Change, Continuity and Labour’s Prospects at the Next Election

Helm Associate and former Labour strategist, Greg Cook, considers which party is actually best placed to win a parliamentary majority at the next election.

Labour’s lead in the opinion polls remains somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent and the sense that it may persist in that ball park until the general election is called is becoming more and more plausible.  Without the outlet of changing their leader again the Conservatives have only the long hard grind of rebuilding their economic credibility and sowing seeds of doubt about Labour to look forward to in the medium term with no guarantee of success in either.  Across the political spectrum many, including some Tory MPs, are discounting the possibility of the Conservatives being re-elected to government.  But with over a year to the likeliest election date that judgement is plainly premature and a decent argument can be made that despite Labour’s great progress any outcome, including another Conservative majority, is on the table.

The monumental scale of the barriers to a Labour-led government which until recently made such a prospect look fanciful have not of course gone away.  But while they are useful benchmarks the unprecedented swings which Labour requires to be the largest party or to win a majority, the 60 per cent increase it seeks in the number of its MPs, the Conservatives’ overall majority of the three-party vote in 2019, the effects of incumbency and the further drift of seats to the south of England under the Boundary Review should not by themselves concern Labour too much.  The accumulated precedent of the 21 elections since 1945, each in unique circumstances, does not amount to the status of scientific law which some accord it.  Records are there to be broken.

But the politics lying behind those elections do matter.  And these tell us that Labour has been ahead in just three of the last 11 general elections, all of them with Tony Blair as leader.  Seven of its defeats in that period have been heavy (by more than six percentage points), three of them landslides (by more than ten points).  Only in three of those 11 elections has Labour’s share of the vote exceeded 38 per cent.  The Blair elections are the only ones in which it has won more than 271 seats (not enough to be the largest party).  Only in the three Blair elections have the Conservatives won fewer than 300 seats (remarkably not since 1974 have they won between 200 and 300).  The Conservative share of the vote has increased in the last six elections.  And in all of the elections up to and including 2010 Labour won more than 40 seats in Scotland.

All of that tells us that while we may persist in supposing ourselves to live in a two-party system where those two parties are roughly balanced in their appeal, that is false.  When it comes to choosing a government the British electorate has shown a clear and consistent preference for the Conservatives, despite the burgeoning of demographic trends that work against them like the spread of higher education, the public sector and ethnic diversity, and often in the teeth of recession or party turmoil.

And yet Labour’s current poll lead is built not on a message of change but of continuity.  Unlike Kinnock, Blair and Cameron who all sought to re-write their parties’ policies and update their constitutions in the wake of electoral rejection, Keir Starmer has as yet made little effort to change the fundamental positioning of his party or to reconcile it with the sources of its defeat.  Starmer's speeches rarely offer any challenge to Labour’s accepted wisdom or its interpretation of the political narrative of the last 13 years of Conservative government.  Indeed at no point since its dreadful result in the 2010 general election has Labour seriously considered why it lost and has continued to lose or conceded the need to change.   Beyond an admission that it had fallen short on the regulation of financial institutions (a rather more serious failing than the normal terms of that admission imply) and a vague acceptance that mistakes may have been made in the handling of immigration, Labour seems still to interpret its 2010 defeat as it did at the time chiefly as the inevitable consequence of the recession created by the failures of the banks, the MPs’ expenses scandal, the supposedly nefarious activities of Lord Ashcroft and a general sense that it had run out of road.

Of course the Labour Party which will present itself to the next election under Starmer will be radically and obviously different to that of Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, as the Labour leader has sought to exemplify in his actions on antisemitism and the suspension of his predecessor.  Its policy programme will also bear little resemblance to that of 2019.  Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves and her team are reining in any suggestion of huge spending increases on public services and requiring every policy to be costed and paid for, while Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting is ruffling feathers by suggesting that extra money for the NHS might need to be accompanied by reform.  Starmer himself has pointedly distanced himself from the wave of industrial action which under Corbyn would undoubtedly have been backed to the hilt.  But as the Tories’ unpopularity has deepened and brought with it an apparent shift in public opinion on their policies, any sense that Labour might need to change more profoundly has only diminished.

It would be unfair to describe Labour’s political message as “We’re sorry to say we told you so”, but it is probably not an unfair characterisation of the mood of most of its members and public representatives who might understandably want to dust down the old “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted Labour” badges which many of them wore through the 80s and 90s.  Starmer himself is obviously wary of such a tone.  For example he seems to want to draw a line under the Brexit issue despite the urgings of many who believe a return to the single market and customs union is essential for economic prosperity and who draw attention to the large plurality of voters who now tell pollsters that they believe Britain should have remained in the EU (a development which in truth probably owes more to the demise of Boris Johnson than an awareness of the analyses of the OBR).

But by contesting and winning the election to be leader of his party on a platform of pledges which (probably of necessity) largely endorsed the Corbyn agenda, Starmer has hampered his ability to present himself as the agent of a fresh start with new ideas, or his Labour Party as a changed entity which has learned from its defeats and mistakes and listened to the electorate.  Very few of those pledges are likely to remain by the time of the next election - just this weekend he was rowing back on some of them - but his rationale for putting them aside must principally be the changed economic circumstances, not a belief that they may be outdated, that Labour should take account of their rejection by the electorate or that they were just plain wrong.  And of course the corollary of that is that if Labour was not “wrong” in 2019 (or indeed in 2010, 2015 or 2017) then the electorate was.  It is not a comfortable place for any politician or party.

These considerations were of less moment when Johnson was Tory leader.  His personality, his populism and his eschewal of the traditional Tory virtue of fiscal prudence took the focus off Labour’s weaknesses.  But in Sunak the Tories have a leader who clearly believes there is mileage in re-establishing the old order and who will forensically exploit Labour’s past political vulnerabilities, whether it be union militancy, the whole gamut of the (for want of a better term) “woke” agenda or more marginal issues which are popular with Labour members but not the public, like lowering the voting age.  Towering over all of these will be economic competence and specifically spending.

Many in Labour have convinced themselves that not only have the public had enough of austerity, they share Labour’s analysis that the policies of spending cuts brought in by the coalition government were a mistake and a failure.  The truth or otherwise of this perception is hard to disentangle.  Austerity is never popular, but often it will be regarded as necessary, which is exactly what the polls repeatedly showed was the case between 2010 and 2015 for which, moreover, Labour’s policies in government were blamed more than anything else.   Both in 2010 and 2015 it seems pretty clear that the Tories won the argument with the electorate and indeed they firmly embedded the old cliché that the chief purpose of Tory governments is to clean up the economic mess left behind by Labour’s over-indulgence.

Under Corbyn Labour unashamedly embraced huge scales of public spending as an economic policy in itself and in 2017, when no one believed Labour could win, proved the unremarkable truth that, in themselves, promises to spend lots of money on things that nearly everybody believes would be beneficial are popular with the electorate.  But the illusion that this had somehow re-written the electoral ground rules proved short-lived when Labour tried to repeat the trick in 2019, an election which the public regarded as a serious choice.  And anyone who carried out any research in the true Red Wall heartlands will know that those spending pledges, many of which were regarded with any combination of being unsustainable, unaffordable and undesirable, were central to the rejection of Labour in that election and indeed played a role in a longer term detachment from the party.

The long-term legacy of Corbyn however is that within Labour “Austerity” is not just a policy to be disagreed with, it has become literally a dirty word and a disreputable concept, notwithstanding the virtuous values that might be associated with it like responsibility, caution and even fairness.  Yet in a poll for Progressive Britain by Opinium in April, the statement “They would spend too much money and get the country into more debt” came behind only “They are unclear what they stand for” as the worst thing about Labour that might stop respondents from voting for them.  And among those who had voted Conservative in 2019 and might vote Labour, the crucial segment of voters, it came far ahead of any other objection.

Of course opposition to austerity has now seeped into large parts of the Conservative Party and their ability to make the next election a re-run of 2015 has been severely compromised by their behaviour in government over the whole period since 2019.  Labour will ensure that every penny it plans to spend will be costed and paid for from populist sources (such as VAT relief on private education) along the lines of its Five Pledges in 1997. It may indeed transpire that this is simply a redundant debate.  But the public may not take much convincing that whatever their opposition to cuts, the extraordinary strains on public finances mean that some form of spending restraint is necessary and that Labour cannot be trusted not to succumb to its predilections.   It is a rather simpler case for the Tories to make than Labour’s retort that it will be better able to generate the higher growth that is ultimately necessary.

At the moment all of this seems completely hypothetical.  The Tories could say two plus two equals four and most would not believe it.  But whatever their distaste for the Tories, the electorate just three years ago comprehensively rejected Labour and pretty much everything it then stood for.  It may be that the Tories are currently and will still at the next election be regarded as unelectable, but the idea that Labour’s positive appeal can be essentially as a more cautious and restrained version of its 2019 self and with a more mainstream leader seems unlikely to be adequate for it to overcome the history of electoral rejection which summarises most of the last forty years.   All of those Red Wall voters who voted Conservative for the first time in 2019 and told focus groups that they felt very comfortable in doing so may well find Sunak’s fiscal conservatism a rather greater attraction and vindication of their choice in the long run than Johnson’s bumptious rhetoric.  For that reason, while both seem pretty steep and rugged (and some form of hung parliament currently seems overwhelmingly probable), the pathway to a potential majority may be a bit easier for the Conservatives to traverse than Labour.