The Labour Party: Ten Home Truths

After the sting of the election defeat, I’ve been doing some initial thinking and jotted down some thoughts. Some of these things may be hard to for some of us to read and were equally hard for me to write (trust me), but as a movement we need to be truly honest with ourselves about what has gone wrong before we try and fix it.

1. Do not underestimate the scale of this defeat. This really is an existential crisis for the party. Our northern base is gone with many seats lost and many more now marginal. There are now only 96 seats in the country where labour have a majority of over 10,000. That means we are possibly not yet at the floor in terms of seats. Our southern and metropolitan gains of the last decade are not yet secure and we cannot rely on them to come through if we pivot in future elections towards a more socially or economically conservative platform to win back the so called “red wall”. The labour party’s only true heartlands remain in Liverpool, Manchester and parts of London. Not good for a party seeking government any time soon. We need that clarity on our current predicament first to focus our minds on what a rebuilding project might look like.
   
2. Labour didn’t lose because of Corbyn, Brexit or our manifesto; we lost due to all the above. Similarly, our relative success in 2017 cannot be attributed to any of these three factors in isolation. My honest assessment of 2017 is that the catastrophe that was May’s monumentally incompetent campaign gave us the space to get our message out in a way that any other campaign would not. And, let’s be honest, we didn’t win in 2017 either. The truth is that labour has been incrementally weakening in the red wall since 2005. As with our collapse in Scotland this is a crisis that was decades in the making. There were warning signs and prophets of doom that I and others ignored, that was a mistake. We need to come back from this smarter, more strategic and ready to re-earn our electorate’s trust. I don’t subscribe to Jon Lansman’s view that winning elections is somehow secondary to the wider goals of socialism. We can sit in our bubble and campaign for a different society all we want; meanwhile the Tories will be in power taking decisions that are hurting our communities.
   
3. There’s no point blaming the Tories, the Lib Dems or the media for what has happened; we have to offer an attractive enough package that will make enough people want to vote for us outright. We know the Tories’ game by now – they smear, they lie and they cheat. T’was ever thus. They have won this election and no amount of bleating from us about their tactics is going to change that. The Lib Dems are a rival political party and it just isn’t good enough to blame them for standing or competing in close seats. If we’re not strong enough to take a seat without the support of another party, then we don’t deserve to take that seat. The media may well have given us a tough time and shown shameless bias, but we played into their hands on many occasions and didn’t maximise the impact of our social media campaigns to counteract this effectively. Tabloid readership declines year-on-year, as does the influence of broadcast media. The media did not lose this election for us, we did. Blaming a single factor for this defeat, either internal or external is too simplistic and risks us thinking there is some easy fix to the predicament we are in, there isn’t. it will also limit our analysis along party factional lines which will discourage the necessary introspection we need to undertake together.
   
4. Corbyn should not have led us into this election. I have made no secret of the fact that I was and am a Corbyn supporter. I have Corbyn in my heart, but it was not my heart that we had to win in this election; it was the hearts of people who don’t religiously follow and track politics, the types of people who John Harris talks to in his fantastic ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ series. Whether I like it or not, those people looked at Jeremy Corbyn and found him wanting. Corbyn sustained dreadful smears and sustained attack from the establishment throughout his leadership. After 5 years many of those attack lines had landed with people and were impossible to shift. We should have known this, and we shouldn’t have put him in front of the electorate a second time. Perhaps Corbyn should have seen this himself and stepped aside after the high watermark of 2017. A different leader could have built on that success without the baggage and target on their back.
   
5. The disconnect between labour and its voter base is worrying. As a member of the so called ‘metropolitan elite’ I am under no illusion that I am not labour’s traditional target demographic and that the answers to its current predicament are not likely to come from the likes of me. There was something I found slightly uncomfortable about buses of enthusiastic activists being wheeled into England’s provincial towns to sell our manifesto. That is not to say that I don’t appreciate those activist’s dedication and efforts. I just wondered why it was necessary in the first place and what locals must have thought of students from London telling them why labour is the answer to their problems. We must grow local activism in all parts of the country, a modern equivalent to the unions and co-ops that held labour together in the 20^th century. In many areas this is already happening but we must do more of it. In this era of identity politics, it really does matter who is delivering a message. That person needs to be local and relatable to the community they speak to.
   
6. On Brexit we stood in the middle of the road and were trampled. This is probably the hardest home truth of all for me to write. As a staunch remainer, of course it felt good when labour endorsed a second referendum. I thought it was the right move at the time, but I was wrong. Interestingly the biggest difference between our 2017 and 2019 manifestos was our stance on Brexit. Yes, people were tired of Brexit but they still voted for it and there was a sense that the will of the people was being upended by a remain supporting parliament. Although I am deeply sad that the UK is leaving the EU, the best thing for Britain would have been a labour government overseeing a soft withdrawal agreement that protected jobs and the most vulnerable in society. Johnson’s pledge to “get Brexit done” cut through in a way that Labours prevarication did not. Even with a pro-Brexit position we would likely still have lost, but we’d have lost differently; with a stronger hand and a chance to challenge the government more effectively.
   
7. Our manifesto and our campaign strategy were poor. We didn’t rekindle the magic of the 2017 manifesto with its simplicity, clarity and golden thread of cohesive ideas. Instead we published something so ambitious and radical that it either frightened people or seemed unrealistic. People may have loved our policy ideas in isolation, but when packaged together they didn’t seem plausible. We somehow allowed the meta-narrative of our campaign to become “free stuff”, which undermined so many of the genuinely transformational policies we were offering. The overall impression was that labour was desperate and trying anything to cover up its equivocal Brexit position. Putting the moral argument to one side, the reactive decision to compensate the waspi women was a major strategic misfire. It played directly into the aforementioned impression of desperation while also enabling the classic right-wing trope of labour being economically untrustworthy. I am not saying that we shouldn’t put a truly left-wing manifesto in front of the electorate again, but we do really need to think about how we communicate those ideas and what the cumulative effects of policy announcements are.
   
8. Corbyn should stay on in a caretaker capacity for at least 3 to 6 months. I say that not because I want him to stay or have a hand in picking his successor but because throwing the party immediately into a leadership campaign before the necessary deep thinking has been done might just finish us off completely. Ideally, we would have a deputy leader who could step up as interim leader, but with Watson gone and no one else in post it is best to allow Corbyn to carry the can through the headwinds of the next few months. It is probably better for the party for example if the new leader doesn’t have to take a position on Boris’s withdrawal agreement in January or respond to the EHRC’s antisemitism report in the spring. We need a clean break so that the next leader isn’t saddled with the baggage of the Corbyn era.
   
9. The next leader must be someone who can attract back our traditional voters - without dampening the enthusiasm of our young and energised base too much. No easy task to appeal to two such widely divergent groups. It is too early to name names, but it would be enormously helpful if our next leader was a) Northern/midlands working class and b) A woman. This limits the field to 2 or 3 main contenders but is more important I think than which faction or wing of the party they are drawn from.
   
10. There is a toxic stink around the labour party of antisemitism that has tarnished its reputation with the electorate. Regardless of your beliefs on the veracity of such claims, it is hurting us and will come back to bite us again, even once Corbyn and co are long gone. The next labour leader needs to take decisive action on this and implement any forthcoming EHRC recommendations in full, while demonstrating genuine contrition so that the issue can be put to bed once and for all. There are at least 4 years until the next election (once the fixed-term parliament act is repealed), that gives us time to address this and hopefully start to rebuild the trust of the Jewish community.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and it is easy to look back and to speak frankly about these things now. Much of what I have said above are internal thoughts I have had at the back of my head from time to time but not been ready or able to articulate them during the last five years. Anyone who knows me knows that I have been a vociferous supporter of the Corbyn project. I still hold its ideals and infectious optimism in my heart. I think it probably arrested a terminal decline in labour that was developing since 2005 and re-energised our base in an exciting way. What it hasn’t done is brought us a transformative labour government, so we now need to step towards something different while learning the lessons of the last four years. The only glimmer of hope I can see right now is that the decline of tribal voting works both ways; while we may have lost our dead cert, pin-the-red-rosette-on-the-donkey seats for good, we have also got a steadily increasing floating vote to whom party allegiance means nothing. That means that with the right offer, leader and plan we can reverse this catastrophe sooner than we think.