“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time”
- Ruth Bader Ginsberg
On 6th May my wife and I took our traditional walk to the polling station in our village hall. We had three votes in the County Council election and one plus a second preference in the Police and Crime Commissioner election. In the former I voted for the two Labour candidates available plus the Green. My wife leant more towards the Liberal Democrats. In the latter we gave both votes to progressive candidates. They all lost. There was a crumb of comfort in the PCC election as it was forced to a second count as the Tory failed to garner 50% of the vote. For this we can probably thank voters in our neighbouring county who pretty decisively kicked the Tories off the County Council.
For the best part of 50 years, I have trudged my way to the village hall to vote for candidates doomed to defeat. I live in a corner of darkest, deepest blue Tory land in the Home Counties which stuck by the party even at the height of Tony Blair’s influence. For a short period of time, it was the only local authority in the country that the Tories controlled. Every other one from Land’s End to John O’Groats was held by Labour, the Liberal Democrats or was in “No Overall Control”. The early 2000’s seem a long way away now.
Strangely local folk complain about local services – or, more precisely, the lack of them. Over recent years the mobile library has been run down and eventually parked up for good. The few buses that came this way are also now in the garage for good. Refuse tips have been closed. The local roads are full of potholes. The schools are underfunded as the County Council’s priority is to protect its grammar schools. The much-hated HS2 literally slices the County in half but citizens still vote locally for the party which nationally is building it against their wishes. The County Council hung out the flag of surrender long ago and opposition to the County’s numerous Tory MPs can best be described as limp. One of them was bought off recently by a promise by a Minister to look at the possibility of building a station on the high-speed line in his constituency. A promise which seems to ignore HS2’s USP which is comfort, speed and non-stop between London and Birmingham. If Aylesbury gets a HS2 station, I will open up a British Rail sandwich franchise on the concourse.
Anyway, the story of the 6th May elections was not about voters supporting a Party that they would still vote for even if they put up Genghis Khan and Dracula as candidates. It was the travails of Keir Starmer. Most pundits expected the red brick in the wall named Hartlepool to fall but what caused much gnashing of teeth of was the magnitude of the defeat added to Labour’s crumbling vote in the County Council elections – particularly in the north.
In accordance with tradition, Labour went into total meltdown. Keir Starmer tried to establish his authority by undertaking a Shadow Cabinet reshuffle. It took a long time, hardly seemed to take off from the ground because it would appear the Deputy Leader did not want to carry the can for the debacle, so set out to extract a big price – which was a bigger job in the Shadow Cabinet. The usual suspects all weighed in to make Keir’s efforts more difficult than they were already. The hard left – remember them? Corbyn and his mates Abbot, McDonald, Burgon, Lavery, McClusky, etc all had an unhelpful go. What was strange about this was that when they did have control of the levers of power in the Labour Party, they held the mainstream media in contempt and would avoid speaking to them. But now they sprinted towards the TV studios (or more likely Zoom interviews). Laura Kuenssberg gave up on balance and her usual ‘a bit of this and a little bit of that’ defence of Boris Johnson to stick the knife into the beleaguered Keir.
Now if I had an easy answer to the Labour Party’s troubles, Starmer would have worked it for out himself already, but it does appear he made some blindingly obvious errors over the last few months which could easily be remedied.
It is easy to forget now how popular Starmer was and how unpopular Johnson was at the peak of the pandemic last year. Keir’s personal popularity ran ahead of his Party. What halcyon days they were. The strategy at the time was to appear competent and this struck a chord with the voters locked away at home. Johnson was saved towards the end of the year by the arrival of vaccines. Boris was awarded with a vaccine bounce in the polls. Suddenly everything was possible again and Johnson milked for all its worth. In a click of the fingers, Labour’s competence strategy looked out of time and out of place. Labour failed to respond leaving the Party open to the accusation that nobody knew what it stood for anymore. It is possible nobody could have prevented the Boris poll bounce which, coupled with lingering Brexit resentment, damaged Labour so much in its former heartlands.
So, lesson number one for Keir is do not take Boris for granted – he is a formidable campaigner and lesson number two is, have a flexible approach to strategy to ensure your Party is not simply taken over by events.
Labour does need to be quite clear about what it stands for, and what it stands for needs to resonate with voters. Remember Blair’s pledge card. It was not a list of hard left promises recycled from the 1970s which were mainly about state control, but a list of actions voters knew addressed their concerns and would improve their lives and that of their families. Now this is not easy when the Tories park their tanks all over your lawn – remember when public spending increased the national debt which would land on our children and grandchildren, hence austerity was the way forward? Well, that is for the birds now and Boris is all for spend, spend, spend. Perhaps northern men and women have fallen out of love with Labour. Perhaps there is an unbridgeable gap between their priorities and some of Labour’s abiding principles – only time will tell.
The counter argument is that Mr and Mrs Average - be they living in Epsom, Haywards Heath, Bradford or Hull - all basically want the same thing. A secure well paid job, a decent home they can afford, a reliable and accessible health service, a good education for their children, and to feel safe and secure in their communities. Labour’s challenge is to find some pledges which address these ambitions while being believable to voters.
They are up against the Tories “levelling up” promise – the problem is nobody is quite sure what it means and there is some evidence from the recent elections that voters in the south feel “left behind” and that Boris’s promise to them is to level their countryside under tarmac and concrete in a rush to build houses. As we appear to be entering an age of looser party loyalties, perhaps there is scope for Labour to make ground with southern liberal conservatives who are more pro-Europe than their fellow citizens in the north.
Lesson three is to make believable, deliverable pledges to voters that are not blinkered by a drive to recapture the lost “red wall” seats.
The commitment to recognising and encouraging ambition and aspiration as Labour values in the forthcoming policy review is welcome. These were dirty words under the collectivism policies of Corbyn. Labour should now stand for everybody being able to achieve their maximum potential.
One of things Dominic Cummings has said that Labour would do well to reflect on is that the Brexit vote finally saw the end of British class politics. He suggests voters now fall into three groups: social liberals who reside in the cities and large towns, the wealthy who occupy the Shires and town dwellers (like Hartlepool). Perhaps he is right. If so, stacking up the votes of city citizens will not get Labour over the line, so it needs a playbook that appeals not just to Islington and Norwood but also Dudley and Truro.
The next lesson is about getting the Party’s best communicators on to the front line.
The Shadow Cabinet does have good communicators – Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner, Lisa Nandy for example - but others are pretty anonymous, and some have the personality of dried dish cloths. Those few second vox pox interviews need to be filled with Labour voices that sound plausible and come armed with the snappy phrase that cuts through. So let us see more of David Lammy, Jess Philips, Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn (assuming the latter two are willing to serve in the Shadow Cabinet) on our television screens. As the Chair of a Select Committee, Yvette has done more to hold the Government to account over its Covid border controls than anybody else in the House of Commons.
And the last lesson – avoid Boris Johnson’s attack on “wokeness” and determination to start a series of culture wars like the plague.
Sucking Labour in will only encourage the Tories to wrap themselves in the Union Jack, don the Union Jack face mask and paint themselves as the true party of patriots. Johnson would love the next election to be either a re-run of the Brexit vote or a tussle over statues – Labour should not give him the pleasure.
Labour needs to stop fighting over contrasting visions of the past – Blairism and Corbynism. 2021 isn’t 1997 or 1977. It needs to look out towards voters and stop trying to satisfy a minority of its members rather than a majority of voters.
Perhaps the Teutonic plates of British politics have moved and moved for good. Perhaps the collectivism of the mines and mills which gave birth to the trade union movement and the Labour Party has gone. Labour may need to take a leaf out of the Tory playbook – stop looking back at a political nostalgia from the past and adapt to the reality of today. It is difficult to believe Boris Johnson belongs to the same party as Harold MacMillan, Margaret Thatcher and Stanley Baldwin. Perhaps Keir Starmer’s Labour may need to look different from that of Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.
Perhaps Labour needs to build a new voter alliance. Look at building a Party that appeals not just to city dwellers but former social conservatives who are appalled at the Tory’s drift towards the right, its attack on the arts and culture, and its negativity towards Europe and immigrants, and want more done on climate change. Appealing to former Tory and Liberal Democrats might be a hard swallow for some on the left but swallow they must if their Party is not to dwindle and die.
Good luck, Keir!
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