition campaign. You wouldn’t expect them to have any doubts about who to support.”
“Or to express those thoughts to Triune colleagues, on a Triune communication channel.”
“Good grief. Were they – all of them – actually working against their own Foundation? Why?”
“Firstly, not all of them, but quite a few – up to and including the then Grand Wazir. As to why… well, let’s look at the next piece of evidence. So, here’s somebody who enjoyed ridiculing the leadership…”
“The Triune leadership?”
“Yes, their own leadership – there’s going to be a lot of this, so I should get used to the idea; they enjoyed ridiculing the leadership and dismissed anyone who supported them as Mameluke seditionaries.”
“Mameluke… I did read about this, but I forget the details. But meaning very marginal to the Foundation and very bad?”
“Meaning a whole variety of things – but yes, in this context the main meaning was ‘very bad’.”
“And why do we care about this unpleasant and disloyal individual?”
“Mainly because they came under suspicion. Not from the leadership – from their colleagues; they were suspected of being a bit of a Mameluke on the quiet.”
Petronius pinched the bridge of his nose and blinked. The after-effects of the R-jump seemed to be lasting longer than usual.
“You mean to say, people in responsible positions at the Triune Foundation were so obsessed with the threat of these… Mameluke tendencies… that they ended up working against the leadership of their own Foundation – and even dismissed anyone who didn’t agree with them completely as a Mameluke in their own right? How did they ever get those positions of responsibility? How did they keep them? Were they just astonishingly good at their jobs?”
In reply, Basil highlighted another area of the visualisation. “Here we come to the question of anti-Khazar abuse.”
“Ah, now, I do remember the part about the Khazars. So at this stage our traitorous office-holders are dealing with… sorry, how many? In a foundation with half a million… surely there were more cases than that? And they’re taking… what? Why are they taking so long? And they haven’t got a process for tracking cases? None at all? Sorry, that’s a lot of questions.”
“All good ones,” Basil murmured.
“Ah, but weren’t these… Mamelukes, was it… weren’t they also supposed to have trouble with Khazars? Maybe the reason those people weren’t processing complaints was that the leadership were slowing them down.”
“Actually, no. The leadership appears to have washed their hands of some close allies and personal friends, if those people seemed to be getting close to using anti-Khazar language.”
“I’m confused now. The Foundation was dealing with them?”
“Ah, no. I said that the leadership washed their hands of them, not that they were promptly removed from the Foundation itself. This note here, for example, shows that one prominent individual’s case was allowed to drag on for over nine goloqs.”
Petronius pinched his nose again. “For over nine…?”
Basil cut across him. “For a very long time. Khazar groups were up in arms about it. And, since this person was politically and even personally close to the leadership, naturally people suspected that the leadership was responsible. But they weren’t; if anything they were pushing for expulsion.”
Petronius shook his head, but it didn’t seem to help. “Let me get this straight. People working within the Foundation, with responsibility for membership and discipline, believe that the leadership are all Mamelukes, and Mamelukes are all Khazar-haters. A friend of the leadership makes statements insulting to Khazars. The leadership cuts this person off, but the Mameluke-hunters – who are the ones with the power to kick them out of the Foundation – do nothing about it, for over nine…”
“Nine goloqs, yes.”
“Were they just very, very inefficient? What’s this one say – they had a very basic system for tracking complaints about members, which they then replaced it with another equally basic system, which they didn’t consistently use? Again, whyever not?”
“Very hard to say – not using a system doesn’t create much evidence. But it doesn’t seem to be a Khazar-related thing, if only because all sorts of complaints were being dealt with just as slowly and just as inefficiently. As far as we can see the only time these people really sprang into action was when there was a leader sortition, and a chance of party members deposing the leadership.”
“I suppose they would want to help that along,” Petronius said with a thin smile.
“It’s more that they hindered the people who wanted to vote for the leadership. Lots of Triune members suddenly discovered they were ex-members, or else that they’d been suspended for the length of the contest.”
“They used membership of the Triune Foundation as a political tool?”
“To be granted and withheld as they saw fit.” Now it was Basil’s face that wore a mirthless smile.
“Ah well. At least it didn’t work. Still, you’d think the leadership would have noticed what was going on; you’d think they’d complain about having people in charge of membership who were good at kicking out allies of the leadership and bad at kicking out actual Khazar-haters. I mean, assuming there were any actual Khazar-haters in the Foundation to begin with, and it wasn’t just part of the big Mameluke hunt…”
“Let me stop you there.” Basil looked stern. “If you think back to the pre-briefing, you’ll remember that anti-Khazar prejudice has deep historical roots in this civilisation; it takes many different forms and can be found in all the main governmental alliances, the Triune Foundation included.”
“OK, OK.” Petronius was chastened. “I just thought, seeing that so few of them were being expelled, perhaps there wasn’t enough…”
“Oh, there was plenty of evidence. After the Grand Wazir – well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Anyway, to answer your question, the leadership were well aware that their membership and discipline specialists were kicking out far too many of the wrong people and far too few of the right ones – not least because some pro-Khazar activists made sure that they knew about it.”
“That’s where this Khazar4Evar individual comes in, is it?”
“Yes. Quite suddenly the membership people are being bombarded with hundreds of vague, half-formed accusations against people who may or may not have been in the Triune Foundation to begin with. And they deal with this in two ways.”
“Let me guess – number one is ‘very badly’?”
Basil nodded. “And number two is ‘by reporting that everything was fine’.”
“This all looks quite efficient, though. They’d had this many complaints from the Khazar4Evar account; they’d all been investigated; this many were against Foundation members, and investigation had led to this many expulsions. What’s wrong with that?”
Wordlessly, Basil highlighted another section of the visualisation.
“None of it was true? And we know that none of it was true – the data was right there and they…” Petronius shook his head again. “They lied about it? Even though they were all in favour of getting rid of anti-Khazar activists, even though it had the potential to embarrass the leadership – which, as we know, they wanted to do?”
“I suppose visibly failing to deal with the anti-Khazar problem had the potential to be even more embarrassing to the leadership,” Basil said coldly. “Or they may not have thought that far ahead; they may just have been extraordinarily inefficient.”
“At anything other than kicking out allies of the leadership and other suspected… what is that word… Mamelukes.”
“Yes. The Foundation was a hard organisation to get kicked out of, if you weren’t an ally of the leadership. You could transmit anti-Khazar propaganda or various other forms of bigotry; you could even advocate joining the Lilac League. If you were reported once, it was an isolated occurrence; if you were reported twice or three times, your case had already been looked at so there was no need to do anything else.”
Petronius frowned. “This isn’t sectarianism, though – just rampant inefficiency; these people seem to have treated senior jobs in the Foundation as if they were sinecures requiring only that they turn up for work, and gone on acting that way even when there was vitally important work to be done.”
“Let’s not lose sight of the broader picture. It would be fair to say that these individuals exhibited both sectarianism – in opposition to their own leadership – and rampant inefficiency. There is a happy ending of sorts, though: at this point here, there’s a new Grand Wazir, and almost all of the other people mentioned here resign. The disciplinary process becomes considerably more efficient as a result, as you can see here.”
Petronius looked at the figures. “A ninefold… no, a tenfold increase. No, wait. A factor of 25. In fact, in one sense it’s a factor of 45. It’s a big improvement, anyway.”
Basil nodded. “But there’s more. If you’ll just take in this audio-visual element…”
A little while later, Petronius shook his head again, more as a demonstration of his agitated state than because he hoped it might help. “Unwritten guidelines… leadership interfering… anti-Khazar sympathies… obstructing their investigations… This just isn’t true! It can’t be true.”
“As I say, this is one of those civilisations where veracity can’t always be relied on.”
“Clearly.” Petronius made to shake his head again but controlled himself. “Apart from anything else, if the leadership had the power to impose these ‘guidelines’ which supposedly slowed everything down so much, how could all of those leadership sympathisers have been excluded? And how could the process of dealing with the anti-Khazar element have got so much better when the leadership had a new Grand Wazir and new people in place? What they say here simply cannot be true. One can sympathise with them in a way – nobody likes being reminded of how inefficiently they’re working, least of all when they have ceased to support the goals of the organisation they’re working for. But this reaction is… excessive.”
“Some would call it a pack of lies.”
“I dare say they would, Basil, and how right they would be. So, remind me, what’s the remit of our investigation?”
“We’re to investigate the content of this data release.”
Petronius nodded. “Quite right too.”
“Also, the circumstances under which it came to be released. Oh, and we’ll be working with individuals nominated by the Foundation under its new leadership, specifically including one known supporter of the former Grand Wazir -“
“I’m sorry, the former Grand Wazir?”
“If I might finish – one supporter of the former Grand Wazir, and one individual who was actually a staff member in this period and whose name appears in the release.”
Petronius succumbed to temptation and shook his head, hard. “What is wrong with this Foundation?”
Basil shrugged. “I imagine we’re about to find out.”
About two weeks ago I was mulling over a post about the prospects for Labour under Keir Starmer, and why there might still be room for some cautious optimism. Then the report on the handling of antisemitism in the party appeared, and watching the fallout from that kept me busy for, well, most of the next two weeks, as well as giving me some more food for thought about the party and where it’s heading.
But it’s a shame to let a good blog post go to waste, so here’s more or less what I was going to write.
We don’t know which way the party is going under Keir Starmer. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that which way the party is going is still undecided. What will decide it will be the resolution of three tensions within the leadership; three opposed pairings which are currently more or less in balance, but won’t stay that way forever.
1. The Pledges and the Backers
I read Starmer’s campaign statement when I went to my CLP’s nomination meeting; I was pleasantly surprised and genuinely reassured. (Not reassured enough to vote for him – either then or in the vote that mattered – but enough to feel that a Starmer leadership wouldn’t actually be a disaster.) He committed himself to maintaining Corbyn’s transformation of Labour politics, both in general terms and with specifics. There were more specifics in his campaign pledges; I combed them for weaselly phrasing, and I did find a few examples (“support common ownership” of the utilities?), but overall it looked as if this was our guy. We knew he wasn’t our guy, of course – we knew the kind of people who were backing him – but still; all in all, as I say, it looked like a Starmer-led party would be solidly on the Left.
At the same time, we did know who was backing him – and we knew that quite a few of them were only on the Left in a “how dare you suggest that Labour has a right wing” sense. Indeed, one of the more startling parts of the antisemitism report was the revelation of quite how strong, in some (important) places, what has to be called the extreme Right of the party still is; apart from anything else, from what I’ve read it would appear that, until quite recently, the General Secretary’s office was run by people who thought that everyone left of Liz Kendall was a Trot.
The question then is, which is going to dominate? Viewed from one perspective, the answer’s simple: pledges are just pledges and can be abandoned any time, or simply revised and qualified into non-existence; your backers are your backers, and you’ve got to keep them sweet. The trouble is, viewed from the opposite perspective the answer’s just as simple: pledges are pledges, and if Starmer were to break them they could immediately be hung round his neck, causing just the kind of internal strife he most wants to avoid; the people who backed his election campaign are just some people who thought he’d serve their interests, and once elected he owes them nothing.
Sooner or later Starmer is going to have to jump – or at least sidle – one way or the other: there is no way to split the difference between “reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax” and “public services should be in public hands”, on one hand, and people who believe that policies like these belong to “Trots”, on the other. And the possibility of a real regression – a rewind to 2015 or even 2010 – does exist; but it’s not the only possibility, and recognising it as a possibility doesn’t make it likely, let alone inevitable. There’s still room to be cautiously… well, there’s still room to be cautious.
2. The Front Line and the Second Line
When Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet was announced, a lot of us breathed a cautious sigh of relief: a “ministry without portfolio” for Reeves (who would have been a truly disastrous choice for Chancellor of the Exchequer, or for DWP for that matter), and no sign of Streeting, Phillips, Kendall, Kyle, Powell… Admittedly the ministries weren’t in the hands of the Left, either – with the exception of Long-Bailey at Education – but the rapid promotions given to centrist MPs such as Nick Thomas-Symonds suggested a real commitment to building a head of steam behind the “soft Left”, whatever we – or Starmer – may take that to mean.
When the junior shadow ministers were announced, of course, there they were – a few leftists, a few “soft Left” types and an absolute raft of Blairite old lags. What does this mean? One, pessimistic, reading is that the old Right is in place to step into the current Shadow Ministers’ shoes when a reshuffle seems urgent – when an election is in prospect, for example. On paper this is true, but in practice the leadership has a lot of latitude in who gets appointed to a shadow ministerial post – the 2016 resignations (and their replacements) demonstrated that, if nothing else. A lot can change in a couple of years; Rebecca Long-Bailey was a very junior shadow minister until February 2017. There may not be many mute inglorious Keir Starmers on the back benches, but I dare say the PLP could rustle up another Nick Thomas-Symonds; and, you never know, Starmer may yet come under pressure to appoint from the Left. (And if he doesn’t, the Left needs to keep pushing until he does.)
Again, things could go very badly, but that doesn’t have to be the case; things could still go… less badly.
Lastly, the “junior Shadow Minister” question overlaps with the third unresolved tension:
3. Party Unity and the Wreckers
One thing the leaked report appears to show is that the requirements of party unity rest much more lightly on the Right than on the Left, due no doubt to the former’s greater sense of proprietorship over the party: if we dissent from their leadership we’re betraying the party, if they dissent from ours they’re just trying to stop us betraying the party (from above). (And if the short-term result is a Tory government, well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, or so they tell the eggs.) Tactically speaking, this sense of entitlement is a real strength for the Labour Right: it enables them to act and speak freely and with total self-confidence, however vacuous their policy recommendations and however destructive their actions.
However, when the leadership is held by a genuine centrist – and nobody has made a convincing case that Starmer is personally on the Right – this strength is also a weakness. When more than one tendency is represented within the leadership, “unity” can’t simply mean “we do what we like and the Left puts up with it”; it has to have some content that isn’t entirely factional, even if it’s only “the leadership does what it likes and everyone puts up with it”.
The question then is, how are the various Right-wing leakers, ego-trippers and coalition cosplayers going to take to being required to show a bit of restraint? My sense is, not very well. Some, to be fair, will be only too happy to repeat whatever line they hear from Starmer – and if it’s not particularly Left-wing or confrontational, so much the better – but some have a record of bigging themselves up whenever there’s a vowel in the month, and/or briefing against anyone to the Left of Bill Clinton. (Never underestimate just how right-wing parts of the Labour Right are.)
The usual suspects are keeping fairly quiet at the moment – something something Mantle of Ministerial Responsibility no doubt – but one wonders how long it can last. (Indeed, one bright spark appears already to be on manoeuvres. It’d be awful if the things he was advocating turned out not to be party policy, eh readers?)
In the longer term there are three possible resolutions (not two this time), namely:
Right-wing wreckers kick off, Starmer covers for them in the name of Party Unity; he thus demonstrates that he doesn’t care about real party unity and takes a decisive step to the Right.
Right-wing wreckers kick off, Starmer sacks them in the name of Party Unity; he thus demonstrates that he does care about real party unity and takes a decisive step away from the Right.
Right-wing wreckers don’t kick off, indefinitely, but act like disciplined centrists for so long that they actually learn how to be disciplined centrists.
1. would be very bad, but it would undermine Starmer’s claim to be above the factions, create an immediate opening for the Left and generally stir up the silt with a long stick; that being the case, I don’t think we can be sure that it’s more likely than 2. I’m not even sure that 3. can be ruled out altogether – or, if not, how bad it would be.
In short, it’s principles vs people all the way down, and it’s surprisingly hard to call. On one hand, incremental change is a real danger. Every day that people like Streeting, Powell and Reeves keep their ministerial positions is a day when the Right’s assumptions can inflect on-the-fly policy-making and the articulation of existing policy; see the (bizarre) shift from pandemic-related rent suspension to rent deferral, which only makes sense if you think that Labour should be standing up for landlords. On the other hand, while Starmer clearly isn’t a Corbynite, he does have principles; more importantly, he has a strong motivation to stake out his territory somewhere other than the neo-Blairite Right of the party. This in turn means leaving much or most of the Corbynite transformation of Labour policy unreversed, while declining to pick a fight with the Left qua Left.
One possibility I haven’t considered, finally, is that all this stuff about the old Right and the undefined centre may turn out to be irrelevant: the territory Starmer stakes out may be an ideological terrain all of his own, an -ism to rival Corbyn and Blair. But there’s a reason why I don’t consider that.
ya know?
i’m no leader
i just can’t see myself following you…
and that’s not in a “heavy” way you
…
not you personally but…
you personally…
– doseone
The first thing I want to say about Jeremy Corbyn is how much I admire him as a person, and how grateful I am to him. There was some adverse comment during the 2019 election campaign about his ‘tetchy’ and ‘sarcastic’ manner with hostile interviewers, but in the context it’s hard to blame him for that – the context being four and a half years of relentless aggression, harassment and bad faith, both from the media and from people who he could reasonably have expected to be on his side. A small example is the press pack we frequently saw on BBC News, camped out outside Corbyn’s house, ready to fire questions at him as he walked to his car. Corbyn never answered questions outside his house, and indeed had explained that this was his policy – and yet they carried on doing it, en masse, day after day and month after month, hoping that they could goad him into letting something slip. This isn’t reporting, it’s harassment – and the mere fact that Corbyn never lost his rag with them attests to a superhuman level of patience. (I would have snapped within a week.)
It’s been suggested recently that media hostility to Labour was predictable, so the way they stitched us up during (and before) the last election campaign actually reflects on Corbyn’s lack of a strategy to manage the media. Given the level of hostility Corbyn faced, this is a bit like saying that everyone knew what Harvey Weinstein was like, so any woman who got assaulted by him only had her lack of an Entitled Creep Management Strategy to blame. Only that particular entitled creep is in prison, and everyone believes his victims. (We used to believe victims of press harassment, come to think of it – wonder what changed.)
As well as for managing to be “Mr Zen”, I admire Corbyn for sticking to what he believed in – more than that, for the integrity he displayed; for getting the message across that not sticking to what he believed in wasn’t an option, wouldn’t even occur to him. To go into politics because you want to achieve X, Y and Z, to state frankly that you want to achieve those things and to answer every question from the point of view of someone who wants to achieve those things – it doesn’t sound like much, but the break it represents from Labour’s recent history can’t be overstated.
The managerial, clientelist ‘realism’ of the old Labour Right; the hesitant, defensive triangulations of the centre-left past and present; Blairism, with its toxic combination of charismatic populism and rightward-trimming calculation: all these different traditions shared one fundamental assumption, the pessimistic certainty that you can’t go Left. It’s a pessimistic assumption, and it’s also disabling: if you’re trying to run a party of the Left and you’re convinced that sooner or later you’re going to need to move Right, a degree of capitulation is built in (left-wing policy? they won’t have it inMansfield), as well as a degree of dishonesty and even self-deception (right-wing policy? are you calling Labourpolicy right-wing?).
Corbyn’s leadership swept all of that away, for a time at least; he demonstrated that you can go Left, and – perhaps the single biggest attraction of Corbynism – that if you’re a Labour politician and you go Left, you can hold your head up: you don’t have to capitulate or lie about anything. The Labour Left has always prided itself on political principle; in Jeremy Corbyn we had a chance to see what a principled political leader might look like, and it looked pretty good. It looked like someone who wasn’t in love with his image or his historical mission, didn’t feel he had to meet anybody’s expectations, didn’t feel he had anything to apologise for and was comfortable in his own skin (literally and politically).
This is also why I’m, eternally, grateful to Jeremy Corbyn: not so much for what he did as for what he showed was possible. It’s always been possible to be on the Left in the Labour Party – the party has certain ideals and certain traditions, after all, and there’s nothing to actually stop you believing in them, if you want to. What hasn’t been possible, at least for as long as I can remember, is being on the Left and having any kind of prominence in the party. (Yes, I remember Michael Foot. I remember him running for the leadership on a pledge to stand above the factions and unite the party, and then backing the Falklands expedition and trying to bar Peter Tatchell from standing for Labour. At best, Foot led from slightly left of centre – and even that was enough to trigger the spectacular wrecking operation that was the SDP.)
Corbyn showed that it was perfectly possible for the Labour Party to have a left-wing leader, a left-wing leadership team and left-wing policies. This alone was a revelation. There are certain principles I believe in, and certain policies that are particularly strongly associated with those principles. With the exception of the 1995-2010 period, I’d always supported the Labour Party because of these commitments; this remained the case even while I was wearily aware that it was unlikely ever to offer the policies, and had a sneaking suspicion that its leadership was only paying lip service to the principles. Under Corbyn, suddenly none of this applied: the Labour Party actually shared the commitments that were the reason why I’d supported them all that time. Suddenly there was no cause to be jaded or suspicious: the principles were there, pure and simple, and there were the policies to back them.
That’s an experience that won’t be forgotten – especially since the resultant combination turned out to be rather popular: it turned out that a left-wing Labour Party could offer the country things it both needs and wants. Bear in mind, the 2017 election wasn’t just another loss, or even just a near miss, and it certainly wasn’t a case of a weak opposition fumbling a loss against an unpopular government (a bizarre and counterfactual story that still circulates on the Right of the party). Theresa May’s Conservatives took 42.3% of the vote – the highest Tory vote share since Thatcher’s second victory in 1983, and an increase of more than 5% as compared with 2015. We underestimate the extent to which the 2017 election actually went to plan, for the Tories; May called it to give her government a secure majority, and 42.3% of the vote – up from 36.9% – really ought to have done the trick. Instead, the Tories lost seats, and Labour deprived them of the slim majority they’d had. Although we were polling in the mid-20s when the election was called, on the night Labour took 40% of the vote – our highest vote share since Blair’s second victory in 2001 and an increase of 9% since 2015. Taking turnout into account, Labour took 14 votes for every 10 we’d got just two years earlier.
At the same time Labour transformed the political agenda: in two years we went from a country where the Labour leadership was endorsing austerity to one where the Tories felt the need to disown it. If Corbyn had been any other leader – or rather, if he’d been a leader from any other part of the party – the pundits would have been sitting at his feet asking how on earth he’d done it. But, of course, if they had asked the answer would have been “by consistently supporting democratic socialist principles and inviting other people to support them; by having beliefs and sticking to them, saying what I believe and only what I believe; by disregarding your assumptions and rejecting your calculations”.
2. Him and Us
Am I grateful to Jeremy Corbyn for making me believe in the Labour Party again, and for leading me (and a few hundred thousand others) to join? Well, yes and no. Being a member of a Labour Party branch in the last few years hasn’t always been the most rewarding experience, as I’ve documented on this blog from time to time. Corbyn’s election took place under peculiar, almost paradoxical circumstances – a left-winger became leader of a party whose internal democracy had largely been dismantled by the Right, thanks to the empowerment of individual members by reforms promoted by the Right. What this meant was that his victory was acutely uneven: substantial layers of the party were not only unaffected by it but resistant to it, to the point of continuing to treat the Left as a marginalised minority even while it was represented by their own leader. Attitudes like these ran deep, grounded as they were in that basic pessimism about the possibility of ever moving Left. Persuasion and dialogue were never going to make a dent in them; those groups could only be brought into line by action, either from above or from below – or, ideally, both.
Unfortunately the Left on the ground was a lot weaker than it appeared on paper – not least because many (most?) of the new recruits were relatively new to party politics, and unlikely to be enthused by the prospect of sitting through a meeting in a church hall for the sake of possibly getting some guy you don’t know elected to some position you don’t quite understand instead of some other guy you don’t know (who seems perfectly nice and is friends with all the local councillors). Perhaps we could, even so, have had a big push to deselect the Right – officers, councillors, MPs – or at least to deselect enough of them to let the others know who was boss; if so, we let the moment pass. As for action from above, again time was of the essence. We can now see that Corbyn wasted a lot of time trying to extend the hand of friendship to the Right in the PLP, and then had to waste a lot more time fending off the ridiculous Smith leadership challenge. By the time reselection of MPs was on the agenda, the conditions were all wrong – there was an election in the offing and the leadership was on the back foot once again. It would have been far better to move on day one – get reliable people in key positions (starting with the Whips’ Office) and let Momentum take responsibility for getting the unreliable ones replaced, or at least putting the fear of God in them. The Right of the party, and their friends in the media, would have thrown a fit – but really, what’s the worst that could have happened? Hostile profiles, recycling old smears and rumours? Accusations of sexism and racism? Resignations from the Shadow Cabinet? Resignations from the Labour Party? New centrist parties? How terrible that would have been, eh?
(Parenthetically, this is what “I welcome their hostility” means. It’s not “I welcome their opposition”; it doesn’t mean you’d rather have people opposing you than working with you – what would be the sense in that? It means that, if you know perfectly well that somebody’s opposed to your entire political project, you would prefer them to bring it on, and stop pretending they just want what’s best for everyone (which, let me check, why yes, it does involve your entire political project being defeated, good guess). And you’d prefer that partly as a matter of honesty, but mainly because you know it’s eventually going to come to that anyway: either your political project is going to go away (and it’s not), or there’s going to be conflict. At some level, hostility implies respect; you welcome them taking you seriously enough to recognise that you’re in their way. (If they really thought you were as laughable as they keep saying, why would they keep saying it?) This, in my experience, is one translation of the vexed phrase “soft Left” – the soft Left are “the Left who hate the hard Left but don’t want to make a big thing of it and would rather they just went away”. Give me hostility any day.)
I am one of those who voted for Tom Watson for deputy leader; he promised that he would support Corbyn, and forgot to add “like a rope supports a hanged man”. I still think that an alt-Tom Watson – a version of Tom Watson who could spell the word ‘loyalty’, say – could have made a great enforcer for Corbyn and supplied something his leadership sadly lacked. And this, I’m afraid, comes back to a weakness in Corbyn himself – at least, a quality in Corbyn which turned out to be a weakness in a leader of the Labour Party. It relates to his pure-and-simple advocacy of the causes he believed in, backed by the confidence that people who listened would join him in supporting them. While this was a huge strength in itself – if only, as I’ve said, because it made such a pleasant change from most other Labour politicians – it brought with it a blind spot with regard to people who weren’t going to listen to him, weren’t going to believe what he said, weren’t going to be persuaded. Perhaps this goes back to Corbyn’s “movement” background: if you’re campaigning for destitute asylum seekers or imprisoned trade unionists, you can’t afford to care about all the people who don’t support you, you just want to maximise the number of people who do. Whatever the reason, I think Corbyn’s attitude has always been “I tried, they didn’t listen, I’ll just keep trying”, or in other words “with you if possible, without you if necessary” – and a party leader’s attitude really needs to be “with you if possible, over your dead body if necessary”. Apart from anything else, the leader owes it to their followers to apply some pressure on backward elements in the party – there’s only so much we can do from below.
This relates to another weakness, which again is connected with Corbyn’s strengths as a communicator and campaigner. The confected scandal over antisemitism in the Labour Party had a real issue at its root, and an issue which Corbyn fumbled badly. The “IHRA” definition of antisemitism was developed as part of a long-running campaign to get anti-Zionism classified as anti-semitism, thereby delegitimising much anti-Israel activism. Moreover, it’s not strictly speaking a definition at all, but an open-ended list of behaviours which may constitute antisemitism; as such it’s peculiarly ill-suited to being used as a way of identifying behaviours – and individuals – which are antisemitic, as it’s guaranteed to be over-inclusive. (This point has been made by the definition’s author, Kenneth Stern.)
Facing demands to adopt the definition (and its examples), entire and unadapted, for internal disciplinary purposes, Labour politicians from Corbyn down could have set out some of this background and acknowledged that the leadership’s position on the state of Israel was more critical than that of any Labour leadership in memory, and that this was – sadly – likely to repel many Jewish voters. Instead they responded by reaffirming their heartfelt opposition to antisemitism, then by delaying and attempting to find some sort of compromise, and then by wholeheartedly caving in – a third stage which Keir Starmer is intending to prolong indefinitely, if we’re to believe the Observer (a very big ‘if’, admittedly).
The issue here is not that Corbyn has anything to retract or apologise for with respect to antisemitism – he doesn’t, a point which was conceded (in calmer times) by at least one of the people who were demanding retractions and apologies. (No, I don’t understand it either.) The issue is that, while “principle pure and simple” works well as a form of advocacy, once you get into argument it’s a one-shot strategy; if it doesn’t work, you’ve got nothing to back it up except trying it again. Corbyn didn’t just refuse to get into personalities (“they go low, we go high”); all too often, he refused to get into detail – and that left the space for his enemies to define the issues on which he was being challenged. Not once did we hear Corbyn acknowledge that he is a long-term friend of the Palestinian cause (a position which many people disagree with, particularly in the Jewish community, but which has nothing to do with antisemitism); or draw attention to the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism (which has to be understood if we are to promote justice in the Middle East while standing firm against Europe’s oldest racism); or even point out the fundamental problems with the IHRA “definition” (problems acknowledged, as we’ve seen, by the definition’s own author). Even Corbyn’s affirmations of support for the Jewish community in Britain weren’t backed up by any details – details which he could easily have supplied. Again, the pure-and-simple style of advocacy left the field open for people who were only too happy to fill in the details, to the disadvantage of the anti-imperialist Left – and it gave very little cover to those of us who came under attack.
Corbyn’s a campaigner; you’d never mistake him for a machine politician or for a policy wonk. In many ways that’s been a strength, but it comes with weaknesses. The way his leadership got trampled on by his own MPs, and the relentless negative campaigning that did so much to torpedo our campaign last winter, suggest that we need a bit more of the operator and a bit more of the geek from our next leadership team. (These aren’t necessarily qualities that one person has to embody, just as long as somebody covers them – and as long as the leadership works together. Angela Rayner, Hammer of the Centrists? Stranger things have happened.)
3. Us
What about us – what now for the Left in Labour? The prospects are fairly gloomy; apart from anything else, if we haven’t managed to take the party over by now, we aren’t likely to manage it under the new leader – particularly if (as seems likely) the new leader is Keir Starmer. It’s even possible that we’re all about to get expelled – or, more realistically, that they’ll expel enough of us that the rest of us feel honour bound to take the hump and leave. (I hope it doesn’t come to that, but I think it’s a real possibility.)
Assuming we have a future in the party, what can we learn from the last few years? Again, I think it’s a matter of strengths and weaknesses. At its best the Corbynite Left has looked a lot like a social movement: the enthusiasm, the good humour, the playful creativity and above all the sheer numbers; the sense that everything could be different now, in the line from Victor Jara I borrowed back at the start of it all, Porque ahora no estoy solo – porque ahora somos tantos! Diversity in unity and unity in diversity – and so many of us!
The trouble is, we weren’t – and aren’t – a social movement; we were and are a faction within a political party. This matters in two ways. First, organising within a political party requires organisation. We’ve had organisation, or rather we’ve had an organisation in the form of Momentum; what we haven’t had is any real articulation between the leadership’s strategy and what Momentum were pushing at any given time. I’m guessing the leadership adopted a hands-off approach to Momentum because of the bad press they would have incurred otherwise – and, again, this seems like a missed opportunity, if only because it’s hard to see how the press they got could have been much worse. In the absence of strategic steers from the top, Momentum has had to come up with its own strategy for party activists – and, as a group formed to support Corbyn’s leadership, its focus has understandably been on securing Corbyn’s position within the party. The problem with that is that it tends to turn every issue into a meta-issue – “the NEC is divided, so we should push hard on issue X” – or a meta-meta-issue – “the Left gaining advantage at this point would provoke the Right, so we should hold off on issue Y”. Which is, ironically, the very opposite of the “principle pure and simple” approach that drew so many of us to Corbyn in the first place.
It’s tempting to recoil from this kind of organising into a dream of a pure ‘movement’, but I’m afraid we can’t take much comfort there either. It’s a question of scale. A Corbynite social movement would have been a movement linking up people doing, and campaigning for, the things we all believe in: people who were active in trade unions and legal advice centres and tenants’ unions and environmental campaigns and occupations and workers’ co-ops and direct action campaigns and food banks and women’s groups and solidarity campaigns and credit unions and, and, and… Labour meetings should have been down time by comparison – a chance to compare notes with fellow activists and co-ordinate bigger actions. It’s no answer to say that the background level of activism is too low, or the landscape of radical self-help isn’t there any more, or that all of this sounds like a throwback to the seventies – those things are all true, of course, but what that tells us is that we weren’t all that much of a social movement.
Arguably turning the groundswell of support for left-wing policies into a social movement – and refocusing Labour members’ attention on what there is to do locally – is a long job; arguably it was getting under way before the election with the work of the Community Organising Unit (although it’s saddening to realise that the unit was only launched in September 2018). But there’s also been a tendency – and I’m not innocent of it myself – to see the Left as a social movement within Labour, and to see working within the party as an end in itself. People only have so many evenings and weekends (or so I recall), and they may not want to spare very many of them, but I do feel that we can do better – and that we need to reorient. Work within the local party, if that’s possible; if not, work to take positions in your local party, if that’s realistic; but in any case, be a Labour member outside the party. Don’t wait for the ward secretary to organise the next round of door-knocking or litter-picking; put a Labour Party badge on your jacket and act on your beliefs, do something that needs doing. (This is a Note To Self, of course; I don’t assume it’s got any wider application.)
New times will call for new forms of organisation, bad new times especially; Momentum has a big part to play (as long as it isn’t proscribed), but it can’t be the whole answer. We are almost certainly going to need to fight to hold every inch we’ve taken within the party – but we can’t let that be our sole focus. What comes out of the strange, sometimes harrowing, sometimes wonderful period we’ve just lived through won’t live up to all the hopes we’ve held – but it won’t be a return to business as usual either. Led by Jeremy Corbyn, we have already changed British politics. We’ll keep on changing it.
I was surprised, midway through my local Labour Party AGM, to hear the name “Steven Fielding”. Could it be?
Yes, it could.
Point of information #1: I think the number I heard cited was 970. As of the 2019 local elections, the electorate of the ward stood at 10,452; if we carry on recruiting we’ll soon be up to one in 10 adult Chorlton residents. Plus 970 is actually higher than the number of votes received by the second-placed (Green) council candidate in 2019. We probably don’t need to bust a gut campaigning this year.
Point of information #2: the factions. Those subtle, subdued factions! (Very Chorlton – factions by Farrow & Ball.) I defer to Steven’s expertise here; my highest qualification in Politics is a Master’s, and my book is only incidentally about electoral politics and political parties. But it seems to me that there weren’t actually two factions visibly active on Monday night, just the one – and that its operations weren’t at all subtle, but rather overt.
Perhaps it comes down to definitions. Put it this way: here are statements on behalf of two groups of people, A and B, both of whom are members of the same party.
A: “We support the elected leader and thoroughly approve of the party’s current programme – and so do our allies who have been denied party membership!”
B: “We think the party’s policy is wrong and the leader needs to change direction – and so do our allies in other, rival political parties!”
Call me an old eccentric, but I’d always thought that the label of ‘faction’ applied properly to group B, but not to group A. Ten, twenty, a hundred people who are involved in collective lobbying for the party to change (and may have other loyalties): that’s a faction. Ten, twenty, a hundred people who are content with how the party is now and back it every time: that’s not a faction, that’s just some happy party members. Broadly speaking, I’d always thought that supporting the party’s policies and leadership was the one thing a party member can do which is definitely not ‘factionalism’. True, sometimes parties go into crisis – I might mention the Cultural Revolution, I might mention Comrade Delta – and under crisis conditions it might make sense to talk of a ‘leadership faction’. But the Labour Party certainly wasn’t in that kind of crisis at the time of the 2017 AGM; we’d just deprived the Tories of their majority, apart from anything else, and were averaging 42% in the polls. This is the AGM that Steven referred to in his second Tweet; it’s also the one where I stood for election as a CLP delegate and (as I wrote at the time) found myself in the absurd position of “effectively running as a left-wing outsider, on a platform consisting of supporting the party’s elected leader and its agreed manifesto”. Running, in other words, against the locally dominant anti-leadership faction. (And didn’t get elected – a record I’ve maintained at both subsequent AGMs.)
Steven for his part was elected as a delegate this year – as his Tweet says – and good luck to him. I noticed that his personal statement led with his involvement in Another Europe Is Possible, a group whose Labour members surely ticked every group B box: an organised group, lobbying for a change to established party policy, on grounds of principle rather than pragmatism. (Whether that principle was correct, and whether it was important enough to override pragmatic considerations, are separate questions.) But the Remain cause has been big in our ward for a while – the incoming Chair is an enthusiast herself, according to her report from last year – so a reckoning with that particular faction of ideological purists may be a long time coming.
There was a report from last year from the incoming Chair…? Well spotted, imaginary reader. The incoming Chair could write a report because she had previously been a branch officer; the branch clearly didn’t think this was a problem, though. In fact, several officers either stayed in post or moved sideways, and several posts were uncontested. Contested elections are a pain, of course, particularly when you’re using paper ballots (in a branch with nearly 1000 members, at that) – and who can blame officers who want to go on working with people they know, or else try their hand at a different role? Still, though; looked at from outside it might seem odd that, in a ward branch with a membership nudging four figures – the size of some entire CLPs – it’s only possible to find one person interested in any of the officer positions.
It might also seem odd – or at least logistically challenging – for a branch this big to hold an all-member AGM: what did they do, hire a sports hall or something? No need, imaginary reader, there was no need. We met in the same place as last year, and I think we were pretty much the same people as last year; we were certainly in very similar numbers to last year, viz. around 70. Which is very much not one in 10 Chorlton residents; it’s not even one in 10 of those 970 members.
Which also helps explain the uncontested elections. Seven days (the notice period required when calling a branch AGM) is not a very long time – and membership secretaries don’t hand out contact lists to anyone who might want to do a quick bit of phone-banking. This is all according to the rules, of course, but these ‘home team’ advantages (and others created by officers’ role in the AGM itself) mean that the likelihood of anyone disrupting the orderly self-perpetuation of the dominant faction is pretty slim. Back in 2017, those Corbynite hotheads might have thought they could change the world by publishing a slate (i.e. printing some names on a piece of paper), but these days everybody knows what’s what and acts accordingly. Groups that are out of power don’t bother putting up candidates for inevitable defeat; the group in power doesn’t bother mobilising its softer supporters; and the wider membership ignores the one email they’ve been sent, and stays away from what sounds like a tedious meeting. The result is a kind of political Sealed Knot, an annual reunion of the office-holders and their factional activists on one side and the diehards of the excluded group(s) on the other. They might as well take allegiances at the door, like ushers at a wedding, and declare the results straight away.
You could argue that all this is beside the point: the party has able and effective officers, many of whom have proved their effectiveness in previous years; we have three Labour councillors; our Labour MP was re-elected in 2019 with a majority of 52%; what’s the problem? True, the dominant political tenor of the branch has been out of tune with the leadership for the last few years, but that’s not a problem – we don’t go around suspendingbranches just because they disagree with the leader – and besides, it may not be the case for much longer, depending on whether Keir Starmer wins (and which of his supporters he betrays). And, let’s not forget, the local party has nearly 1000 members, and they don’t seem to mind; they certainly didn’t turn up to complain.
But this doesn’t represent a healthy democratic party. A hard-fought meeting at which you pull out all the procedural stops, pour your heart into your statements and end up defeated is depressing enough, God knows, but a meeting where almost nothing gets fought because there’s no point trying is ten times worse. And what kind of message do these conditions send to the membership – what kind of membership are we building, if members keep seeing the same names in the same posts, or else (for a change) the same names in different posts? Come to that, should we be concealing from members the fact that different people in the party – although we all support Labour – think different things about the best way to get a Labour government, or about what a Labour government should do when it is elected? Reading party mailings – and attending party meetings – I often get the impression that we’re concealing that knowledge from ourselves.
I’ve always believed that uncontested elections and musical-chairs rotation of posts were signs of a local party in decline – not of one that’s going from strength to strength, as ours apparently is. Perhaps the problem is precisely the apparent absence of factions – or rather, the impossibility of multiple factions arising when a single faction dominates for long enough. Perhaps what we’re seeing is how unchallenged factional dominance sows the seeds of decline. Depending how you define ‘faction’, of course.
Update The second Labour Party meeting this week saw Withington CLP’s leadership nominations go to Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner, neither of whom I voted (or will be voting) for. These nomination meetings are something of a formality now – with three of the four leadership and four of the five deputy leadership candidates already on the ballot – and Withington’s nomination doesn’t actually have any effect on the vote, unless there are members out there willing to vote for whoever an email from the local party tells them to, which I would hope isn’t the case. (Then again, some people at the meeting were seriously arguing that we should vote for Starmer on the grounds that our MP supported him, an argument which to my ears sounds not so much unpersuasive as downright weird – we elected him, he didn’t delegate us.)
Anyway, it doesn’t matter greatly in the scheme of things that Keir Starmer won the vote over Rebecca Long-Bailey – although I feel compelled to mention that the win was fairly narrow and depended on transfers from Lisa Nandy’s supporters (so much for “time for a woman leader”) – or that Angela Rayner walked it for deputy (with Richard Burgon and Dawn Butler in distant second and third places).
The candidates’ statements – and the speeches in favour of them from attendees – were interesting, though. I’m not going to say much about the deputy leadership contest, but I do want to say a word for Richard Burgon’s statement; some really interesting proposals, particularly to do with democratising the party, which make me think he’d be a good complement to either of the main leadership candidates. His cause wasn’t helped on the night by his partisans, though – one went big on his (symbolic and easily circumvented) “peace pledge” proposal, while another said that Burgon would help Long-Bailey stay true to the “Corbyn project” (a phrase not guaranteed to win over the doubters).
More generally, there were some interesting contrasts between the speeches in favour of the three main candidates and those candidates’ statements. I tell a lie, there were some interesting contrasts between the speeches in favour of Keir Starmer and Starmer’s own statement. Long-Bailey and Nandy’s statements, and the interventions in their favour, both followed quite similar lines, viz:
Long-Bailey: policy 1, policy 2, policy 3, democratise the party, political experience, personal experience, local woman
Nandy: rebuild the party, unite the party, towns and cities, new, different
Starmer, not so much; his statement was quite policy-heavy and included some fairly explicit commitments to maintain the course set by Corbyn (which I found – in fairly rapid succession – surprising, gratifying and suspicious).
But – perhaps needless to say – this was not what made Starmer appeal to the people advocating him; the speeches in his favour (and there were several) could be summed up as three parts “unite the party”, two of “electability” and one “experience in senior roles”. As in Chorlton branch, there seems to be an odd association, for many members, between “not being on the Left” and “(correctly) having no position at all”. Later in the evening, as people ran out of more specific things to say and tempers began to fray, we were treated to several interventions on the theme of “you can either have the perfect ideological position [said with contempt] and be in opposition forever, or you can try and win the next election”. This is objectionable in a number of ways – it rewrites the history of the 2010-17 elections, which you’d think we’d want to learn from, as well as being quite extraordinarily insulting to members who are on the Left and have worked rather hard to try and get Labour MPs elected (thanks all the same). But what really stands out is the blithe assumption that they, the speakers, don’t care about having “the perfect ideological position”; that they’re a non-Left non-ideological non-faction.
(Nobody really spoke for Emily Thornberry, incidentally. It’s genuinely surprised me the way that she’s effectively dropped off the ballot; on paper it’s hard to see what Keir Starmer’s got that she hasn’t (ho ho). At one point somebody had the impertinence to ask whether Starmer’s “electability” had something to do with him being a white man from London who looks good in a suit. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an actual chorus of disapproval before.)
The other interesting thing is how thinly attended the meeting was. This will sound like crazy talk to anyone who was there – we packed out a sizeable school hall, and the debate between loyalists and the anti-leadership faction was pretty lively. But consider: total attendance was in the region of 320. There are seven wards in the constituency and consequently seven party branches; one of them (as we’ve just seen) has a membership of 970. None of the others is that large or anywhere near, but total membership across the constituency must be around the 3000 mark. So: turnout at a meeting to decide, at least symbolically, who the constituency wants to see as the next leader of the party was approximately 10%. Which is 50% better than the 7% we managed on Monday night in Chorlton – but that’s a low bar.
The Labour Party’s half a million members are, still, a sleeping giant – even now, four years on from 2015. That’s an enormous, untapped asset; viewed less cynically, a membership that size has the potential to change the political culture of this country from the ground up, and at the very least to change the way that we think about political party membership. But if that’s going to happen, they’ll need to be mobilised, and mobilised politically – which means abandoning the pretence that everyone in the Labour Party thinks the same thing, or that all that any of us care about is electing good, hard-working Labour councillors and a good, hard-working Labour MP to represent all the good, hard-working local Labour voters. (Apart from anything else, how is that going to draw anyone in? Let’s face it, a diet of “re-elect Councillor X” and “what shall we ask the council to do about local issue Y?” is pretty thin gruel, even if you supplement it with events to mark key calendar dates.)
The trouble is that the keys to making that kind of mobilisation happen are, very often, in the hands of people who gained their current position in just the conditions of unchallenged factional dominance – with all its depoliticising and demobilising effects – which need to change.
My MP has just asked me – and a few thousand other members of his CLP – what went wrong in December: what do we blame for Labour’s defeat?
Now, you don’t ask a ‘quantity’ question if you want a ‘quality’ answer; if you wanted to hear a measured argument weighing up multiple factors before coming to a judiciously qualified conclusion, you wouldn’t ask several thousand people at once. Presumably what our man is after is something to replace the row of dots in a statement like “Members have told me over and over again that…” or “What I’m hearing again and again is…”. So I don’t suppose my MP will be reading and considering my arguments very carefully, or (to be brutally honest) at all. But I wanted to get it straight in my head, so I thought it was worth doing for that alone. And hey, free blog post!
What do I blame for Labour’s defeat in 2019?
1. Brexit. Brexit has to be top of the list; it was always going to make winning in 2019 a long shot. Ultimately I don’t think it mattered very much exactly where Labour’s policy ended up – we were always going to lose x% to hard Brexit parties and y% to hard Remain parties, it was just a matter of which was bigger. Perhaps a more Brexit-friendly position would have saved some (net) votes and seats, but we can’t be sure – although I definitely don’t think that going any further towards Remain would have helped. What we do know is that the constant lobbying and nudging to shift Labour’s Brexit policy didn’t help at all – it made us look indecisive, made our policy look incoherent and exacerbated divisions within the leadership. In retrospect we should have set out a line quite early on and stuck to it – even if that line was ‘accept Brexit but blame the Tories’.
2. Populism. Brexit also exemplified a broader problem – the way that politics (“the art of the possible”, objectives and how to achieve them) has increasingly been supplanted by a kind of populist spectator mentality, in which people cheer on their side and don’t care what actually happens as long as the other side loses. Talking policy to an audience primed for slogans is a waste of breath – but how did we end up with an audience that wants slogans, and how do we get them to think about policy again?
3. Margaret Hodge. Or if that’s giving too much prominence to one person, I blame the lack of loyalty and discipline within the PLP more generally. Like him or loathe him, after 2016 there was no possibility of removing Corbyn as leader; anyone who continued to agitate against him, under those conditions, was only working for a Tory victory. But, as disgraceful as many MPs’ conduct was, they don’t bear all of the blame here; Corbyn’s lack of interest in party management came back to bite him, and us. The next leader must do better, which means learning (selectively) from New Labour. (A little Leninism goes a very long way, as Philip Gould once said.)
4. Online. Postal votes are one of the things killed us – I suspect that many of the people I spoke to on the doorstep, and thought I’d persuaded to consider voting Labour, had already voted Tory. I think the underlying lesson is that the Tories’ online operation – particularly targeting Facebook – is scarily good; we need to work on ours. (We also need to rethink what we think we’re doing – and in particular who we think we’re talking to – when we do online campaigning.)
5. The manifesto. The manifesto was a programme for a sweeping social-democratic transformation of the economy; we could never have done it all in one term. I don’t think there’s much wrong with the proposals themselves, but we should have been clearer about what we were proposing for the first term and what was more of an aspiration. Also – most importantly – we should have been working towards those policy announcements from 2017 onwards, not springing them on an unsuspecting electorate with a few weeks to go till the election.
6. There is no point 6. I’m not saying a word against Jeremy Corbyn – plenty of people will do that for me – but even if I did I wouldn’t put the leadership’s contribution to our defeat any higher than sixth in a field of six. Scapegoating Corbyn might be satisfying, but it’s a distraction – and won’t help us win next time.
The polls seem to be settling down at around the 43% Conservative, 34% Labour mark – which are also the figures YouGov’s second MRP model came up with. On paper – or on Election Polling‘s swingometer – this means a Tory majority of 40.
Is there any reason to hope that the result won’t be that bad? Yes – as I said in the previous post, there are several. There’s the fact that four of the seven polls which completed fieldwork on the 11th showed a rise in the Labour vote share, while the other three had it static; opinion may still be moving Labour’s way. There’s also the fact that YouGov’s MRP model doesn’t give the Tories a majority of 40, but only of 26 – I’ll come back to this.
But let’s assume that the 43%/34% figures are the last word, and that they’re an accurate reading of what the pollsters set out to read. What then? Is there any reason to suppose that the actual percentages will be different? If so, how different?
First, remember that rush to register – 2.8 million new registrations, 1.8 million of them under 40. If this included a substantial element of new business, it may have put the demographics of the electorate out of whack with the age group split assumed by pollsters; add a million new punters to the lowest age group and half a million to the next one up, and a 35:40:25 split becomes 38:40:22. This alone, given the steep age gradient among Labour and Tory voters, would turn 43%/34% into 42%/35%.
Then there are turnout assumptions. YouGov revealed recently that they model turnout on the assumption that it will be much the same as it was in 2015; this assumption seems foolhardy. Assume that, instead of under-40s’ turnout rate being down at 60%, it’s 70% – which is still below the 80% characteristic of the middle age group, let alone the 90% of over-65s – and our 42%/35% becomes 41%/36%. (Crank it up all the way to 80% and we’d be looking at 40%/37%, but I won’t go there.)
Lastly, assume that Labour is going to work harder than the other parties at getting out its vote. Pollsters assume that the only people who are going to vote are those who express a certain likelihood or above – but what if one lot of voters has friendly people knocking on their doors on polling day, and another doesn’t? Add another 5% to Labour turnout (only) and our 41%/36% turns into 40%/36%.
40%/36% is still a Conservative victory in all but name – it’s a hung parliament with the Tories on 324 seats, needing only to come to a deal with the Lib Dems (or possibly even the DUP). At least, that’s how it looks on the Election Polling swingometer. But remember where we started: the YouGov MRP model gave the Tories substantially fewer seats than the headline vote share suggested. Presumably this is based on local factors: tactical voting (although I suspect this will be a wash, for reasons touched on by Dan) and – what’s likely to be more important – targeted campaigning in marginals, particularly by Labour. The difference that these factors appear to make, in YouGov’s eyes, is the rough equivalent of a 1% swing from the Tories to Labour, making 43%/34% look more like 42%/35%. And 40%/36%, presumably, would look more like 39%/37%.
Now, 39%/37% – or a 40%/36% in actual votes which looked like 39%/37% – would still make the Tories the largest single party, and still enable them to form a coalition with the Lib Dems. But it would enable all the other British parties combined to outvote the Tories, and that’s a start. Also, bear in mind that all this started from a 43%/34% vote split; if we started from ComRes’s 41%/36% split and applied the same factors, we’d end up with a 38%/38% tie, and one which looked more like 37%/39% in Labour’s favour in terms of seats. And that would give us a House of Commons in which Labour and the SNP could outvote all the other parties (the Lib Dems included).
In short, a Labour landslide isn’t on the cards, but things do look a bit more hopeful than they might seem.
We’ll know whether hope was in order before too long. Roll on 10 p.m. – but in the mean time let’s keep up the pressure.
Workers’ Playtime 