Labour’s 2019 Campaign: A Defeat of Epic Proportions Free

When the Prime Minister Boris Johnson called an early election, few Labour candidates were expecting a victory or even a repeat of the better than expected results obtained in the 2017 general election. Equally few, however, were prepared for the party to suffer such a comprehensively devastating defeat. Yet Labour obtained its worst election result since 1935, attracting less than one-third of the votes cast and electing only 202 MPs. Crucially, Labour lost 61 seats (and won one), many in traditional heartlands in northern England and in the Midlands, but the party also lost a sizeable number of seats in Scotland and Wales.

Unsurprisingly, as soon as the electoral results arrived, the blame game began. For many observers and Labour candidates, the leader of the party, Jeremy Corbyn, was the main cause of Labour’s defeat. After all, he agreed to hold an election at the worst possible time, led a disorganised campaign and was extremely unpopular with voters. ‘Corbynistas’, on the other hand, blamed Labour’s pro-European faction, which forced the party to adopt a new policy on Brexit which, in their view explains the loss of dozens of seats in the North of England and Midlands.

Doubtless, these factors contributed to Labour’s devastating defeat; however, other long-term factors, such as a decade of turbulent politics, structural changes to politics and the emergence of new cleavages contributed to Labour’s fourth consecutive defeat since 2010. This chapter will explain the short-term and long-term factors that led to Labour’s defeat but it will start by contextualising Labour’s state of readiness for the election and analysing Labour’s 2019 electoral campaign.

1. From hubris to chaos

Labour’s better-than-expected results at the 2017 general election offered some breathing space to its leader. The planned plots to oust Corbyn were put on hold and so were the ‘Save Jeremy’ campaign devised by his team (Shipman, 2018, p. 448). Moreover, as the new intake of MPs was supportive of his agenda, Corbyn was able to tighten his control over the party. Over time, the Left became the dominant voice of the party’s National Executive Committee and main decision-making structures of the party.

When the party met in Brighton for its annual conference in September 2017 the mood was, to use the words of Corbyn’s former adviser Andrew Fisher, ‘hubristic’ (Evening Standard, 2020). Reflecting that mood, Corbyn told delegates that Labour had become ‘a government-in-waiting’ that was ‘setting the agenda and winning the arguments for a new common sense about the direction our country should take’ (Corbyn, 2019c).

The Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, responded to Corbyn’s call by turbo-charging the party’s policy-making engine and by focussing on improving the party’s economic credibility. He led workshops on alternative forms of ownerships, listened to economists on productivity and launched several ‘tea-charm offensives’ to the City of London and to Britain’s boardrooms in the hope of reassuring them that business was ‘better off with Labour’.

But McDonnell’s efforts to turn Labour into a credible government in waiting were undermined by two major crises which paralysed the party for the best part of the two years that preceded the 2019 election. The first one was Corbyn’s failure to tackle decisively anti-semitic behaviour within the party; the second was his inability to develop a coherent approach to Brexit, the most important question facing the country at the time.

The crisis of anti-Semitism emerged soon after Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 but it had acquired dramatic proportions by the summer of 2018. The party tried slowly, albeit with little resolve, to address the issue by adopting new internal rules to discipline members found guilty of anti-semitic behaviour. But those efforts backfired when, in March 2018, Jeremy Corbyn expressed his opposition to the defacing of an anti-semitic mural. The backbencher Luciana Berger questioned the leader’s office about Corbyn’s apparent endorsement of the mural. Corbyn’s office backtracked immediately and apologised but this reaction was deemed inadequate by Berger and other MPs. Even McDonnell and Momentum condemned Corbyn’s office for Labour’s failure to deal with anti-semitic behaviour in a decisive manner (Kogan, 2019, pp. 349–351).

The mural incident was not the final one in the party’s anti-Semitism crisis. In the summer of 2018, Labour’s internal debate about the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-semitism into the party’s code showed that Corbyn had not yet tackled the problem. The NEC’s proposed amendments to the definition were challenged by several frontbenchers who wanted Labour to adopt the full IHRA definition and by 68 British Rabbis, who published a letter in the Guardian (2018) condemning the party’s new code. Needless to say, the media coverage of the controversy did Labour no favours.

This was a wound that continued to bleed. Another key moment in Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis emerged in February 2019, when Luciana Berger, together with seven other Labour backbenchers, defected from the party claiming institutional anti-Semitism. Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis escalated further when three months later, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched an investigation into Labour’s anti-semitic behaviour. The extent of the party’s anti-semitic crisis was highlighted by the decision of the Jewish Labour Movement to refuse to campaign for the party at the 2019 election, quickly followed by the recommendation by the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis to his congregants to vote for whichever party that is more likely to defeat Labour. Following this, Labour’s reputation as an anti-racist party was in tatters.

The second problem that undermined Labour’s popularity was Brexit. The party’s 2017 manifesto accepted the results of the referendum on membership of the European Union (EU) as well as the end of free movement, while making some positive noises about a softer Brexit and the benefits of immigration (Labour Party, 2017). This ambivalent position was electorally astute (Mellon et al., 2018, p. 735), but following the general election, Corbyn was under pressure to adopt a more pro-European stance. Confronted with a divided parliamentary party on the most important issue of the day, Corbyn’s approach to Brexit was marked by obfuscation in the period between the two general elections. The party’s Shadow Brexit Secretary, Keir Starmer, told Labour’s 2018 conference in Liverpool that ‘nobody is ruling out Remain as an option’ in a second referendum. Corbyn appeared less enthused by such a move.

It took months of campaigning by pro-European groups and trade unions, and the disastrous results of the European Parliament elections in June 2019, for Labour to adopt a clearer policy on Brexit. Finally, at the party’s 2019 annual conference, Corbyn announced that a Labour government would first negotiate a new withdrawal agreement with Brussels and then it would subject that deal to a new referendum where voters would also be given the option to vote to remain in the EU. But to the surprise of many, the Labour leader announced that he would remain neutral on the question and would implement the will of the people.

Labour’s new Brexit policy, which reflected the views of the majority of Labour members (Bale et al., 2020, p. 70; Fieldhouse, 2019), was greeted with relief by activists who had been campaigning for the last two years for a new referendum on EU membership. However, Labour’s new position was announced just a few weeks before the general election and meant that the party had little time to explain it to voters. As a result, many candidates feared the worst. For candidates who represented Leave seats, it was clear that their voters would react angrily at the party’s blatant disrespect for the results of the 2016 referendum on EU membership (Cruddas, 2019). Others feared that Corbyn’s neutrality on the issue made him look indecisive and opportunistic.

The party’s handling of these crises undermined Labour’s popularity, even among ‘Corbynistas’. The infectious enthusiasm of the youngsters who chanted ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’ at music festivals in 2017 waned as a result of the party’s inability to discipline anti-semitic behaviour, ambivalence over Brexit and resistance to democratising its policy-making structures. Indeed, as the Leader of the Opposition’s Office tightened its grip over the party’s policy-making machine, disillusion grew amongst activists.

That disillusion was well captured by the convener of the left-wing grassroot movement Compass, Neal Lawson, who remarked that the ‘Labour leader’s office today is at least as powerful, and unaccountable, as it was under Blair and Brown. Whatever else it is, this is not bottom-up democracy’ (2019, p. 180). In a similar vein, Jeremy Gilbert, an academic who supported Corbyn, admitted that the leader’s office was ‘acquiring a reputation for secrecy, authoritarianism and narrow-mindedness that may have well been an inevitable product of seeking success within the Westminster system, but which threatens to demoralise the membership base’ (2019, p. 87). This account was confirmed by Andrew Fisher’s letter of resignation from the party, in which he accused the leader’s office of a ‘lack of professionalism, competence and human decency’ (quoted by Line and Bloom, 2019).

The scale of Labour’s unpopularity was extraordinary given the inability of the then Prime Minister Theresa May to get her withdrawal agreement supported by her party and approved in parliament. But instead of capitalising on May’s failings and unpopularity, Labour was consumed by its own internal crisis and was therefore unable to mount any effective opposition to the government.

2. Falling into the fox’s trap

In the meantime, the Conservatives got their act together following Theresa May’s resignation and Boris Johnson’s election as leader of the party in the summer of 2019. Johnson faced the same institutional and political limitations (i.e. he did not control a parliamentary majority) as of May, but his style of governing was radically different. Instead of dithering and last-minute charm offensives to parliamentarians, Johnson relished the confrontation with the House of Commons and the Supreme Court over his decision to prorogue parliament in the hope of getting his EU withdrawal agreement approved with as little scrutiny as possible.

Johnson’s use of prerogative power to prorogue parliament for five weeks was adjudged to have been exercised unlawfully by the Supreme Court on 24 September. Forced to retreat, the Prime Minister, in October, reluctantly asked the EU for another extension for article 50, delaying Britain’s departure, but his strategy of forcing an early election eventually paid-off. Labour, together with the other opposition parties was totally unprepared for this turn of events. In reality, they fell into Johnson’s wily fox trap by reluctantly agreeing to an early election to be held in early December.

But the timing of the election could not have been worse for Labour. The party was trailing behind the Conservatives by 15 percentage points (YouGov, 2019a). Corbyn’s personal ratings were even more problematic. In one survey, he ranked as the most unpopular leader of the opposition since 1977 (Skinner et al., 2019). The same survey showed that 76% of public opinion was ‘dissatisfied’ with Corbyn as opposition leader and 77% believed he was doing a bad job at handling’s Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. At the start of the electoral campaign, only 21% of voters thought that Corbyn would be the best Prime Minister (YouGov, 2019a).

3. The advent calendar campaign

With these polling figures, it is not surprising that Labour launched its electoral campaign almost a week before the Conservative Party. Party strategists hoped to reverse the trend in the opinion polls with an offensive campaign strategy and by diverting voters’ attention from Brexit with a populist-themed campaign adapted to the festive season. To use the words of one of the party’s strategists, the aim of the campaign was to channel the ‘Christmas cheer and spirit’ into the election, with ‘Vote Labour’ bobble hats, mulled wine in flasks on the doorstep, Christmas jumpers and all manner of creative ideas’ (Ryle, 2019).

Labour’s electoral promises would be presented as if displayed in an Advent Calendar: each day the party would announce a brand-new policy idea which would target a different segment of the electorate. In this spirit, Corbyn launched the party’s Christmas-themed campaign, sprinkled with small doses of populist anger against the ruling elites. In the speech that launched the party’s campaign at Battersea’s Arts Centre, he announced a ‘once-in-a-generation chance to transform our country’ and promised to go after ‘the tax-dodgers, the landlords, the bad bosses, big polluters’ (Corbyn, 2019b).

Labour’s strategy involved avoiding Brexit as a campaigning theme. Aware that the party’s new stance on Brexit was not easy to explain to voters, Corbyn used his second speech of the campaign to promise that a Labour government would get ‘Brexit sorted within six months’ (2019a). In a parallel move, Momentum launched a video where an enthusiastic young man explained Labour’s ‘simple’ approach to Brexit in 30 seconds but for the rest of the campaign, the party tried to avoid the subject. It turns out that these efforts were insufficient as most voters thought that Labour’s Brexit policy was unclear (Abraham, 2019).

Having decided to treat Brexit as an aside, Labour’s offensive campaign strategy had four main components: Corbyn’s visits; the daily announcements from the party’s headquarters; the ground campaign and the digital campaign. To some extent, the tactics deployed at the 2017 election were fine-tuned; however, there was an important difference. Instead of adopting the defensive strategy used in 2017 (Middleton, 2019, p. 508), this time Labour conducted an offensive campaign. Labour strategists believed that Labour could have won more seats in 2017 if the party had adopted a more offensive strategy.

This reasoning explains the decision to conduct most of Corbyn’s visits in marginal or Conservative-held seats. Over the six-week campaign (from 31 October to 11 December), he only visited 29 Labour-held seats, out of his visits to 80 seats.¹

Corbyn spent most of the campaign visiting marginal seats and Conservative seats like Harlow, Ashfield, Telford, Milton Keynes, Loughborough or seats held by the Scottish National Party (SNP) in Scotland (which he visited twice), but his visits to Labour-held seats in the North East of England and the Midlands were rarer. But Corbyn’s offensive visits strategy was also the result of the unwillingness of Labour candidates to be seen side-by-side with Corbyn (Labour MP, 2020).

Corbyn enjoyed a few good moments on the campaign trail. For example, when Yorkshire and the Midlands were hit by flooding, Corbyn was able to present himself as an empathetic leader who visited the affected areas. This image contrasted to that of the Prime Minister, who stayed away from the media glare. But these positive moments were rare. In truth, the crowds at Corbyn events were smaller and less enthusiastic than in 2017, and his media performances were lacklustre and in some of them (e.g. his BBC interview with Andrew Neil), he came across as impatient and angry.

In terms of digital campaign, Labour relied on the grassroot movement Momentum’s infrastructure which had been upgraded since the 2017 campaign. Momentum launched the new website MyCampaignMap.com which directed activists to their nearest marginal seats and was used to set up more than 21,000 canvassing events. Momentum also launched the ‘Labour Legends’ campaign, which recruited 1,400 individuals who volunteered a week of their time to campaign for the party (Clarke, 2019), and trained thousands of activists on how to have persuasive conversations with voters, using techniques borrowed from the campaign team of the American presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

However, Momentum’s contribution to the campaign was not the asset it had been in the previous election. Halfway through the electoral campaign, the site MyCampaignMap.com adopted Labour’s offensive strategy and started to divert activists from defensive seats to participate in ‘Unseat Campaigns’ in places like Wimbledon, Hendon, Uxbridge and Chingford and Woodford Green, which Labour had few chances of winning. In addition, the Bernie Sanders’ inspired training sessions turned out to be less effective. Many activists were turning up to campaign events not knowing how to handle hostile voters, and some did not know the name of the candidate they were campaigning for.

There was also significant variation in the number of footsoldiers on the ground. In London and in the South East of England, Labour candidates could rely on the support of hundreds of Labour and Momentum activists, but it was far more difficult and expensive to send footsoldiers to campaign in seats in the North East and the Midlands. Indeed, in seats which had not been targeted by the party’s headquarters (Proctor, 2020), Labour candidates could rely only on a relatively small pool of party members to conduct the campaign.

But Labour’s main campaign problems were not created by Momentum. The party’s campaign was also in the words of one observer ‘shambolically organised’ (Rodgers, 2020). Information was concentrated in Corbyn’s office, and consequently there was, according to a post-mortem, a ‘lack of communication and preparation over key policy lines, lack of clarity of how campaigns could secure the data of newly registered voters, the unreliability of digital tools’ and inadequate training of activists’ (Somerville, 2020).

The daily policy announcements did not help as it contributed to a campaign without a coherent and focussed narrative (Rodgers, 2019). Apart from Fisher and McDonnell few people knew which flagship policies would be announced on a daily basis (Stewart, 2020). Without guidance from the party, candidates around the country were forced to improvise. As Chris Bryant put it, ‘you never knew if you were getting a ring or a satsuma’ out of the Advent Calendar (2020).

Labour thought that these shortcomings could be overcome by the launch of the party manifesto. To that end, the party organised a big manifesto launch event in Birmingham on 21 November which involved the entire shadow cabinet. The manifesto, entitled It’s Time For Real Change, was more radical than Labour’s 2017 manifesto and it promised free broadband to all, a Green Industrial Revolution, the nationalisation of the railways, water and electricity, a four-day week, the scrapping of university tuition fees, the rise of the minimum wage, a windfall tax on oil companies, the promise of building 100,000 new council houses every year until 2024, higher investment in the NHS and other public services, pay rises for nurses, teachers and police officers, pension justice for women and crucially a second referendum on Brexit (Labour Party, 2019).

The media reaction to this Christmas themed manifesto was either negative or tepid. Most newspapers perceived it to be too radical and too costly. For example, the Daily Mail called it the ‘Marxist Manifesto’ and ‘Corbyn’s 83% Tax Robbery’; the Daily Express called it ‘The £80 BN Raid on Your Wallets’, the Financial Times claimed that Labour’s manifesto stirred the ‘spectre of the 1970s for business’, while The Guardian neutrally claimed that Corbyn had unveiled ‘Labour’s most radical manifesto for decades’. The only supporting newspaper was the Daily Mirror whose front page claimed that Labour was ‘On Your Side’.

4. Alarm bells start ringing

By the end of November, alarm bells started to ring at Labour headquarters. The ground and digital campaigns, together with the manifesto launch had a very modest effect upon the party’s lack of popularity. If Labour’s approval ratings were slowly rising in the polls, so were the Conservatives’. But the real bombshell of the campaign was YouGov’s multilevel with poststratification poll (see the Introduction to this volume) released in late November. The model, which confirmed Labour’s internal polling and the success of the Conservatives’ strategy of targeting seats in Labour’s ‘red wall’, projected a comfortable Conservative majority of 359 whilst Labour was expected to win only 211 seats (Wells, 2019).

This devastating projection led to a change in the party’s strategy in the last two weeks of the campaign. The party shifted campaigning resources to defend constituencies which thus far had been deemed safe and started to focus on ‘bread and butter issues’ like council housing, more local buses and free prescriptions that were more likely to attract traditional working-class voters in the ‘red wall’. Because many of the seats under threat were strong Leave constituencies the party also started to place more pro-Leave voices at the centre of the campaign. For instance, Ian Lavery led a tour of Leave areas, whereas figures like Richard Burgon, Laura Pidcock, Angela Rayner, Jon Trickett were given more prominent roles in Labour’s media strategy. In contrast, figures associated with the Remain campaign, like Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry, Diane Abbott, were told to keep off the airwaves.

By the last week of the campaign, morale was extremely low among Labour activists and campaigners. Opinion polls suggested that the Conservatives retained a solid lead over Labour and the feedback from the candidates and canvassers confirmed that trend. Nonetheless, Corbyn pursued with his gruelling schedule of visits, having spent the last day of campaign visiting Scotland and Middlesbrough for the second time (Stewart, 2019).

On election day, Labour was preparing for bad news, but the electoral results went beyond the party’s worst fears. Labour attracted only a 32.9% share of the vote across Great Britain (32.1% of the UK vote), with only 202 MPs elected, the lowest number of seats won since 1935. Labour retained only 72% of its 2017 voters. The loss of ultra-safe and traditional Labour seats like Bolsover, Sedgefield, Blyth Valley, Don Valley, Leigh, Workington and Bishop Auckland came to symbolise Labour’s existential crisis. However, the results showed that Labour’s crisis extended well beyond the famous ‘red wall’. The party lost seats everywhere and to every party and lost votes across all demographic groups (Cooper and Cooper, 2020, p. 12).

Faced with such devastating results, Corbyn announced his resignation from the leadership of the party but failed to take responsibility for Labour’s defeat. In reality, his office blamed Keir Starmer for forcing the party to adopt a new Brexit stance which seemed to disrespect the result of the 2016 referendum. This interpretation of Labour’s crushing defeat was rejected by many. Indeed, three-quarters of Labour councillors said that Labour’s national leadership was the main reason for voters leaving the party (Butler, 2020). And for those candidates who lost their seats or who were re-elected on small majorities, the blame lay mostly with Corbyn, who was not only unpopular but seen as an ineffective leader (Merrick, 2020). This view was encapsulated by Alan Johnson’s outburst against Corbyn whom, he said, ‘couldn’t lead the working class out of a paper bag’ (ITV News, 2019) let alone to electoral victory.

But the scale of Labour’s defeat cannot be attributed to a single factor or simply to contextual factors like Brexit or a poorly run electoral campaign, especially because this was the party’s fourth consecutive defeat since 2010. The following section will analyse the short-term and contextual factors as well as the long-term trends that explain Labour’s results.

5. Explaining the results

The electoral results and survey and polling data show that there was an amalgam of reasons, both contextual and structural, which led so many voters to abandon Labour. Among the different factors that can explain the party’s defeat, Corbyn’s reputation, the party’s Brexit policy, a transactional manifesto which overpromised, a poorly run campaign together with long-term factors like structural political changes and new trends in voting behaviour, standout. These different factors did not work in isolation. In some instances—for instance, the Brexit and Corbyn factors—they reinforced each other.

Doubtless, Brexit influenced voting behaviour. This was after all the issue that had dominated British politics since 2016 and the reason why an early election was called. Thus, it is not surprising that of the 60 seats that Labour lost, 52 represented Leave areas, though the party also lost Remain voters (Cooper and Cooper, 2020, p. 16). One analysis of the electoral results showed that only 14% of Leave voters voted for Labour in 2019 (down from 24% in 2017) and only 49% of Remain voters voted for the party (House of Commons, 2020). Lord Ashcroft’s polls, outlined in the opening results chapter, indicate a higher vote share for Labour among Leave voters, of 26%, compared with 47% of Remain voters. What is clear from both sets of figures is that Labour’s support among Leave voters was woefully low. Leavers did not see Brexit as ‘getting done’ by Labour.

Analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows that ‘changes in Labour’s vote shares were more shaped by their Brexit vote’ than in the 2017 general election, but other factors, like voters’ perception of the competence of party leaders, were also contributing factors (Bell, 2019; see also Curtis 2019). Lord Ashcroft’s (2020) analysis of Labour’s defeat also claimed that two-thirds of Labour Party members, including three-quarters of those who voted for Corbyn as leader, said that Brexit dominated the election and had a bigger effect on the result than on how people felt about the parties, leaders and other policies (Ashcroft, 2020).

However, it is not clear whether a pro-Leave position would have resulted in retaining seats in Leave areas. Lord Ashcroft’s survey indicated that 85% of Labour voters said they would have probably voted the same way had Brexit not been an issue (Ashcroft, 2020). In truth, candidates and activists who campaigned claimed that the Brexit factor could not be disentangled from voters’ attitudes towards the leader of the opposition. As Curtice explained, the ‘lack of leadership’ was a very big problem for Labour because, among other reasons, it led to indecision on Brexit and perceptions of competence and electability (2020).

Perceptions of competence influence voting behaviour (Stewart and Clarke, 1992, p. 467), especially ‘when major events heighten the relevance of competence’ (Green and Jennings, 2018, p. 11), when parties prime questions of competence and performance and when high salience events ‘politicise the handling of an issue and make managerial competence’ more important (Green and Jennings, 2018, p. 221). After three years of parliamentary deadlock around Brexit, it can be argued that perceptions of competence seemed to be particularly relevant to voters in 2019. In truth, the Conservative Party primed competence as an important benchmark to evaluate party electability and centred its campaign on the promise of ‘getting Brexit done’.

It is then not surprising that most analyses of Labour’s defeat identified Corbyn’s reputation as a leader as the main reason why so many voters abandoned the party. YouGov’s (2019a) report showed that Corbyn’s leadership was the main reason why Labour voters defected (Curtis, 2019). Lord Ashcroft’s (2020) report also showed that 53% of Labour defectors did not want Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister. The same survey suggested that voters found Corbyn unpatriotic and lacking in leadership qualities.

Corbyn’s unpopularity had many facets. As George Eaton (2019) explained, he was not trusted on national security; he was perceived as an unpatriotic, weak leader unable to manage a divided party and who did not look prime-ministerial. An illustration of the multi-faceted nature of popular hostility to Corbyn was offered by the former Labour whip, Graham Jones’ canvassing experiences: ‘door one wouldn’t vote for him because he was scruffy; the next person wouldn’t vote for him because of antisemitism in the party; the next because of connections to Hamas; and the next because he seemed unable to lead’ (Jones quoted Syal et al., 2019).

Labour’s ambitious manifesto was also invoked as one the causes of its defeat, the party’s manifesto promises viewed as undeliverable, unrealistic and too expensive by many (Curtis, 2019). Similarly, Lord Ashcroft’s (2020) study identified Labour’s manifesto as a cause of Labour’s unpopularity. Labour’s badly organised campaign also played a role, especially because it contrasted with the Conservatives’ laser-focussed ‘Get Brexit Done’ campaign, though it must be said that electoral campaigns are rarely game changers. At best, campaigns have a mobilising effect which is reflected in the media coverage (Banducci and Karp, 2003, p. 463).

But Labour’s 2019 results cannot be fully understood by considering only the short-term factors that influenced voting behaviour, especially because this was the party’s fourth consecutive electoral defeat. Indeed, it is important to consider that the election took place following ten years of high political turbulence. As the four general elections (two of which delivered hung parliaments), a referendum on Scottish independence and a national referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU vividly illustrate, the British party system has suffered in the last decade several ‘electoral shocks’ which rendered voting behaviour more fluid, volatile and unpredictable (Fieldhouse et al., 2020, p. 30).

In truth, the instability of the party system predates this decade of political turbulence (Goes, 2019, pp. 295–297). Hyper-globalisation, the rise in immigration flows and the adaptation by political parties to these changes led to class and partisan dealignments which in turn altered voting behaviour. In particular, the emergence in the last two decades of a globalisation cleavage led to significant changes in voter behaviour not only in Britain but also in most European party systems (Jennings and Stoker, 2016; Kriesi et al., 2006; Hobolt, 2016, p. 1260; Cutts et al., 2020, p. 17).

As globalisation created ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in society their antagonism manifested itself at economic, cultural and political levels. Thus, as shown by Kriesi et al., the ‘losers of globalisation’, who tend to be older, with fewer qualifications and live in rural, suburban or post-industrial areas, are more likely to vote for parties that defend tighter immigration controls, economic protectionism and authoritarian values, whereas the ‘winners’, who tend to be younger, with university qualifications and live in ethnically diverse urban areas, are more inclined to vote for parties that favour European integration, support immigration and cosmopolitan and libertarian values (2006, p. 924).

It was precisely this globalisation cleavage which transformed the demographic and geographic profile of Labour support in the last two decades. Indeed, as Evans and Tilley show, the working classes started to desert the Labour Party after 2001 (2017, p. 153), but the 2015 general election was the first election since the war when the ‘working class voted for Labour at a lower rate than some middle-class groups’ (2017, p. 152). This new pattern of class voting was again in evidence at the 2019 general election. In terms of social class, Labour attracted only 33% of the vote of those categorised as C2DE, while the Conservatives attracted 48% of that social class. The old electoral laws of social class had been reversed. The Conservatives enjoyed significantly more support among the working class than did Labour. Meanwhile, Labour attracted 33% of the ABC1 social class, compared with 43% support for the Conservatives in that middle-class category (YouGov, 2019b). Labour’s support was evenly spread across the social classes, too thinly in both cases.

New social class voting patterns are accompanied by age, educational and geographical dimensions, confirming Kriesi et al.’s globalisation cleavages. Age was the key indicator of voting behaviour at the 2019 election: 56% of 18- to 24-year-old voted Labour, while only 22% of the over-60s did likewise. Only 25% of voters without educational qualifications voted for Labour, while 43% of Labour voters had university degrees (McDonnell and Curtis, 2019). Age is correlated with education, as younger people tend to have higher educational qualifications. In terms of the geographical dimension, Jennings and Stoker showed that, at the previous two elections, support for Labour had tended to be concentrated particularly in urban areas connected to global growth, but declined in a cluster of coastal, post-industrial, suburban and rural areas (2017, p. 361; see also Jennings and Stoker, 2019 , p. 156). This trend was confirmed and consolidated in 2019.

To understand how the globalisation cleavage played out at the 2019 election, we need to consider that the new pattern of class voting reflects economic and social values and also cultural identities normally expressed in public attitudes to immigration (Evans and Tilley, 2017, p. 186). Analysis by Evans and Chzhen confirmed the expression of this new class voting, by correlating the decline in Labour’s support in the 2005 and 2010 elections to popular disquiet with levels of immigration (2013, p.19). In 2019, that globalisation cleavage is associated with the Brexit factor.

A closer look at Labour’s share of the vote in some of the ‘red wall’ seats over the last two decades shows us again the impact of globalisation in voting behaviour. As Table 5.1 shows Labour’s decline in support started in 2005, but became spectacularly visible following the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2016 referendum on EU membership and was confirmed at the 2017 and 2019 general elections.

In the 15 seats displayed in Table 5.1, a pattern of electoral decline in Labour’s working-class heartlands can be identified between 2001 and 2019. In 2001, Labour won its comfortable electoral victory but by 2005, the large influx of immigrants from the new EU accession countries started to erode support for Labour in some of these seats. By 2010, two years after the global financial crisis, Labour suffered a devastating defeat which continued in 2015 but two years later there was surprising surge in support for Labour. In 2019, the decline in Labour support resumed, expressed in dramatic fashion.

In seats like Ashfield, Redcar, Leigh, North West Durham and Stockton South, Labour registered notable vote share gains in 2017, but two years later Labour lost those seats to the Conservatives for the first time, in some cases in spectacular fashion. Labour’s woeful results in Leave-voting former heartlands indicate Brexit salience (see Curtice in this volume). In 2017, Labour promised to respect the results of the EU referendum and to reverse austerity measures and was rewarded with very big majorities in those seats, but in 2019, the promise of a second referendum on EU membership and lack of clarity over Labour’s position on Brexit proved unappealing, restoring the pattern of decline in the Labour vote in these areas. Thus, to a certain extent what was expressed in the last two general elections was not simply a Brexit effect but the long-term impact of the globalisation cleavage in the voting behaviour of traditional Labour voters (see also Flinders in this volume).

6. Conclusion: Labour on life support

Labour’s decline in its traditional heartlands and concomitant transformation into a party of the ‘winners of globalisation’ led the backbencher Jon Cruddas to conclude that ‘paradoxically Corbyn completed Tony Blair’s project’ of transforming Labour into a party of the urban middle classes (2019). This is an interesting conclusion but there is no denying that these new trends in class, age and geographical vote pose an almost existential challenge to the Labour Party. As Lord Liddle argued, ‘Labour is still a viable party, but it might never again be a party of government’ (2020). Simply put, Labour cannot be a party of government by relying solely on the support of middle-class voters in English cities.

Corbyn’s successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, elected in April 2020, was elevated to restore the party’s much battered credibility. As the candidate who attracted support from all Labour wings and won the leadership election with a resounding victory, the immediate expectations of Starmer were the unification of a bitterly divided party and the capacity to offer a more professional and forensic opposition to the Conservative government. Nonetheless, as the new Labour leader admitted in his acceptance speech, he faces a proverbial mountain to climb.

To turn Labour into a party of government again, Starmer has to craft a political programme which keeps the urban, educated middle classes on board while bringing back into Labour’s fold the suburban, post-industrial communitarian working-class voters of the North of England, Midlands, Wales and also Scotland who have abandoned the party since 2005. This is a tall order. After all, these two sets of very different voters will struggle to find common ground on issues of law and order, immigration and national security but may agree on a social, democratic, economic approach that addresses the devastating socio-economic impact of a pandemic-led recession and of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, the effects of which will be acute at the time of the next election. If that is the case, Starmer, may, but only just, find the solution to the electoral puzzle that has kept Labour out of power since 2010.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Lord Liddle, Lord Giddens, Jon Cruddas, Bridget Phillipson, Chris Bryant, Sienna Rodgers, Michael Chessum, Luke Cooper, Natalie Sedacca and other Labour MPs, councillors and party members who asked to remain anonymous, for sharing their time and insights. All mistakes in analysis are, of course, my own.

References