- Why did Labour lose? Charlie Kimber 1 Archived Message
Posted by Keith-264
on April 20, 2020, 1:39 pm
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http://isj.org.uk/why-did-labour-lose/ Why did Labour lose? Issue: 166 Posted on 28th March 2020 Charlie Kimber Along with 10.1 million other viewers, I awaited 10pm on 12 December last year and the broadcasting of the BBC/Sky/ITV general election exit poll of voters. “Here we go,” I anxiously WhatsApped a friend as the time-signal sounded. Ten seconds later he replied: “####”. The poll was not entirely accurate, overstating both the Tory and Scottish National Party (SNP) gains. However, it was immediately apparent that, unless there was some historic error in its findings, we were not going to see a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn evict Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson from Downing Street.1 When the full results were in, the grim reality was confirmed—Conservative 365 MPs, Labour 203, SNP 48, Lib Dems 11. Boris Johnson enjoys the first big majority for a governing party since 2005—the first for the Conservatives since 1987. Why did it happen? Understanding this is not some academic exercise. Millions invested massive hope in a Corbyn victory. Some of this was overblown, exaggerating the radicalism of Labour’s programme. But Corbyn did reflect the yearning for an end to a decade of cruel austerity, a hunger for a different sort of politics, no longer centred on the priorities of big business and the rich. Instead it was an electoral disaster for Labour. Many on the Labour right—who preferred a Tory victory to a Corbyn one—are using the result to demand a return to the “centre”, precisely the politics that have proved disastrous in Britain and many other parts of the word. It is also being used by opponents of socialism across the world. Joe Biden, former US vice president and challenger for the Democrat nomination for the 2020 presidential election, pointed to Labour’s defeat as a warning of what happens if you go too far to the left—by which he meant Bernie Sanders and even Elizabeth Warren. “Boris Johnson is winning in a walk,” Biden said as the results came in. He told supporters that international headlines the next day would read: “Look what happens when the Labour Party moves so, so far to the left.”2 The British voting system accentuates the scale of the shift. There was no massive increase in the Tories’ vote. It was up only 1.2 percent on 2017. They gained 300,000 votes in 2019 compared with Theresa May’s increase of 2,000,000 in 2017. There are no Tory MPs in Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham or Sheffield. In London, the Tories gained two seats and lost two, and still have just 21 of the capital’s 73 MPs. When the Conservatives won in 1987, they had more than two-thirds of London’s MPs.3 Nevertheless, Labour’s defeat is serious. The tally of 203 seats is Labour’s lowest since 1935: Looking at the last century, only in 1983 has an opposition lost more seats than Labour did last night. Crucially that was after only four years of Margaret Thatcher’s government, whereas the Conservatives have now been the incumbents for nine long years—by now the public tend to fancy a change. Clever clogs might say that Labour lost by ten percentage points in 1987 after an almost comparable eight years of Conservative rule. But even then Labour didn’t lose seats and the economic backdrop was very different to today. For those people and places not scarred by unemployment, 1987 was boom time Britain. Today, our economy is hardly growing and earnings are only just returning to their pre-crisis level a full decade on.4 It is also true that Labour received only 455,000 fewer votes in 2019 than 18 years earlier (10,269,000 in 2019 compared with 10,725,000 in 2001 when Tony Blair won a majority of 166). Labour’s vote in 2019 was higher than in 2005, 2010 and 2015. The story of 2019 is a fall in Labour’s vote compared with 2017, not a soaring Conservative vote. The big picture is that 2019 saw Labour return to a trend of stagnation and decline that has been apparent for decades—a trend that was bucked only by Corbyn’s message of hope and transformation in 2017. As Labour’s vote slumped by 2,500,000 in 2019 it was not plumbing new depths but returning closer to the total won by former Labour leader Ed Miliband in 2015. One analyst writes, “2019 was not an earthquake but a tipping-point”.5 Did the poor vote for the toffs? When looking at class and voting it is important to start with a health warning. For Marxists, class is not an individual or subjective attribute defined by where you come from, what sort of accent you have or what individual consumer choices you make. It is a social relationship. The capitalist class owns and control the “means of production”—the offices and computers, call centres and phones, factories and machinery. Because working class people do not own these things, they have to sell their labour power, their ability to work, in return for a wage. Postal workers and cleaners are part of the working class, but so too are most teachers and university staff. Most pollsters, by contrast, use the National Readership Survey (NRS) social classification grades. These are based on occupation and are widely used in market research. Table 1 shows the grades and what percentage of the population falls into each. These classifications are not the same as class divisions; they can, at best, paint a very broad picture of the relation between class and the vote. Every group except A includes large numbers of workers. The B group, for example, includes some lecturers, teachers and health workers. Table 1: Breakdown of UK population among NRS grades Source: NRS, 2020. Grade Occupations % A Higher managerial, administrative and professional 4 B Intermediate managerial, administrative and professional 23 C1 Supervisory, clerical and junior managerial, administrative and professional 28 C2 Skilled manual workers 20 D Semi-skilled and unskilled workers 15 E State pensioners, casual and lowest grade workers and unemployed with state benefits 10 Therefore, polling using the NRS grades should be used with care, and this is intensified by the way pollsters act and the nature of who votes in capitalist society—a third of eligible people did not vote at all in the 2019 general election. In addition, even after the surge in 2019 registration, around 30 percent of 18 to 34 year olds are not registered to vote and millions of others are not registered or wrongly registered.6 As table 1 shows, categories A and B together make up 27 percent of the population, but the Ashcroft poll is made up of 42 percent people in A and B—because they are more likely to vote. Another problem is seeking to measure election outcomes over many years against particular social groups when those groups may go through important changes. A recent article by Michell and Jump looks at one study that “uses vote shares from the 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, but only uses data on blue-collar occupation shares from the 2011 census. The figure therefore ignores any changes in the populations of blue-collar workers since 2011”.7 With all those caveats, we can still compare similar analyses at different elections. The breakdown from Ashcroft’s poll for the 2019 and 2017 elections are shown in figure 1. Figure 1: Breakdown of vote among NRS grades, 2017 and 2019 Source: Ashcroft, 2019. The Tory vote is almost unchanged in category AB. It is significantly up in C2 (six points) and DE (nine points). Labour’s vote is down in all categories, but the biggest fall is among C2 and DE (nine points each). The inescapable conclusion is that numbers of working class people who had voted for Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2017 changed their vote this time. Some of them voted Tory; some abstained; some voted for other parties. The precise flows are hard to gauge because you cannot be sure that if one party’s vote in the DE category goes down nine points and another goes up nine points that there has been a simple transfer. A 2017 Labour voter might have switched to the SNP, or the Lib Dems. A UK Independence Party (UKIP) voter might have chosen the Tories this time. However, the overall trend is clear.8 We can also look at the detailed tables based on income from some of the post-election analyses. Among full-time workers, Labour was 2 percent behind the Tories in 2019. In 2017 Labour had been 6 percent ahead. But, in what comes as a bigger shock, the Tories led Labour by 11 percent (45 to 34) among people with a household income of less than £20,000. Even worse, in households with an income of between £20,000 and £40,000 (most of which must be people in work) the Tories led Labour by 47 percent to 31 percent—a gap of 16 percent. The Tory lead was actually more slender among households with an income of over £70,000.9 There are some important counter-trends. The Tories have not become the party of the poor. Figure 2 shows the party vote relative to the relative deprivation of a constituency. There is still a clear correlation: poorer areas tend to vote Labour; richer ones, Tory. Figure 2: Relationship between deprivation and Conservative/Labour vote, English constituencies, 2019 Source: Commons Briefing Paper CBP-7327; House of Commons Library, 19 December 2019. However, a more detailed analysis by the Resolution Foundation, comparing the 2019 result with those of earlier elections, demonstrates a weakening of this relationship between deprivation and voting Labour between 2017 and 2019.10 In 2017 Labour’s vote share in the most deprived constituencies was around 65 percent. Two years later it was down to just over 55 percent—although that is still above the figure for 2010. More generally, if we look at the most deprived constituencies in England, the top 16 are all Labour seats—and all are in the North of England or the Midlands.11 You have to get to number 17 on the list (Blackpool South) before there is a Tory gain. The working class has not “gone Tory” but some people have, and crucially they are concentrated in seats that were key in the 2019 election. The role of Brexit The immediate cause of Labour’s defeat in England and Wales was its position on Brexit and the European Union (EU). Labour lost 54 seats to the Conservatives and all but two had Leave majorities in the 2016 EU referendum.12 In those seats where more than 60 percent of voters backed Leave in the referendum, the average increase in Conservative support was 6 percent. Labour’s vote in these seats was down 10.4 percent. Here are three examples. In Bolsover—former Labour MP Dennis Skinner’s seat, which voted by 70 percent for Leave in 2016—the Labour vote was down roughly 8,000. The Tory vote increased by about 3,000 and the Brexit Party took about 4,000—2,000 more than Ukip in 2017. Some who voted for other parties or who abstained last time voted Tory this time but it is also reasonable to assume that there are thousands of 2017 Labour voters who did not vote at all this time. It is reasonable to speculate that they did not feel motivated to vote Labour but could not bring themselves to vote for anyone else. In Workington—61 percent Leave—the Labour vote was down about 5,000 votes from 2017. The Tories were up 3,000 and the Brexit Party vote was only just above what UKIP took in 2017. Again it seems reasonable to argue that some former Labour voters did not vote, and indeed the percentage turnout was down. A final example is Blyth Valley—60 percent Leave and one of the most commented on seats at the 2019 election. The Labour vote was down around 7,000. The Tories were up just 1,500. The Brexit Party took 3,400—and probably quite large numbers of Labour voters stayed home. Why such a consistent pattern across many constituencies? A YouGov study in January explored the views of voters who had switched from Labour to the Tories, finding: Half (49 percent) said it was down to Brexit. This came above the leadership of the parties (27 percent) and the wider policy offering (10 percent)… There is a real feeling among these voters that the Labour Party has left them behind. In total, 74 percent think “Labour used to represent people like me, but no longer does”. In total, just 12 percent of Lab-Con switchers think the Labour Party is close to people like them.13 In contrast Johnson had a clear plan from when he became leader. It was to present himself—wholly falsely—as the friend of the Leave-voting masses, and a sturdy opponent of the elitism and privilege that was squashing their voices. His slogan of “Get Brexit Done” won out. The detail of the main YouGov analysis of the election showed that just 52 percent of those who had voted Leave and then voted Labour in 2017 stayed with Labour in 2019. A third of them voted Tory.14 As a final piece of evidence, look at the constituencies with the biggest declines in Labour’s vote share. These were also heavily Leave-voting areas: Wentworth and Dearne, down 25 percent (70 percent Leave) Bassetlaw, down 25 percent (68 percent Leave) Barnsley Central, down 24 percent, Barnsley East 22 percent (Barnsley was 68 percent Leave) Doncaster North, down 22 percent; Doncaster Central, down 18 percent (Doncaster was 69 percent Leave) Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford, down 22 percent (69 percent Leave) Jarrow, down 20 percent (62 percent Leave) Over the two years preceding the election, Labour has edged closer and closer to a Remain position and has called for a second referendum. This was a major shift from its 2017 manifesto policy, which stated: “Labour accepts the referendum result and we will seek to unite the country around a Brexit deal that works for every community in Britain.” The new approach was disastrous. It alienated swathes of those who voted Leave. Tariq Ali put this pithily: “Let’s face it: Johnson won the election because the Tories pledged to implement the result of the 2016 referendum without any more shilly-shallying. Democracy matters. Labour’s rejection of the referendum outcome at its bubble party conference last September did them in”.15 Political responsibility for the Labour shift to support a second referendum begins with figures such as shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer and shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry. They were backed by union leaders such as Tom Roache of the GMB and the Trade Union Congress’s Frances O’Grady. But the responsibility goes wider. At a People’s Vote rally in October 2019, shadow home secretary and Labour left-winger Diane Abbott told the crowd: “I’m a Remainer.” Shadow chancellor John McDonnell also spoke, saying: “We believe that our future best lies within the European Union itself.” Ctd.... |