The pro-Starmer think tank “Labour Together” has published a report under the title “Red Shift”, outlining their strategy for winning the next General Election. Given that it was founded by the likes of Wes Streeting, Jon Cruddas, Lisa Nandy and Rachel Reeves, it is perhaps unsurprising that this group is leaning away from core Labour values in its recommendations.
The report leans heavily on polling and analysis by YouGov, which is a notoriously right-leaning polling service, with a history of producing push-polls on key policy areas such as Brexit.
In this post, I will explore some of the problems I have with their approach, and explain how wrong-headed the conclusions are. Yes, in their terminology, I am in the “Activist Left”, and thus “out of step” with the country. But when the country is sliding towards fascism, it is incumbent on those who see themselves as centrists to stand against that slide, not to adopt fascist policies to try to appeal to the same base instincts.
Something Is Missing From Your Picture
The report starts by suggesting there are 6 loose-ish groupings of voters in the UK,characterised by their supposedly shared positions on economic intervention, and social policy. YouGov measure these on scales from “Economic Left” to “Economic Right”, and “Socially conservative” to “Socially liberal/individualist”. Having found this supposed clusters, they then applied demographic measures such as geographic location, economic status, age, gender and race to create a picture of each group.
The 6 groups are defined as “Activist Left”, “Patriotic Left”, “Centrist Liberals”, “Disillusioned Suburbans”, “English Traditionalists” and “Rural Right”.
(It’s worth noting that in describing “Stevenage Woman”, their stereotype of the Disillusioned Suburban voter, the authors of the report, seemingly unwittingly, echo the language of one Theresa May when she talked about who she wanted to make policies for: the “Just About Managing” or “JAM” voters.)
The Tories’ core support are the traditionalists and the rural right. Labour’s core support are the Activist Left. The “Patriotic Left” are presented as the voters Labour lost in the “Red Wall” of northern constituencies in 2019. (Spoiler: this is one of the groups Labour Together think we should be courting heavily.)
My immediate concern is that, despite the report treating these groups as homogeneous in attitudes and motivations, three groups seem to be evenly split between Labour and Conservative at the 2019 election, and even with the Tories absolutely crashing, only around half of them actually back Labour or Green now.
Not only that, but the YouGov statistics show around 5% of the “Activist Left” group voting Conservative – even in 2015!
It seems to me that something pretty fucking important has to be missing from your understanding of why people vote the way they do, if you can have these kinds of inconsistency in your data.
The questions that need to be asked, and urgently, are: “What’s different about the outliers?” and, “What’s the distinction between the groups of e.g. Disillusioned Suburbans who intend to vote Tory, and those who intend to vote Labour?” A third question follows: “Are the distinctions we find between Labour and Tory voters in each group comparable across different groups, or do different things make the difference?”
None of this analysis is attempted by the Labour Together team (possibly because they already got the answer they wanted to get and have been pushing since 2010, despite it losing Labour the 2015 election).
So we already know that their characterisations of the groups must be inadequate on some significant details, details that would more accurately predict voting intention than the analysis that YouGov put together.
Don’t You Think That Sounds A Bit, Y’Know, Fascist?
The Labour Together team claim that to win the next General Election, winning 4 out of their 6 groups guarantees it; winning 3 of 6 makes it a close race. They congratulate Keir Starmer on his brilliant tactic of doing absolutely fuck-all beyond not being Corbyn, while the Tories fucked the country without lube (they paid one of their mates to provide it but they never delivered) and partied through Covid lockdown. They note that Conservative Party support has plummeted across the board, even among their core support groups, “English Traditionalists” and “Rural Right”, meaning that Labour are now polling well ahead in the other four groups.
Given that “Centrist Liberals” are more likely to be in LibDem/Tory marginals than in Labour/Tory marginals, they focus on the “Patriotic Left” and “Disillusioned Suburbans” as the key groups to entice to stay with Labour.
They describe these target audiences like this:
“These voters believe that we should not increase immigration numbers. They believe Britain should be proud of its past. They believe that young people do not respect British values. They believe that certain places should be made safe by restricting entry by biological sex.”
They go on to say that, “Our target voters think prisons should, primarily, punish criminals.”
Change “Britain” to “Germany”, and I’ve read these words before. Specifically, I’ve read them in books about how the Nazis were able to take power in the Weimar Republic, describing which voters they appealed to to do so.
Even without that comparison, the description of their target voters screams to me, “These people do not view basic human rights and dignity as universal, but things that can and should be denied to some sections of society.”
Fascism By Any Other Name
The authors of Red Shift: Labour’s Path To Power use the information they’ve gathered, particularly regarding feelings of insecurity on economic status, environment and communities, to lay out a new ideology they call “Securitarianism”. A name that reeks to me of fascism, but let’s see if what they say about it can dispel that sense.
Here’s what they say:
“We call this ʻsecuritarian politicsʼ, which takes us beyond the old divides of left and right, liberal and conservative, old and young, rural and metropolitan. Instead of choosing a course of action based on the ideological purity of a political creed, it forces leaders and their parties to ask themselves more challenging questions.”
“On social security, securitarianism means cutting crime, ensuring public services are delivered, and re-stitching our social fabric. On national security, securitarianism demands a firm commitment to defence, ensuring hard as well as soft power.”
Sorry, but my initial instinct appears to be absolutely correct. These talking points are tragically familiar from reading about the concerns that lead people to supporting fascist ideologies, and the talking points used by fascists to appeal to them.
It’s not guaranteed that this means Labour Together are crypto-fascists (although they probably are), and it’s not guaranteed that this report would actually lead to fascist policies (although it feels like it will). But reading “Red Shift: Labour’s Path To Power” sent a cold chill down my spine and a sinking sense of dread, as it would anyone whose basic right to exist and be accepted is allowed to be brought into question for the sake of political gain. By treating fascist talking points as fair and reasonable, as “legitimate concerns”, you, well, legitimise them and give fascists credibility.
Austerity-Lite didn’t convince the public to vote for Labour in 2010 or 2015, it merely told the public that the Tories were basically correct in what they were doing. The same logic applies to “Securitarianism” and fascism.
Labour’s Road Back To 2010
One of the report’s key claims is that there is, “Some fear that taking positions like these might imperil the Labour Partyʼs core support. We found no electoral case whatsoever that this is a concern that should worry the Labour Party.” They go on to pat themselves on the back that, “Keir Starmer is winning more of Britainʼs most left-wing voters than Jeremy Corbyn ever did.”
That seems to fundamentally ignore just how completely the Tories have shat the bed over Covid-19, and their utter failure to manage the economy in the aftermath of the initial lockdown. After throwing out the couch, they now claim that sleeping on the floor is more popular than sleeping on the couch ever was, because it turns out most people don’t want to lie in a pile of crap all night!
It’s true that in 2024, the most left-wing voters are likely to vote for Labour – or stay at home. The blatant corruption and fascism of Conservative Party politics in the past six years has made getting them out of office ASAP into a matter of urgent importance. (That it took them breaking Lockdown rules to get us to the point where that can happen, is a terrible indictment against the British people, and against Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party.)
Similarly, the report’s authors claim that Tony Blair won in 1997 because, “New Labour channelled the optimism of Britain on the cusp of a new millennium”, even though later they acknowledge that, “In 1997, after the long years of Conservative government, marked by a terminal descent into sleaze, Tony Blair promised a new ‘third way’ and a modernisation of British politics”. They choose to ignore the role of that descent into sleaze, and the fact that the same thing, on a much more massive scale, is happening with the Tories right now. From 1992 to 1997 in by-election after by-election, John Major’s majority in parliament was eroded down to almost nothing. But by 1997, New Labour was almost indistinguishable from the Conservatives on any matter of economic importance. They did achieve in government some positive things on social policy that couldn’t have happened under any Tory government, but they drifted towards more authoritarian policies as their spell went on.
The difficulty in distinguishing between the three main parties, and the fact that a left-wing alternative wasn’t readily available any more, left millions feeling disenfranchised and (here’s the key word) disillusioned with the “political class”.
After an initial landslide victory in 1997 with 43% of the votes cast, and winning 418 seats, on a turnout of 71% (already lower than the 1992 election rate of 77%), Blair’s premiership saw the voting turnout plummet to around 60% and stay there until 2010. Labour’s share of the vote also tumbled, from that 43% to 41% in 2001, then 35% in 2005. Finally, in 2010, Labour polled only 29% of the vote. Their share of seats plummeted similarly, 412 in 2001 and 355 in 2005. Not only that, but Labour Party membership crashed too: from 405 thousand in 1997, by 2001 it was 272 thousand, and 2005 as low as 198 thousand.
Labour had lost the support of the Activist Left. It didn’t regain it until the election of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, when membership rose above 200 thousand for the first time since 2005, and eventually peaked at 575 thousand. Membership today remains above the 1997 peak, at 432 thousand in 2022, but how long will that last?
At the time, the Liberal Democratic Party was flirting with centre-left ideas and policies, and there is a clear shift away from Labour to the LibDems between 2001 and 2010. The least said about what they did with their new-found centre-left support the better at this point, but suffice to say a lot of us felt betrayed.
As soon as Labour have power again, it is likely that the Activist Left will once more cast their eyes about for someone else who can take up the mantle of progressive politics. It probably won’t be the LibDems, but the Green Party if they’re smart about leveraging they key issues, might make a few gains, or the new alt-left Breakthrough Party if they can identify a few viable target seats and perhaps woo Jeremy Corbyn into being a figurehead and a useful representative in Parliament now he’s been excluded from standing for Labour. Or they may just decide to stay at home in 2029.
The Voters Of Yesterday Become The Voters Of Today, And The Voters Of Today Become The Voters of Tomorrow
The other dynamic that is missing from the Labour Together analysis is that of people growing up. The early-40s “Disillusioned Suburbans” now were early-20s in the Blair Years. The early-20s are the most likely to be into social justice, or “socially liberal” and the most likely to be “Activist Left” in the terms of the report.
The narrative that “disillusionment” and “disenchantment” with the “political class” run through the target groups begins with the complaint of “voter apathy” that we heard so often in the early 2000s, to explain the inexorable decline in turnout and In Labour’s support. The feeling that politicians were all the same, and, “Every big and abstract promise has been made to them a thousand times before” starts with the empty rhetoric and indistinguishable economics of the 00s Labour and Conservative leaderships.
Labour Together make plenty of noise in the report about needing, “political promises that relate directly to [voters]” and “policies that are rooted in their everyday experience, not grand promises and abstract ideals.” And yet, the promises they talk about (ones that relate, “to jobs near them, to better local schools and hospitals, to clean parks and safe streets”) are the same as the promises that have so often been broken and that have been “promised a thousand times before”. Ironically, the policies that made up Labour’s 2019 manifesto they disparage so greatly, relate far stronger to these issues and to practical, everyday experience, than anything I could perceive in their “Securitarian” ideology.
What do they have to offer the young Activist Left today? Why should someone in their twenties now stick with Labour when Labour betrays the principles of equality and inclusiveness that supposedly are its foundation and bedrock? The Labour Together group hope that economic security will be enough, but offer little enough in terms of their core concerns regarding in particular housing costs and economic inequality.
By 2029, a Labour government that places its faith in the attractiveness of “Securitarianism” will have squandered its support, and the core of the Activist Left will drift into disillusionment and defect to other parties, or just not vote at all. Just as the Activist Left of yesterday became the Disillusioned Suburbans of today, or drifted into Centrist Liberal positions, so will today’s Activist Left drift away from Labour and into less stable and reliable voter groups. It remains to be seen who would be able to capitalise on that best, whether a re-centralised Conservative Party offering a similar programme but with more authenticity because social conservatism is their base position, or a new alt-Left party that captures the imagination of a significant portion and starts to seize votes, and seats, from Labour’s core, or even a rehabilitated Liberal Democrats who find their balls at last and manage to lose the single-issue anti-Brexit stance they’ve built up to put forward a stronger case for proportional representation again, with a socially liberal and progressive economic policy platform.
“There Go My People. I Must Find Out Where They Are Going, So I Can Lead Them”
There was a time when the business of political campaigning was about doing your utmost to convince the people of the rightness of your position, laying out the case in favour of, for example, human rights legislation, greater redistribution of wealth, anti-racism, LGBTQ rights, and so on. If you did the job well enough, by reason or emotion, then you won your case and got to make policy. Even if you didn’t win on every argument, you might still get the chance if you convinced people of your other programmes. For instance, Harold Wilson’s Labour Party made gay sex legal despite the vast majority of the country being against it in 1967.
If you couldn’t get enough of the people to come all the way with you, then you could at least bring them to a position closer to where you wanted them to be. In the 2000s, Tony Blair’s government couldn’t quite get gay marriage through despite their desire to do so. A compromise position of “civil partnerships” was used instead. By the time David Cameron (still trying to pretend the Tories could be nice) proposed gay marriage outright, the mood had shifted to accept it, and in all probability the fact of having come part-way helped somewhat in that.
But Blair and Cameron were the beginning of that model being dropped. We went from leadership to approval-seeking. Instead of persuading people of our case, the new model was to find out what they already believed and parrot it back to them.
In The West Wing episode “Bartlet’s Third State of the Union”, pollster Joey Lucas runs a telephone poll for Josh Lyman to assess attitudes on gun control. The results are disappointing, that the people are not on board with the Bartlet regime’s position. In despair, Josh says it means they have to dial back the rhetoric on gun control. Joey disagrees, arguing, “This means dial it UP. We aren’t getting through to them.”
If the “Patriotic Left” and more so the “Disillusioned Suburban” are not yet on board with socially progressive policies, it isn’t the Labour Party’s job to meekly lie down and accept that. It’s our job to change their minds, by whatever arguments and appeals are effective. The Labour Party should stand for equality, human rights and dignity, and social justice. If those positions are not popular in Britain today, we have failed in our job. We should not move to embrace bigotry and fascism just because we think that will make us a little more popular.
Valery North - Writer 