It may be too late for Labour to much reduce its coming losses in the borough elections. But if it values its longer-term future, it should make the effort anyway. The party’s hammering by the Greens in Gorton & Denton brought home with a mighty crash what analysis by such as the British Election Study has been showing for months – it’s not switchers to Reform UK Labour should be most worried about, but the much larger number of its erstwhile supporters turning to an array of liberal, Left and nationalist parties, together with a substantial group that have become “don’t knows”.
Labour’s harder lines on immigration and welfare have been putting people off, as has its handling of the economy and the National Health Service. For some, Gaza is an important issue and Labour’s stance has not endeared. Others have been irked by its stepping back from ambitious environmental policies.
There’s also a general sense that the party under Sir Keir Starmer has no clear direction or purpose. Instead, it has been defined by U-turns and inconsistencies, and by sending muddled messages that anger and confuse, many of them inspired by a fear of Nigel Farage.
Yet Reform’s support has mostly been coming from ex-Conservative supporters and people who don’t usually vote. The relatively few who’ve abandoned Labour might have done so anyway – part of the electorate wants to punish whoever is in power, whoever that may be. Labour will never woo them back. Why does it fixate on trying to when it alienates so many more?
The party needs to reconnect with its winning coalition. The path to such salvation looks steep, but it’s the only one available. It runs through many different places, including Scotland and Wales. But London is unquestionably one of them and matters a great deal.
Labour should remember that London provides lots of Labour MPs – 59 out of the 412 elected two years ago. Any insistence that, when it comes to the crunch, most of those seats can be taken for granted looks delusional in light of the Greens’ recent triumph.
If a once ultra-safe seat in Manchester can be conquered from the Left, how many in London are secure? Labour still leads London opinion polls, but by less than it once did. At least a dozen of its 21 councils in the capital look vulnerable. London has been one of Labour’s staunchest strongholds. If the city rejects it in a big way on 7 May, there might be no coming back.
It is no good denouncing the Greens as extreme as the PM did, even though, true enough, they have come to resemble the Jeremy Corbyn Left. Sir Sadiq Khan, writing in the Guardian at the weekend, was surely right to argue that “the vast majority” of Londoners thinking of voting Green do not fit that description and won’t appreciate being so termed. Trying to compete with Reform, the Mayor added, just makes Labour look treacherous and inauthentic.
Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, says the PM’s allies believe he is “finally asserting his own personality” and the “pragmatic centre-Left politics” that go with it. There was a hint of that in his party conference speech last autumn, though there hasn’t been much more since. A supposedly mission-led government needs to remember who handed it power, and why. In London, 43 per cent of the popular vote came Labour’s way, more than twice the share won by the Tories. The way Labour has been carrying on, most of that could go down the drain.
What is so difficult about standing up for the values that got you elected? Is it really so hard to fashion a position on immigration that recognises both the need for overseas workers in health, care, engineering and other sectors and the need to manage the system well? After all, as Peter Kellner has shown, that’s what the voters want. Might it do Labour more good than harm to firmly state that Brexit has been a failure? Again, most of the people would agree. Could it be that putting the goal of making Britain a clean energy superpower front and centre of your story for voters, instead of playing it down in deference to “Nige”, would be more welcomed than jeered?
There is no doubt that adopting more liberal, practical Left or “progressive” positions on such issues would please lots of London voters and their counterparts in other cities across the UK. A few bold steps in those directions in the coming weeks would at least give Labour’s embattled campaigners some more positive responses when faced by disillusion on London doorsteps from Camden to Lambeth and from Newham to Hackney. Labour cannot afford to lose the capital without a fight. And if it can’t see that, then losing will be what it deserves.
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