“All parties when they govern are effectively a coalition,” David Lammy said on Thursday night, when the deputy prime minister was in the unenviable position of being the first Labor politician to hit out at the BBC’s coverage of the next election. The question of who Labour’s coalition is has been newly open in recent months, as the party’s strategy so far has come under fire and lost key domestic backers (most notably, outgoing chief minister Morgan McSweeney).
The prevailing idea until recently that Labor could take a firm line on sensitive issues such as immigration, and generally actively emphasize some element of illiberalism in its programme, as a prophylactic against losing votes to Reform, is attractive in its simplicity. Unfortunately, this simplicity is complicated by several key facts.
First, it is the fact that the government has followed this strategy since the beginning of its mandate and has obviously not stopped the march of reform. Advocates of its doubling must account for why this is so.
Second, there is the related fact that seats lost from Labor to Reform are often not lost solely – or even mainly – through direct switching from one party to another. There is a more complicated electoral calculus at play involving a drop in the Conservative vote share and, more importantly, the loss of the Labor vote to the progressive parties (for YouGov’s Patrick English“There is little or no statistical relationship between reform performance and Labor performance, but a very strong (negative) relationship between Labor and Greens performance”). Differential turnout – high levels of enthusiasm among Reform and Green voters to leave, low levels of enthusiasm among Labor supporters – also plays a hugely underestimated role.
Subscribe to the New Statesman today and save 75%
Third, there is polling that tells us that while those who voted Labor in 2024 and have since shifted allegiance to other progressive parties are quite open to returning to Labour, those who have moved to Reform are unlikely to reconsider switching (as a title IN New statesman from last week stated, “Only 1 per cent of Reform supporters would consider supporting Labour”). This means that even the most sympathetic hypothetical parts of the current Reform vote are not meaningfully winnable for Labour. Labor may need to find some voters from the right to maintain their majority, but they may have to come from a group of voters who are more like soft conservatives.
The Labor Party is very sentimental about its view of itself and who it represents, a view that has often been at odds with the party’s current base. She wants to represent countries that are now electing reform candidates, and that desire has been coupled with a clear disdain for more left-wing voters, something that Economist THERE DESCRIBED as a “hippy punching” strategy. It is understood, given its history and composition, Labor does not want to be the party of the financially secure, but it seems that they have a hard time accepting that they are not only Reform, but also the Greens. who they are now the choice of Britain’s most insecure voters.
The Prime Minister claims on the opinion pages of Guardian that the results mean that he will neither climb left nor right, but apparently prefers to sit in the empty “wide but shallow” tub long after the water has drained. A willingness not to seek the votes of – and even to put yourself at odds with – the interests of certain segments of the electorate that are highly unlikely to vote for you is a necessary part of any sound electoral strategy. The problems arise when you misidentify the section that might vote for you and therefore fail to serve the interests of your current supporters, especially in our new multi-party system: there are other places to go.
Much consideration will now be given to Starmer’s imperiled leadership and the direction of party policy. Labor also needs to examine who its supporters really are, with a view to building from there, and not just who the party would like them to be.
(Further reading: Angela Rayner: Labor is not working, bring back Burnham)
Content from our partners
