Labour Together’s 150-page post-mortem on the 2019 General Election is a big fat curate’s egg of a report. Founded in 2015, Labour Together was conceived as a project to bring together New Labour bright young things and Blue Labour traditionalists like Maurice Glasman on the premise that there had been “an absence of intellectual renewal” at the heart of the Party. Its supporters included many of the usual suspects: Chuka Umunna, Tristram Hunt, Lisa Nandy, Jon Cruddas and Steve Reed. Its directors included Nandy and Trevor Chinn, a generous donor to both Tom Watson and Keir Starmer. Nandy and Reed, along with fellow supporters Ed Miliband and Jim McMahon have all now been given prominent roles in Starmer’s shadow cabinet.

Intellectual Renewal Still ‘To Do’ 

Not much intellectual renewal seemed to have taken place over the following four years until the aftermath of the 2019 general election when a 15-strong commission was set up which, although it tilted towards the centre and the right, did include left-leaning members Manuel Cortes and James Meadway. With no Black representative, there was however a diversity deficit. For all that, this is not a report that makes entirely comfortable reading for Labour centrists and right wingers, and was reviewed dismissively by John Rentoul, one of Tony Blair’s most senior representatives on the planet.

For a start, it doesn’t date Labour’s growing disconnect with working-class voters to the Corbyn era but to the last two decades, and traces “an apparent fall in political engagement among lower income and less educationally qualified voters” back to the 1990s – the era when Blair, on the basis of an expanding economy, was chasing Mondeo Man.

Current and Former Voters 

What should concentrate minds is the detailed evidence the report marshals on the attitudes and voting behaviour of Labour’s current and former voter base and its repeated emphasis that the Party has a mountain to climb to return to government or even be the largest party. In addition to familiar themes such as deindustrialisation, falling trade union density and the decline of single industry/employer towns, there is considerable segmented analysis by occupation, age and geography based on 11,000 individual responses and a YouGov dataset of private polling responses from almost 240,000 people during the 2019 general election.

Key Conclusions

• “To be the largest party at the next election, Labour now needs to make a net 82 gains from the Conservatives, requiring a swing of 7.9 per cent”
• “In 1992 Labour canvassed 53 per cent of the electorate in their target seats; by 2010 this had fallen to 29 per cent”
• “Labour declined dramatically in every region between 2001 and 2010, losing most seats in Southern England as well as many in the Midlands and North”
• “The swing away from Labour in our heartland seats in the 2017 election, masked by the much better than expected result, foreshadowed our 2019 defeat. The Conservatives made significant gains in 2017 in seats they would go on to win in 2019”
• “Whilst individual policies polled as popular, resistance to Labour’s reform programme came as people evaluated the overall package in our manifesto”
• “Over half of the Labour members (57 per cent) who responded to our survey cited the policy to have a second referendum as the single most unpopular with voters”
• “During the short campaign, of 135 key marginals, only 25 saw contact rates above 20 per cent, while 56 saw contact rates of just ten per cent or lower”

Diagnosis but No Remedies 

The report is surely correct when it argues that “the Party needs to revolutionise our digital methods and campaign tools.” There’s a breath of optimism that working-class pro-Brexit voters retain a lot of common ground on economic policies, and argues the new electoral coalition it sketches out should have a “big change economic agenda” – though you would suspect that the right and centre of the Party have a very different idea of what transformational change means. 

But while Labour Together is often acute in its diagnosis, it is just as often weak on remedies. There is silence on what alternative course of action could have avoided the Brexit debacle – for example the Norway 2.0 option, which, while leaving EU institutions, would have retained a close relationship with Europe. There’s no reckoning with the responsibility of those who vociferously campaigned for a second referendum, which in turn played a key role in the collapse of the Red Wall. There’s a throwaway comment that “there is still further scope to increase turnout amongst younger voters” but leaves out any practical proposals.

There are several references to the ‘toxic culture’ that operated at Labour HQ, but no highlighting of the unprecedented sabotage by those who split to form the Independent Group and those who called for a vote for the Tories and have been rewarded with peerages. Running in parallel was the near-complete breakdown of PLP discipline during the Brexit crisis and the disgraceful campaign to paint Jeremy Corbyn as a racist.

There are brief references to the problems of local government incumbency in an era of austerity, but no mention of the fact that most Labour-led councils have failed to mount any meaningful anti-austerity campaigns since 2010, despite their proven possibility in places such as Salford, Preston, and North Ayrshire.

Where’s the Unity?

The elephant in the room is, unsurprisingly, the 860-page leaked report, which is carefully tip-toed around. There’s a pious hope that “the public need to know Labour’s leadership can be trusted and is up to the task of governing” alongside the odd call for unity and an end to factionalism.

A week after the report was published in mid-June 2020, Rebecca Long-Bailey, the last leading representative of the left in the Shadow Cabinet, was sacked. The method of electing the CLP reps on the NEC was pushed through in lockdown. Left-wing officials have been purged up and down the country. Factional suspensions of left wingers have continued right up to this year’s conference. As Star Trek’s Mr Spock might have said, “It’s unity, Keir, but not as we know it.”

The full report is available at: https://www.labourtogether.uk/review

Richard Price sits on the CLPD Executive Committee and is a member of Leyton & Wanstead CLP

Image credit: “General election ‘Vote Labour’ poster on The Street” by Evelyn Simak is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0