Nadia Whittome
Clement Attlee after the second world war, Tony Blair and New Labour, Jeremy Corbyn forcing a hung parliament in 2017 … the thread running through these electoral success stories is a vision for society that resonated in that moment. In this election, Labour said very little, and it didn’t work.
Talking about big issues and taking principled stances has been replaced with focus groups and buzzwords. Voters need to know what we stand for and that we mean what we say. Hanging flags in the background and mentioning the NHS in every breath isn’t going to cut it. We need a coherent set of bold policies.
We are dealing with a populist Conservative party that will turn on the spending taps to win votes while growing ever more extreme in its views on immigration and authoritarian in its attitude to civil rights. The Tories are redefining the parameters of mainstream politics – the far right is being let in through the backdoor. Yet too often Labour is choosing to sit these battles out, or worse – pander to them.
The pandemic has turned the world upside down and will have far-reaching impacts. The boundaries of what was previously thought possible have been obliterated. The possibility of bringing on board people with ambitious socialist vision, and organising with them to transform lives and empower communities inside and outside of electoral cycles, has never been greater.
From a green industrial revolution to a national care service and publicly owned rail and broadband, we need bold, unifying policies rooted in social and environmental justice. If we continue to dance to the Tories’ tune and fail to present a powerful alternative, we will get nowhere.
Jon Trickett
If a Labour leader’s first duty is to win elections, Keir Starmer has stumbled. Badly. Naturally he wanted to establish his own identity. But he spent too much time triangulating against the Corbyn era. It damaged public perceptions of Labour unity as we lost of thousands of activists. To mobilise, we needed an inspiring vision, yet we got division in the party. On Brexit, it wasn’t enough to say that the debate was over. That was wishful thinking. Sure, our Hartlepool candidate was an NHS practitioner. But prevailing attitudes in Leave areas trumped our attempt to make it about the NHS.
The political terrain is shifting fast. Voters have lost trust in the political class. There is a mood for change in the country. You can see stirrings of this in votes for parties like the Greens and the nationalists. Labour ought to be able to embrace this. Never was a moment more auspicious for a fresh start, based on green economic renewal and social justice. But Starmer and his team need to show they are up for it. For now, the PM has the wind in his sails: he is trying to redefine Toryism, but he won’t deliver. Labour’s leadership needs to avoid empty platitudes, internal reviews, and rear-view mirror driving.
With a second byelection likely in Batley, there is no time to lose. A West Yorkshire town like Batley is different from Hartlepool. We can win. Nonetheless, a May stumble in the north-east would be a disaster if repeated in Yorkshire in June.
Benjamin Bradshaw
Never waste a good crisis. That old political axiom needs to be clanging in Keir Starmer’s ears as he responds to these elections. And he must use the not entirely fair media narrative that the results were disastrous for him and Labour to be bold. Yes, Hartlepool and the results in some other “red wall” areas were terrible. They were also predictable. The Labour rot in these areas predates Corbyn – but Corbyn’s disdain for their voters’ patriotism and aspiration repelled them. The damage was always going to take more than a year to fix.
Where Labour governs well – in Manchester, Wales and, yes, Exeter – the voters rewarded us. Labour’s national share of the vote was 6% behind the Tories; it was 17% when Starmer took over. This despite Johnson enjoying an undoubted vaccine bounce and the quietly growing national euphoria as Covid restrictions are lifted. This is not to underestimate Labour’s challenge. Johnson is a formidable opponent. His constant shapeshifting and bumbling boosterism go down well, particularly with voters desperate for hope and optimism.
Starmer needs to hold his nerve and, as we come out of Covid and he can get a hearing, show the nation what he’s made of. He must deploy the steely resolve he showed in dealing with antisemitism to ensure he has the strongest team and the best communicators from the next generation around him. He doesn’t have long, but Johnson and the Tories are still eminently beatable.
Margaret Hodge
Thursday’s results were devastating, but perhaps not surprising. After the catastrophic 2019 general election, Labour has a very high mountain to climb to restore trust. And a contest in the middle of a national crisis is bound to favour any government – including Labour in Wales – working to sort it out.
But the challenges Labour faces are structural and difficult. In more than one in four of the parliamentary seats Labour won in 2019, our majority was less than 5,000 votes. If we fail to change now, and if we are not both radical and bold, things will get worse. Changing our leader in 2020 was a necessary first step, but blaming Keir Starmer a year later does not make sense. In the 1980s we changed our leader then went on to change our constitution, our people, our policies and, yes, even our name.
Anybody who seriously thinks the solution to people voting for a party of the right is for Labour to drift to the left is, frankly, deluded. Political parties win elections by occupying the centre ground, and we must never concede that territory to the Conservatives.
Voters think we have not changed nearly enough. We must accept this reality, and demonstrate our rejection of the ideology of Corbynism as well as the man. Speak to the country, not the party. Start listening and stop preaching. And define a vision that provides hope, builds support through uniting not dividing people, and understands that social justice and economic prosperity are two sides of the same coin – we must champion both.
Clive Lewis
For any leader, serious defeat inevitably leads to a crossroads. Before them lies a series of choices. Which way they proceed will decide their fate and that of those that follow and the cause they fight for. Keir Starmer and the Labour party now find themselves at just such a junction. The implications of a wrong turn are possibly existential.
It turns out that voters in the north are just like voters anywhere else. Offered a choice between concrete, material gains after decades of decline, and vague notions of “values” and flag waving, they rather predictably chose the former.
But while Labour has gone backwards since 2019, its longer-term decline started much earlier. The world in which Labour was created has all but disappeared. Too many seats have been sustained by old habits, former glories and the first-past-the-post electoral system. Hartlepool is just the latest reminder this will not always be so.
To turn things around Starmer must ensure that our movement is allowed to build an authentic policy offer that matches the challenges facing the country. The middle ground of British politics is a myth. Boris Johnson has proved that it is wherever you make the case for it to be. This, then, is a new phase of Toryism – neo-illiberalism if you will. One which combines large state spending and market intervention with authoritarian and nationalist instincts. The “same old Tories” playbook simply won’t cut it.
In the longer term, Labour must tackle the crisis of democracy gripping our country. To do this it must understand that under first-past-the-post, only centre-left electoral alliances can oust the increasingly hegemonic Tories. That means embracing PR and acknowledging that Labour no longer has a monopoly on progressive politics in the 21st century.