Labor remains at odds over the Green challenge as the clock ticks down to Election Day on May 7. Our political editor Ailbhe Rea has written the politics column this week in the interior debate about the Greens within Labour. It shows that Labour’s lines of attack against the Greens were still being finalized in the hours before the party launched its local election campaign last week (which is perhaps why, as I noted at the time, those lines were so jumbled).
Ailbhe also writes about the behind-the-scenes work in Labor to take on the Greens, from Anna Turley, the party leader, holding heated sessions with Labor MPs to discuss their strategy against the Greens to deputy leader Lucy Powell giving a post-mortem of the Gorton and Denton by-elections that optimistically says protest voters may be coming back to Labour.
Much of this is about tactics, but for some in Labor it is starting to look like a general reassessment of election strategy may be called for. And so the party has another argument about who are its most important voters. Labour’s liberal right and soft left are beginning to unite in their concern that the party leadership is denying who these voters are and that this is one reason for the rise of the Greens. The argument goes: many in the Labor leadership believe that the key voters to win are an idealized white working class that mixes economically left-wing with right-wing social views – essentially the people who made up the most important part of Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in 2019 – and so the party is reaching out to these people. Whenever it does this – with policies such as Shabana Mahmood’s radical immigration reforms – it appears to lose support among the white professional, managerial classes, as well as ethnic minority working-class people, who are now effectively key to Labour’s survival as a mainstream party.
It’s a sober criticism, if accurate. We are already partially in the wars of history. Your answer to who the most important Labor voters are is largely determined by what you think they did in the 2024 election: did they actually vote Labor in a majority? Or did many of them stay home because they were disillusioned with the Tories or voted Reform to punish the Tories?
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(Further reading: The silent fist)
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