Post-election commentary
speaks of Corbyn’s party achieving “its worst result since 1935.” Alexander
Mercouris shows why that is a serious misrepresentation.
By Alexander
Mercouris
in London
Special to Consortium News
in London
Special to Consortium News
The Conservative Party’s
election victory is a personal tragedy for Jeremy Corbyn, whose quest to lead a
transformative Labour government has ended in failure. It is also a
tragedy for Britain, which has lost the opportunity offered by a transformative
Corbyn-led Labour government.
It may also become a tragedy
for the Labour Party, but only if it takes away the wrong lessons from its
defeat.
The last point needs to be
emphasized, all the more so since some of the reporting shows that there is
quite clearly an agenda to overstate the extent of Labour’s defeat.
Most of the commentary speaks
of Labour achieving “its worst result since 1935.” This is a serious
misrepresentation of the facts.
Labour’s vote share in the
election was 32.2 percent. That compares with the 30.4 percent it
achieved in the general election of 2015, just before Corbyn became leader,
when the Labour Party was led by Ed Miliband.
It is also higher than the 29
percent vote share the Labour Party achieved in the general election of 2010,
when it was led by the then incumbent Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown.
Going back further, Labour’s
vote share in earlier general elections was 27.6 percent in 1983; and
30.8 percent in 1987.
Absolute Numbers of Votes
In terms of absolute numbers
of votes, Labour in 2019 gained more votes than it did in the general election
of 2005 (10,269,076 versus 9,552,436), which Labour won under the leadership of
the then incumbent Labour prime minister, Tony Blair.
The claim that Labour achieved
“its worst result since 1935” is based solely on the number of members of
parliament (MPs) it returned to the House of Commons following the election
that stands at 202.
This is indeed a historically
low figure. However, saying that ignores the fact that Labour had already
lost — in the general election of 2015 — 40 of its seats in Scotland, which it
could formerly rely upon to reliably return a Labour MP. These 40 seats
were lost to the left wing pro-independence Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP),
not to the Conservatives. The SNP has held on to them ever since.
Labour has never been able to
regain these lost 40 seats, and given the rise of pro-independence sentiment in
Scotland it seems increasingly unlikely that it will ever do so.
Suffice to say that if Labour
had retained these 40 seats in 2015, and had it held on to them in the latest
general election, its cohort of MPs would now be 242 and not 202.
That is significantly more than the 209 MPs it had after the election of 1983.
Ignorance, or in some cases
willful disregard, of the extraordinary political transformation that took
place in Scotland in 2015, and which has ever since affected Britain’s
electoral and parliamentary arithmetic, seriously distorts discussion of
British politics.
Like Labour, the SNP is a
left-wing social democratic party. The political swing in Scotland
— which took place in the election of 2015, not in the election that just took
place — has not been from left to right or from Conservative to Labour.
It has been from the unionist social democratic left (Labour) to the
nationalist social democratic left (the SNP).
The SNP has just won 45
percent of the vote in Scotland, as compared to 25.6 percent for the
Conservatives and 18.1 percent for Labour. The Conservatives have, moreover,
just lost seven of their 13 seats. In Scotland there is a strong
anti-Conservative sentiment, and in the event of a hung parliament the SNP made
clear that it would have backed Labour.
On a related point, if the
swing to the SNP had not taken place, and if the vote in Scotland had continued
in line with previous pre-2015 elections, Labour’s total share of the vote in
the current election would not have been 32.2 percent. It would have
been roughly 34 percent.
That is close to the 35
percent Tony Blair achieved in the election of 2005, which Labour won, and is
the same as the 34 percent Labour achieved in the election of 1992, when it was
led by Neil Kinnock, which prepared the ground for the landslide of 1997.
In summary, Corbyn in 2019 won
more votes and a bigger percentage of the vote than his two immediate
predecessors, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. The Labour Party under his
leadership also did significantly better than it did in the two elections held
during the period of Margaret Thatcher’s ascendancy in the 1980s. Corbyn
did slightly less well than did Kinnock in 1992, but only because of an earlier
collapse in Scotland for which he is not responsible. Corbyn did only slightly
less well in percentage term —but significantly better in numbers of actual
votes cast — than did Tony Blair in 2005.
All this can be compared with
the apocalyptic predictions which were made about his leadership before the
election of 2017. Corbyn’s leadership was then said to be so incompetent and so
disastrous that it would destroy
the Labour Party as an electoral force.
Obviously and in reality,
Corbyn has done much better than that. In fact, in terms of Labour’s
recent electoral history, the vote share he won for Labour was creditable, and
he has left the Labour Party with a bigger share of the vote and a much larger
and more active membership than when he found it.
Labour Didn’t Lose Because
It’s ‘Too Left Wing’
All this should make one
skeptical about claims that Labour lost the election because of Corbyn’s
“excessive radicalism” or because Labour under his leadership became “too left
wing.”
As it happens the radicalism
of the manifesto on
which Labour fought the election has been overstated.
Its three main standouts — the
ending of student fees and the increase in welfare and National Health Service
spending; the re-nationalization of the railways and of certain public
utilities; and the plans for greater infrastructure spending and for an
increase in public housing construction with a specific proposal to provide all
British households with free broadband — would not have been considered radical
in Labour’s social democratic heyday between 1945 and 1980.
Nor would the scale of the spending
that Labour proposed have been excessive
for a rich country like Britain, or have caused its bankruptcy. Again,
the spending program that was announced would have been considered
unexceptional during Labour’s social democratic heyday from 1945 to 1980.
Labour Party canvassers in
fact found that the pledges in the manifesto were popular overall. The
problem was not hostility to the manifesto as such, or concern about that it
was “excessively radical” or “too left wing.” It was skepticism that a
Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn could make such a program work.
There is a further reason to
doubt that Labour’s failure in the election was due to its being perceived as
“too left wing.” This is the utter failure of the supposedly more
“moderate” left-centrist alternative to the right of it.
None of the “moderate” Labour
MPs who defected from the Labour Party in 2019 complaining about Labour’s
“excessive radicalism” and anti-Semitism has won re-election to the House of
Commons. Change UK,
the party some of them set up, has failed to win a single seat, and looks
certain to be wound up.
As for those “moderate” Labour
MPs who chose to join the Liberal Democrats, they too have failed to win any
seats.
Luciana Berger — a former
member of the shadow cabinet of the previous Labour leader Ed Miliband — who
left the Labour Party specifically highlighting its alleged problem of
anti-Semitism, and who was much fancied to win election in Finchley and Golders
Green, a parliamentary constituency with a large Jewish population — in the
end failed
to do so. The seat was retained by the Conservatives.
As for the Liberal Democrats —
the traditional party of Britain’s “moderate” center left — expectations
before the election that they would win as
many as 100 seats and would overtake the Labour Party in share of the
vote have been crushingly disappointed.
The Liberal Democrats’ share
of the vote share did increase, but only slightly, from a derisory 7.4 percent
in 2017 to just 11.6 percent. Compare that with the share of the vote of
Jeremy Corbyn’s supposedly “extremist” Labour Party, which is three times
greater at 32.2 percent.
In addition the Liberal
Democrats suffered the humiliation of seeing their number of MPs actually fall
by comparison with 2017 from 12 to 11, whilst their leader, Jo Swinson, actually
lost her seat in Scotland to Labour’s putative ally, the left wing
social democratic SNP.
Compare these dismal results
with what the Liberal Democrats achieved as recently as the 2005 general
election, when the “Labour moderate” Tony Blair was in power as prime
minister. In that election the Liberal Democrats’ share of the vote was
22 percent, and their number of MPs was 62.
The Liberal Democrats’
strategy during the election was in fact to position the party as the
“sensible” “middle of the road” alternative both to the Conservatives and to
Jeremy Corbyn’s supposedly “extremist” Labour Party. Accordingly,
the Liberal Democrats fought the election promising to cancel Brexit whilst
saying they would never agree to enter into a coalition with the “left wing
extremist” Jeremy Corbyn.
In the event most “moderate”
anti-Brexit Conservative voters chose to stick with their party, whilst the
trend amongst supposedly “moderate” left of center voters was for them to
switch during the election from the supposedly more “moderate” Liberal
Democrats to the supposedly more “extreme” Labour Party.
Compare this with what
happened in the general election of 1983, when the British electorate really
did think that the Labour Party had become too left wing and too extreme.
Over the course of that
election the share of the vote of what was then the Liberal-Social Democratic
Alliance (the ancestor of today’s Liberal Democrats) increased steadily, so
that at the end of the election they won 25.4 percent of the vote compared with
the 13.8 percent the Liberals had won in the previous election of 1979. Overwhelmingly
this was at the expense of Labour, whose share of the vote crashed from 36.9
percent in 1979 to 27.6 percent in 1983.
Labour did not lose the
election because the electorate saw it as too left wing. The facts show
otherwise. Like the claim that Labour achieved its “worst result since
1935” this claim is a piece of misrepresentation peddled by those who want
Labour to return to the status quo policies and triangulation of the Blair era.
Why Then Did Labour Lose?
The short and unavoidable
answer — and one which is gradually gaining acceptance, despite continued
denials from some quarters — is because of Labour’s stance on Brexit.
A survey of Labour losses
makes this fact overwhelmingly clear. Though there was a swing from
Labour to Conservative across the whole of England and Wales (Scotland, as
discussed above, now has a wholly different politics) the swing was not
uniform, and was biggest, and Labour’s losses were far and away greatest, in
northern England and in the English Midlands.
It is not a coincidence that
these regions voted heavily for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.
By contrast in those areas
which voted against Brexit in the 2016 referendum the Labour vote held up
better, and Labour losses were relatively few.
By way of example, in London,
which in the 2016 referendum voted overwhelmingly against Brexit (by a margin
of 60 to 40) Labour narrowly lost Kensington & Chelsea (by just 150 votes) but
won Putney from the Conservatives. In total Labour holds as many seats in
London after the election as it did before.
The same pattern repeated
itself in other areas that voted against Brexit in the 2016 referendum.
In Canterbury, which also
voted in the 2016 referendum against Brexit, and Labour won from the
Conservatives for the first time in the election of 2017, Labour won again
with a bigger
majority and an increase in its share of the vote.
The same is true in other
anti-Brexit urban areas such as Manchester, Bristol and Cardiff. Labour
won in all three, achieving a clean sweep of all the seats fought there.
Overall, as surveys of the
voting across England and Wales make clear, Labour held on to the great
majority of its voters who voted against Brexit in the 2016 referendum, but
lost roughly half of its voters who in the 2016 referendum voted for
Brexit. It was this which caused Labour’s defeat and the Conservatives’ victory.
In raw terms of parliamentary
arithmetic, this meant that the Labour Party lost a swathe of seats across its
former heartland in northern England and in the English Midlands, which had
voted for Brexit in the referendum of 2016, giving the Conservatives the clear
election victory and the large parliamentary majority they now have.
This points to the underlying
explanation for Labour’s debacle, which was Labour’s impossibly
over-complicated Brexit policy.
Where Boris Johnson and the
Conservatives had a simple and clear message — “Get Brexit Done” — the Labour
Party fought the election on a policy of negotiating an entirely new Brexit
deal different from Boris Johnson’s, which it said it would then put to a vote
in a second referendum, with the option of remaining in the European Union
offered as the alternative.
This proposal, committing
Labour to a second referendum on an issue which most British voters had been
told had been decided by the 2016 referendum, was bound to be unpopular with
voters who in the 2016 referendum had voted for Brexit. What however made
this proposal utterly toxic was the stance towards the proposed referendum
which was taken by almost the entirety of Labour leadership.
John McDonnell, Labour’s
shadow chancellor and its effective No. 2; Emily Thornberry, Labour’s shadow
foreign secretary; Diane Abbott, Labour’s shadow home secretary; and Keir
Starmer, Labour’s Brexit spokesman, all said they would vote in this second
referendum in favor of remaining in the European Union — in other words against
the deal Labour was saying it was going to negotiate with the European
Union.
As for Corbyn himself, he said
he would remain “neutral” — in other words he too was saying that he would not
support in the referendum the deal Labour was saying it would negotiate with
the European Union.
Needless to say, this would
have meant that with Labour failing to support its own proposed deal, the deal
would have been all but certain to be rejected, and the option of remaining in
the European Union would have won.
This exposed the whole second
referendum proposal as what it obviously was: a complicated mechanism to cancel
the result of the 2016 referendum by staging what would have been an obviously
rigged referendum on a deal that was clearly intended to fail.
Unsurprisingly, pro-Brexit
working-class voters in northern England and in the English Midlands, presented
with a proposal like this, turned their backs on Labour, and voted for the
Conservatives instead.
It was this ultimately
dishonest Brexit policy — one which sought to cancel the result of the 2016
referendum without actually saying so — which in my opinion explains the strong
antipathy towards Jeremy Corbyn that Labour canvassers discovered as they
campaigned in their former northern England and English Midlands heartlands.
During the 2017 general
election the British electorate warmed to Jeremy Corbyn, who was seen as a
straightforward and principled if rather eccentric man, sincerely interested in
making the lives of the British people better.
By contrast, during the 2019
general election, with Jeremy Corbyn proposing a Brexit policy which was
ultimately both dishonest and absurd, he came over as just another politician.
The bitter anger and sense of
betrayal in the circumstances is entirely unsurprising, and was made worse
amongst older voters — a disproportionate number of whom had voted for Brexit —
because they would have remembered that Corbyn had opposed Britain’s European
Union membership for most of his political life.
Overstating Effect of
Anti-Corbyn Smears
This anger and sense of
betrayal also explains why the smears about Corbyn as an anti-Semite, a
traitor, a friend of terrorists, and the rest, endlessly recycled by the
Conservative Party and their right wing media friends, this time stuck, which
they had failed to do in 2017.
There is an understandable
temptation to see these smears as the reason for Labour’s election
defeat.
This temptation should be
resisted. Every Labour leader since the establishment of the Labour Party
except for Tony Blair has been the target of right-wing smears. The smear
campaign against Corbyn may have been more intense than others. However,
working-class voters in northern England and the English Midlands —
traditionally the Labour Party’s core vote — have historically proven to be the
least susceptible voters to such smears.
That on this occasion they
turned against Corbyn and the Labour Party to the point where some of them
began repeating these smears shows how great their anger and sense of betrayal
was.
Inevitably, given such
feelings, the response of these voters to Labour’s proposals in its manifesto,
instead of being supportive as had been the case in 2017, was cynical.
Since these voters no longer believed Corbyn or the Labour Party on Brexit,
they no longer believed them on anything else.
All of this was not only
predictable; it was widely predicted. Commentators ranging from Neil
Clark on the left to Dominic
Lawson on the right repeatedly pointed out, both before and during the
election, that the Labour Party’s Brexit proposal was electorally suicidal, and
was certain to result for the party in a heavy defeat.
Jeremy Corbyn himself is known
to have long opposed the proposal for precisely this reason, as did his key
advisers, Andrew Murray and Seamus Milne. The Labour Party’s chairman Ian
Lavery, who is himself a northern England MP, also strongly and publicly
opposed it. So did several other Labour MPs representing seats
in northern England and in the English Midlands.
Why then was this bizarre and
seemingly suicidal policy adopted?
There has been much discussion
about this, with some attributing this to weakness on the part of Corbyn, who
supposedly let himself be bullied into agreeing to a policy he knew was wrong
by the strongly anti-Brexit and Blairite elements within the Labour leadership
and amongst Labour’s MPs.
There is some force to this
claim. Certain prominent figures in the Labour Party, notably the shadow
chancellor, John McDonnell; the shadow Brexit minister, Keir Starmer; the
shadow foreign minister, Emily Thornberry; and the shadow home secretary, Diane
Abbott; did indeed apply extraordinary pressure upon Corbyn to get him to adopt
the policy.
Keir Starmer, who is a
committed opponent of Brexit and a strong supporter of keeping Britain in the
European Union, appears to have been not just a proponent of the policy but
also its principal author, which he borrowed from the anti-Brexit and
pro-European Union People’s
Vote campaign.
Starmer is a brilliant lawyer,
and both the policy and the tactics he followed as the Labour Party’s Brexit
minister were in fact very much such as one might expect from such a lawyer,
who saw Brexit as essentially a problem to be litigated away by wire-pulling
and clever parliamentary tactics, rather than as the major political headache
for the Labour Party, which it in fact was.
One result of this approach
was that it led the Labour Party into becoming involved in a series of complex
parliamentary manoeuvres hatched by various dissident anti-Brexit
Conservative MPs, whose primary purpose seem to have been to embarrass the two
successive Conservative prime ministers, Theresa May and Boris Johnson.
These intrigues did cause some
temporary embarrassment to the Conservative government. However, the
Labour Party’s involvement in them in the end only solidified the impression in
the country that the Labour Party was opposing Brexit. Taken together with
the Labour Party’s referendum policy, the impression this gave in the
Brexit-supporting regions of northern England and the English Midlands
ultimately proved disastrous.
Shift in Labour’s Character
& Base
It is important however to
recognize that there were also compelling reasons why the Labour Party in the
end adopted its second referendum policy. These relate to the shift in
the character of the Labour Party and of its electoral base which has been
underway for the last three decades.
Though working-class voters in
northern England, the English Midlands and elsewhere, were once the Labour
Party’s core supporters, that
is no longer the case.
Whereas in the election of
1979 around 80 percent of voters who voted Labour were manual workers, today
that proportion has fallen to around 40 percent.
Right up to the 1980s the Labour
Party spoke of itself as “the political wing” of a “Labour movement” of which
the trade unions were “the industrial wing.” It is decades since I have
heard any Labour politician speak of the Labour Party in that way. Nor is
that surprising since such language no longer describes the Labour Party in any
true sense.
Particularly during the New
Labour era of Tony Blair the Labour Party has sought to respond to the decline
of its working-class electoral base caused by de-industrialization and Margaret
Thatcher’s assault on trade unions by refocusing the Labour Party increasingly
on winning over the progressively minded middle class voters in London and in
Britain’s major cities.
That has meant that whilst for
historic reasons the old working heartlands of the north of England and in the
English Midlands continue to account for a very large proportion of Labour
seats returning Labour MPs to the House of Commons, an increasingly large
proportion of the Labour Party’s members and of its MPs are now middle class as
are many
of the voters who supported the Labour Party in elections.
The rise of Jeremy Corbyn has
intensified this trend. One of the features of the period of Corbyn’s
ascendancy within the Labour Party is that there has been a huge increase in
the party’s membership, with the great majority of the new members being from
the progressive middle class.
A further striking feature of
the Corbyn era has been the
increasingly sharp division of the British electorate on age lines.
Whereas in the election of
1983 42 percent of young people aged 18-24 voted Conservative as opposed to
just 33 percent who voted Labour, in the general election that just took place
57 percent of people aged 18-24 voted Labour, as opposed to just 19 percent who
voted Conservative.
By contrast pension-age
voters, many of whom would have voted Labour in their youth and who would once
have held working-class jobs in Britain’s now closed coal mines and factories,
now vote overwhelmingly Conservative. In the general election that just
took place 62 percent of pensioners voted Conservative, as opposed to just
18 percent who voted Labour. This almost exactly correlates
to the
60 percent of pensioners who voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.
In summary, support for the
Labour Party now comes overwhelmingly from younger people, either students or
workers in paid employment, very few of whom work doing the sort of jobs in the
mines and the factories that once defined the sort of people who voted
Labour.
Moreover, these new Labour
voters tend increasingly to live, study and work not in Britain’s former small
industrial and mining towns in the north of England in the English Midlands,
but rather in Britain’s big cities and population centers.
It is the cities that also
increasingly provide Labour’s political leadership, with London playing a
disproportionate role.
Corbyn is himself a London
MP. So are nearly all the other key members of Labour’s current
leadership group. John McDonnell, Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry and
Diane Abbott are also London MPs.
It becomes much easier to
understand the nature of Labour’s Brexit problem once the fact is grasped that
the vast majority of those who now form Labour’s younger, more middle-class
electoral base in the 2016 referendum voted for Britain to remain in the
European Union.
This is most extreme amongst
the youngest voters, who are also the voters most likely to vote Labour.
Amongst young voters aged 18-24 who voted in the 2016 Brexit referendum, 73 percent
voted for Britain to remain in the European Union.
Brexit Split
This explains the critical
divide within the Labour supporting electorate on the Brexit issue, which in
the end was to prove so disastrous for Labour in the election.
It is a divide that also has a
distinct cultural character.
Support for Brexit in England
and Wales is often said to be essentially an English nationalist anti-immigrant
position.
Whilst there is some truth to
this, it is important to say that English working-class voters — the voters who
used to form Labour’s core electorate, and who deserted Labour in large numbers
in the election — have never
at any time been keen on the European Union. These voters were overwhelmingly
the demographic that voted against Britain joining the European
Economic Community (the lineal ancestor of today’s European Union) in the
1975 referendum, when importantly immigration from the EU was not an
issue. It was also this same demographic — at that time still very much
Labour’s core electorate — that pushed Labour into adopting an
outright anti-Europe pro-Brexit position in the general election of 1983.
These voters have
traditionally seen the European Union as a hostile entity, aligned with elites
and employers, and inimical to their interests.
Anti-immigrant sentiment
undoubtedly plays a part in this, with the commonly expressed view that EU
membership enables British employers to ship in cheap workers from eastern and
southern Europe, undercutting British wages and losing British workers their
jobs. Whilst it seems that there may be some truth to this claim,
strikingly these sentiments today are often expressed by working-class people
who are now retired, and who therefore no longer receive wages or have paid
jobs.
By contrast Labour’s new
younger urban middle-class electorate — which is now a majority of voters who
vote Labour — has an overwhelmingly positive view of the European Union.
For these voters, withdrawal
from the European Union is the shutting of Britain’s doors to the wider world
and a retreat into insular exclusiveness.
This is unacceptable,
especially in London, which today increasingly conceives of itself as a world
city and not just as a British city.
Not only are these views and
sentiments diametrically opposed to each other but they also come with a
considerable dose on each side of class prejudice.
Working-class voters resent
what they see — with some justice — as the condescension of affluent middle class
voters in London and the big cities. They tend to be scornful of claims
that Brexit will result in economic catastrophe, seeing in such claims the
self-serving scaremongering of a middle class worried about losing its European
holidays and its Erasmus scholarships.
Urban middle-class voters by
contrast all too often tend to see working-class hostility to the European
Union as the product of ignorance tinged by racism and xenophobia, which is
being cynically exploited by right wing demagogues such as Boris Johnson and
Nigel Farage.
Straddling a Divide
Given the passionate feelings
on each side of Labour’s Brexit divide, it was inevitable that Labour would
struggle to hold together the two sides of its increasingly unwieldy and
fractious electoral coalition in an election where Brexit is the overriding
issue.
Given that this was so a
strong case can be made that since the Labour Party in the end had no choice
but to back one side of its own Brexit divide, it made the right choice — in
terms of its own long-term interests — by in the end agreeing to the demand for
a second referendum.
Not only is Labour’s new
middle-class base now much bigger than its old working-class base, it is also
the part of Labour’s fastest-growing base, and which is more articulate and
more dynamic. To say it straightforwardly, it is the part of Labour’s
electoral coalition which it most needs in the future.
If Labour had taken a more
obviously pro-Brexit position, it would have risked alienating this new
electorate, whilst its membership and its activists would have become
demoralized and cynical. Support in Labour’s key urban strongholds would
have slipped away, not to the Conservatives but to the Liberal Democrats.
That was in fact precisely
what was starting to happen in the first half of this year.
At the same time that the
Conservative Party on the right was losing support to Nigel Farage’s Brexit
Party, the Labour Party on the left was simultaneously losing support to the
strongly anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats, precisely because at that time it was
resisting committing itself to a second referendum.
In the May 2019 European
elections the Labour Party was overtaken
by the Liberal Democrats in percentage of the vote won, just as the
Conservatives were in those same elections overtaken by the Brexit Party.
The Liberal Democrats were even starting to win over anti-Brexit Labour voters
in Jeremy
Corbyn’s own north London constituency in Islington.
A victorious Liberal Democrat
Party, overtaking Labour in vote share and winning seats from Labour in England
and Wales’s urban centers in a British general election, would be a far greater
existential threat to the Labour Party than the Conservative Party winning
Labour seats in Labour’s former heartlands in the north of England and in the
English Midlands.
Labour can survive the loss to
the Conservatives of a place like Blyth Valley, which it can realistically hope
one day to win back. If, however, the party were to lose a swathe of seats in
places like north London and Manchester to a rival center-left party such as
the Liberal Democrats, there would be no certainty that it would ever win them
back. Labour’s very existence as Britain’s main center-left opposition
party would be in doubt.
What that means is that once
the People’s Vote Campaign, with its demand for a second referendum, began to
gain traction amongst voters in Labour’s urban middle-class electoral base, it
was only a matter of time before the Labour Party fell into line and adopted
the policy of holding a second referendum.
That in turn led directly to
the debacle in the election which followed.
Corbyn’s Failure
Saying all this does not
acquit Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership of responsibility for what has
happened.
The fundamental problem with
Corbyn’s and Labour’s approach to the whole Brexit issue is that they failed to
realize until it was far too late the size of the problem it represented.
Corbyn himself is said to have
been bored by the whole Brexit issue. I have heard stories that whenever
the subject of Brexit came up his eyes would glaze over, only for them to
brighten up again when the discussion moved back to those issues which really
interest him, such as housing or social provision.
Up to the end of 2018 this
approach worked reasonably well. Theresa May’s government struggled to
come up with a coherent Brexit policy, and went into the 2017 general election
without one, so that the Labour Party came under no pressure to explain its
own.
This was what made it possible
for Corbyn and the Labour Party to move the whole subject of the discussion
during the 2017 election away from Brexit and onto Corbyn’s and Labour’s
popular policies for transformative change. All Corbyn and Labour had to do was
say that they would “respect the result of the 2016 referendum” and that was
enough. That simultaneously reassured pro-Brexit voters in Labour’s
working-class north England and English Midlands heartlands that their choice
in the 2016 was being respected, whilst at the same time causing no alarm on
the part of Labour’s anti Brexit middle-class voters in Britain’s urban centers,
who were not being presented with an actual Brexit policy that they needed to
worry about.
As a result, Labour achieved
in the 2017 election one of the biggest surges in support for an opposition
party in British electoral history, with the Labour Party increasing its share
of the vote from 30 percent to 40 percent.
However once Theresa May did
come up with a Brexit proposal, Corbyn’s and Labour’s failure to develop a
coherent Brexit strategy was quickly exposed.
Inevitably the People’s Vote
campaign, enthusiastically backed by prominent anti-Brexit Labour Party figures
such as Emily Thornberry and Keir Starmer, filled the gap.
A more supple Labour leader,
one more sensitive to the divergent opinions in the Labour Party and with a
better grasp of the danger Brexit represented to the Labour Party’s electoral
prospects, would have handled things differently.
Such a leader would have
realized that the Labour Party’s interests lay in getting Brexit “done” as soon
as possible, so that the whole subject was got out of the way long before an
election was fought and whilst the Conservatives were still in power.
Inevitably, given the
difficult parliamentary arithmetic, that would have meant taking steps to help
Theresa May get her deal through the House of Commons.
That sort of approach would
have gifted the Labour Party with a whole set of powerful advantages.
The Conservatives would have
been left saddled with an unpopular and discredited leader in the person of
Theresa May. They would also have been stuck with a Brexit deal which most
Conservatives in the country loathed and rejected, and which was strongly
opposed by the Brexit Party and its leader Nigel Farage.
The result would have been a
divided and demoralized Conservative Party, racked by feuds, and threatened by
Nigel Farage’s newly minted Brexit Party in its own strongholds.
The ground would have been
laid for a Labour landslide on the same scale as those of 1945 and 1997.
There is some evidence that
Jeremy Corbyn gave serious thought to this approach. At the Labour
Party’s conference in the autumn of 2018 he
appeared to reach out to Theresa May in a way that suggested that he
was willing to help her get a Brexit deal through the House of Commons.
If Corbyn did however give any
thought to adopting this approach, the record shows that he quickly gave up on
it.
Perhaps he was talked out of
it by Starmer or Thornberry. More likely he was intimidated by fear of
the inevitably angry reaction there would have been from some anti-Brexit
Labour MPs and from his own party activists, as well as from The
Guardian newspaper.
If such fears explain Corbyn’s
actions, then it needs to be said that these fears were groundless.
Corbyn would not have needed
to instruct Labour MPs to vote for Theresa May’s deal in any vote in the House
of Commons. An instruction to abstain would have sufficed. That
would have automatically limited any opportunity for any anti-Corbyn
grandstanding by any disaffected anti-Brexit and anti-Corbyn Labour MPs.
As for anti-Brexit opinion in
the wider Labour Party, Corbyn could have assuaged it by pointing out that a
Brexit deal on Theresa May’s terms, which would have kept Britain in fact if
not in name in the European Union’s Customs Union and Single Market, would be
easily reversible by a future government, and that the Labour Party was keeping
that option open. What would have given that sort of assurance extra
force is that it would have summarized Theresa May’s deal entirely
correctly.
Doubtless there would still
have been an angry reaction from some people, but with Brexit out of the way
the Labour Party would have quickly reunited behind Corbyn, just as the
Conservative Party would have started to fall apart.
Corbyn’s failure to grasp this
opportunity stands in sharp contrast with the skill that an earlier Labour
leader, Harold
Wilson, showed in his handling of a similar crisis back in the 1970s.
It was the inevitable
consequence of the Labour membership’s decision to elect a leader — Jeremy
Corbyn — who for all his many virtues and fine qualities was temperamentally
unsuited to the role, so that he always in the end preferred to avoid
confrontations and to put off difficult decisions, even when his own interests
and those of the Labour Party demanded a firmer approach.
The result was drift, which in
the end resulted in Corbyn and the Labour leadership being confronted by a
binary choice of either agreeing to a second referendum or refusing to do
so.
Though they chose what was,
from the Labour Party’s point of view, the least-bad policy of agreeing to a
second referendum, doing so inevitably paved the way for their and Labour’s
defeat.
The Future
The election defeat has
however had the one positive effect for the Labour Party, which is that it has
finally got the Brexit issue out of the way.
Boris Johnson now has no excuse
not to “get Brexit done,” and presumably it soon will be “done.” The
pro-Brexit working-class voters who flocked to Johnson in the north of England
and in the English Midlands in order to “get Brexit done,” and who have just
provided him with his majority, will then have no further reason to stick with
him. There must be at least a reasonable chance that with attractive
policies and a different leader uncontaminated by the Brexit issue the Labour
Party can win them back.
In order for that to happen
the new Labour leader must however build on that part of the Corbyn legacy that
most voters — not just working-class voters — have found attractive. That
points to sticking with most of the policies set out in Labour’s
manifesto. As shown both in this election and in the previous election of
2017, these policies overall are popular, and in an election no longer clouded
by Brexit they stand a good chance of winning support.
Certainly, they offer a far
better prospect of reuniting Labour’s now -fractured electoral base than would
a retreat back into sterile Blairite triangulation.
That points to the next Labour
leader being someone who is genuinely committed to Corbyn’s program, but who is
also able to communicate to working-class voters in the north of England and in
the English Midlands in a way that Corbyn ultimately failed to do.
Rebecca Long Bailey,
a capable lawyer loyal to Corbyn, of northern working-class origins, and
representing a seat (Salford) which in the 2016 referendum voted for Brexit,
but which she was able to retain in the election with only a relatively small
drop in support, is an obvious possibility.
Labour, despite some of the
headlines, remains a powerful electoral force. It commands the support of
a third of the British electorate, even following an election held in the most
unfavorable circumstances. With the Brexit issue finally out of the way
the peculiar set of circumstances that made the 2019 election so difficult for
Labour are unlikely to recur.
The way forward for Labour is
for the party to hold its nerve and avoid descending into recriminations and
factional infighting. Objectively, there is no reason why it cannot win
again.
