Labour people are used to defeat. Before every election they wonder if the Tories will defy expectations. Real votes are not the same as opinion polls, after all, they say. And yet ever since Boris Johnson broke his own lockdown rules, disastrous performances for the Tories in opinion polls have been replicated by disastrous results in real elections. We are only beginning to grasp the consequences of an inevitable Tory defeat.
Barring divine intervention by a Tory god, Labour will win the next election
Not all the results of the 2024 local elections are in by any means, but come on now. At the time of writing, Labour has taken the Blackpool South parliamentary seat. Conservative support collapsed by 32 per cent.
This was not a one off. As the unstoppable electoral stats machine, Rob Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University points out, Tony Blair achieved four swings of 20 points or more from the Conservatives when he was opposition leader. Starmer has now achieved five – including four of the five largest swings ever recorded in British political history.
Barring divine intervention by a Tory god, Labour will win the next election. And that knowledge is making Labour more left-wing than many Westminster correspondents acknowledge.
The gains of the Green party in the local elections and Muslim boycotts of Labour candidates because of the party’s pro-Israel stance may not have had a great impact this time round. But it is easy for any clear-sighted Labour politician to see how left anti-Labour forces might build in the future.
As a result, Starmer is not following the Tony Blair playbook of appeasing conservative opinion, or at least he is not following it to the letter. Here are a few examples of his thinking that deserved more notice than they received.
Last week, the New Statesman reported a political rumour that Labour would carry on with the government’s plans to deport asylum seekers to the corrupt, militarist and quasi-dictatorial Rwandan state, which have outraged liberal opinion. ‘We cannot just come in, tear it up and have nothing to put in its place,’ an anonymous adviser told the magazine.
All the criticism shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper and shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock have poured on the waste of public money Rwanda has prompted was to be forgotten, apparently.
The only template modern Labour leaders have for winning an election is the punitive strategy of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997, and it seemed they would follow it again in 2024. Readers old enough to remember the 1990s will recall an arms race on crime and asylum policies, as Michael Howard and Tony Blair outbid each other with gimmicky authoritarian stunts.
Today, the Blairite model of refusing to allow Labour to be outflanked on the right would have mandated accepting deportations to Africa. Nothing of the sort happened, however. Keir Starmer thought it worth his while to personally crush the story. ‘I don’t think it will work, I know we have to stop the boats and I want to get going with our plan on day one,’ he said. ‘What I’m not going to do is flog a dead horse.’
The Greens, the SNP, and whatever Corbynite movement emerges after the next election would all use a U-turn on Rwanda to attack Labour, and you can see the political damage that would flow from changing course.
But to highlight the political threat is to miss a wider point. Most Labour politicians are not ‘desiccated calculating machines’ to use Nye Bevan’s putdown of Hugh Gaitskell. They do not just weigh electoral consequences. They believe the Rwanda policy is a cruel stunt, as does Keir Starmer. That is why it will die with this government.
We are moving into a new Britain where the old calculations do not apply. Ever since the Brexit referendum of 2016, all who criticised right-wing populism were dismissed as elitist fools who did not understand the beliefs of ordinary, honest people. Now that right-wing populism has failed so utterly it is no longer even popular, new concerns will dominate. The attitudes of renters, young home buyers, Muslims, and the supposed out-of-touch progressives will matter.
Another episode from earlier this week made my point for me. The Financial Times claimed that Labour was about to unveil a weakened package of workers’ rights. Its promises to deliver higher sick pay, end employers’ use of ‘fire and rehire’, and reverse anti-strike legislation would be watered down or forgotten, apparently
The story tallied with the easy, fashionable view that Starmer’s Labour will say and do anything to win, and with Margaret Thatcher’s rather complacent Tory assumption that ‘the facts of life are conservative,’ and Labour must follow conservative policies when it is in power.
Starmer blew both assumptions away. He categorically denied the FT story saying, ‘We will not be watering down the New Deal for Working People’.
The biggest test for Labour is yet to come. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has gone into full Liz Truss mode and has pushed forward unfunded cuts to National Insurance. On the one hand, Hunt and Sunak, have been politically naïve: by saying they want to abolish NI they have allowed Labour to engage in the populism of the left and claim that the Conservatives are threatening the state pension.
The biggest test for Labour is yet to come
But eventually Labour will have to declare whether it will accept the huge spending cuts Hunt’s uncosted proposals will necessitate. In 1997, Gordon Brown accepted the incredibly tight fiscal programme Ken Clarke left him. Better to do that, he reasoned, than allow the Tories to hang the ‘tax raiser’ label around Labour’s neck in the general election campaign.
Do not be shocked if shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves refuses to do the same. Instead she may well point out that Hunt is trying to play a trick and say that she will not go along with the charade, and nor should the voters.
If you look ahead to 2025, you can see a Labour government under attack from the left by the Greens and Corbynistas, from Scottish nationalists in the SNP and English nationalists in the Conservative party. To hold the centre ground, it must treat all its opponents with equal seriousness.
The idea that it will only make concession to conservatives, that it will give ground to them on asylum, human rights, workers’ rights, public spending, and indeed Brexit, because Labour has no other choice is a delusion born of the long years of Conservative rule, which I can say with certainty, are now over.
Comments