The Labour leadership contest is well underway and there are already some interesting plots in the battle to be the man or woman to take the Tories to task throughout this next government. What seem to be the two main contenders, Kier Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey, have been at loggerheads to some extent with one of Long-Baileys supporter, Labour Party chairman Ian Lavery, calling on Starmer to stand down so that the Labour Party can have its first female Labour leader. Long-Bailey represents a continuation of Corbynism and has promised to defend socialist policies and make the Labour Party the ‘salespeople of socialism’. This is something that is bound to resonate with much of the Labour Party membership, which in the middle of the previous decade after Ed Miliband stood down, was filled with members of Momentum who subsequently elected Corbyn several times as leader despite the opposition of a vast number of the PLP. The travesty of the 2019 election is what has seen the end of Corbyn, yet this was the fourth election Labour has lost in a row: the issue cannot simply be laid at the doorstep or Labour’s Brexit policy, or Jeremy Corbyn.
Last week, Lord Ashcroft released his ‘smell the coffee’ report on reasons why Labour may have had such a torrid time at the ballot box last December. The results highlights a staggering disconnect between the Labour membership and traditional Labour voters. Given that it is the membership that elect the PLPs next leader, this divergence between Labour Party members and Labour Party voters (both those that did vote for Labour in 2019 and those that defected having previously voted Labour) is a fundamental problem if the Party wants to challenge in the near future. Looking at some of the statistics from the Lord Ashcroft polling report, these differences are clear. Whilst Labour defectors in 2019 blamed Corbyn, Brexit, a divided party and the unbelievable nature of the manifesto, Labour members blamed an unfair bias against Labour and Corbyn in media, voters ignorance of what a Tory government would mean for them and believing Tory lies, and the fact that some voters have bigoted views about race and immigration. While only 8% of both Labour defectors and all voters, as well as only 16% of Labour voters, believed a more left wing manifesto gave Labour the best chance to win at the next election, 44% of Labour members believed in the potential electoral success of a more left wing manifesto.
Those are significant differences of opinion in terms of the future direction of the party. The unappealing nature of both Corbyn and Labours policies are somewhat shown in the fact that the number one reason why Labour voters voted Labour in 2019 was simply because they didn’t want a Conservative government. This clearly emphasises the extent to which the Labour Party was not able to connect with voters and provide a positive message as to why people should lend them their vote. Another factor that has plagued the Labour Party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader is antisemitism with numerous allegations, investigations and reports on this issue. In fact in May last year the Equality and Human Rights Commission announced it was launching an inquiry into the Labour Party over antisemitism. Yet, only 22% of Labour members, and a mere 6% of Corbyn supporters from 2016 believe antisemitism to be a real problem within the Labour Party. The rest believe it to have been either exaggerated or invented by the media, and although many believe the Party should’ve dealt with the situation better, roughly 30% of members and 40% of Corbyn 2016 supporters, argued the media was to blame for the controversy over antisemitism. These differences between a party membership and those that fall under the category of traditional voters for those parties don’t just apply to the Labour Party, yet the extent of the disagreements over the fundamental direction of a party is certainly something Labour has to sort out if it is to win the next election, or even the one after that.
This phenomenon of a relatively extreme party electorate compared to the standard general election voter is something that is mirrored in the United States, where candidates tend to have to appeal to the left or right during their primary campaigns, in order to win the nomination, before pivoting to the centre for the national vote. The issue in the UK may be with the size of the party membership however. Though, in Labour’s case it increased massively before the election of Jeremy Corbyn, that still represented a tiny proportion of prospective voters. In fact Labour has two and a half times more members than the Conservative party with just over half a million, so should in theory represent more of the traditional Labour Party vote, yet looking at the success of Boris Johnson compared to Corbyn suggests that may not be the case. Kier Starmer out of the Labour candidates seems best placed to successfully manage that pivot to the centre, being one of the most popular among the Labour members, and the most popular of the current candidates with the overall electorate. But the question remains about whether the main British parties will be able to elect leaders through their membership that are able to successfully appeal to the rest of the electorate.
Clearly at each election there are a variety of factors which play a role in why a single party may win or lose, and those factors inevitably play out to differing degrees. However, in the case of Labour, it needs emphasising that by the time of the next General Election, Tony Blair will be the only Labour leader to have won a general election in the last half century. That is a staggering fact for those that believe the Labour Party to be the party of the working man and woman, and for those who believe strongly in the virtues of a Labour government. Furthermore, Blair’s New Labour represented a rejection of ‘Old Labour’ and the state socialist policies that they prioritised. While a diagnosis of Labour’s failure to win the 2019 election predominantly was focussed around the failings of either a Corbyn, their Brexit policy, or both, Labour’s positioning of its policies to the left of Blair has been a correlating factor in their electoral failings. Proponents of the socialist left may argue that this is down to the need for a true radical socialist manifesto that has yet to be tried and tested, and represents a genuine alternative, but it may not be in the form of the Labour Party that this message can be effectively portrayed to the British people.
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