Labour’s Northern Strategy is backfiring — it was always going to

The YouGov poll released on Thursday after the Budget predictably set hares running about the direction Labour Party is taking under Keir Starmer. It was the first poll in months to show a net swing towards the Tories, with Labour dropping to 32%, and the Tories moving back up to 45% — a thirteen point lead.

The case for the defence is obvious: we are in the middle of a national emergency, and people do tend to get behind the government at times like this, particularly now that the vaccine programme is delivering and the end of Lockdown is in sight; the YouGov poll is one poll; and in any case, the next election isn’t due until May 2024.

But those are all easy answers. The first point falls apart when you realise that Labour have made inroads during the crisis, only to go into reverse gear now. Looking at the state of the opinion polls now, if there were an election this week, it looks like the Tories would be re-elected with a slightly reduced majority.

The YouGov poll might be one poll but there’s been a consistent trend of polls showing smaller and smaller swings to Labour, and larger and larger Tory leads: the difference is that this is the first to show Labour behind where it was in December 2019. And with the coming repeal of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, the next election might be sooner than people think. Besides, in the first week of March 2012, just over three years before the following election, Ed Miliband’s Labour Party was ahead in five of the seven polls completed that week. He lost the following election.

And Ed Miliband seems to be an apt comparison to Starmer’s leadership: Miliband was trying to move the party on from Blair, just as Starmer is trying to move the party on from Corbyn. And both seemed to spend most of their time complaining about Tory policies but going along with the general thrust of them. For Miliband it was Austerity. For Starmer it’s Brexit, or it would be if he were actually complaining about it, rather than trying to avoid the issue altogether.

But the big problem with Starmer’s leadership is the strategy: his focus on winning back votes and seats in the North at the expense of targets elsewhere.

Why does a Northern Strategy look attractive?

On paper, this sounds like a good strategy: a 5% swing to Labour would see Labour rack up 23 gains from the Tories in the North of England, compared with 27 gains (and one from the SNP) in the rest of the UK. It would take a 3% swing just to make two gains from the Tories in the South. So under First Past the Post, targeting voters north of the Dee and the Humber is the most efficient way to gains.

Besides, it was in the North, and in seats that until recently have been considered Labour heartlands, where the biggest losses took place in terms of votes and seats, so it’s obvious that the road to recovery points North.

But is it actually working?

We’ll know for sure in the upcoming local and Mayoral elections, which are Starmer’s first test at the ballot box, but the polling evidence right now makes for grim reading. In the most recent polls by seven different companies who produce regional breakdowns of their opinion polls (with the obvious caveat that individual subsamples are unreliable, though when you see the same figures over and over you can discern a trend), six of them show swings from Labour to the Tories in all or part of the North. And while an average of the latest polls shows a 2% swing to Labour across Britain, in Northern England, there’s actually a swing to the Tories, meaning that the nine Labour gains a 2% swing in the North would produce don’t materialise, and instead there are five Labour losses (with a sixth in North Wales).

Why isn’t it working?

It seems that despite the focus groups, Labour are misjudging Northern voters. Just going along with Brexit doesn’t suit anyone: those who supported Brexit haven’t forgotten that Starmer and Labour opposed it, and probably notice that their new-found support isn’t particularly full throated. And those who oppose Brexit feel let down by what they see as Labour’s capitulation.

Then there’s the image of Labour as a party of metropolitan liberals who have very little in common with the voters they’ve lost. Starmer does have a compelling backstory — the working class boy who made it in life — but that hasn’t cut through to voters. They see him, they hear him talk, and they still see the soft, middle-class, socially liberal Southerner that they saw in both Miliband and Corbyn. They see his frontbench, and despite the presence of MPs in Northern constituencies, they don’t think the parliamentary party has changed all that much from the one they turned against.

And there’s the use of the flag. Starmer and his team have identified a stronger national identity in voters they’ve lost, and it’s natural they’d want to respond to that. I’ll come on to why this approach has been proven to fail before, but it looks insincere, and for me, it reminds me of a parent trying to calm down a toddler. “Look, a flag! You like flags, don’t you?”

It’s 50:50 whether it works with toddlers. It’s certainly not going to work with adult voters.

This has been a long time coming

This is perhaps the hardest thing for Labour to face. First past the post has produced monolithic Labour strongholds across the North both at Council and Parliamentary level that appear invincible — until someone seriously challenges them. The longer Labour’s position appears rock solid, the more complacent the party gets and the more their organisation hollows out (this is true of the Tories elsewhere in the country, by the way). All it takes is for another party or group to organise, and Labour can’t respond until it’s too late.

Let’s take an example in a constituency which Labour held — Wigan. Other than freepost leaflets, there was no visible active campaigning by opposition parties, and only a token effort by Labour, who were piling in their local resources to defend Leigh. Labour did no canvassing before the election to find out who their voters were and who was wavering, and they had no tellers outside the polling station on election day to see who had already turned out.

Had they canvassed me, they would have known I had no intention of voting Labour, and if they’d had tellers out they’d have seen me queuing up to vote at 7am. They wouldn’t have posted a Get Out The Vote card through my door to encourage me to get to the polling station (to vote for someone else), and they certainly wouldn’t have done it two hours after I’d actually voted.

And this is the problem: you can adjust your policies, you can change your image, but if you don’t have experienced campaigners on the ground winning voters over doorstep by doorstep, then all it takes is for someone else to fill that vacuum and you lose. That is what happened in the Red Wall.

Labour hasn’t learned from what happened in Scotland

It’s 2014. Labour has lost touch with its heartlands in the Central Belt of Scotland where the Yes vote was surprisingly high in the Indyref. Speeches by former Leader Johann Lamont deriding a “something for nothing” culture and campaigning closely alongside the Tories have driven the left, and traditional Labour voters straight into the arms of Yes and the SNP. When Lamont resigns, Jim Murphy is elected Leader and immediately gives the party a facelift.

A Saltire appears at the top of the Scottish Labour website. The party rebrands itself as a “patriotic, socialist party”, and Murphy goes for runs wearing a replica Scotland kit, on a route that just happens to take him past Glasgow’s TV studios. After all, so many of their voters switched to Yes, so this will keep them onside for the May 2015 General Election, won’t it?

It didn’t. Labour went into that election defending 41 seats. They came out with just one.

The strategy Starmer is embarking on has been proven to fail. Repeating the mistakes Jim Murphy made in Scotland risks repeating the result in England — certainly in the North.

What would work?

The contention among Labour activists that it’s too early to start putting forward serious policies is probably fair: the popular ones would get co-opted by the Tories, who are in a position to implement them today, and the others would get ripped apart by the press from now until the General Election.

Building up Starmer’s backstory might work. At least challenging the Tories on their top policies might work better. And recovering the ground lost on the liberal left would at least stem the flow of voters from Labour to the Greens.

Strangely, despite the Northern Strategy: Labour’s vote is increasing in the South, expecially outside London. In fact, the YouGov poll saw the swing to Labour increase in the South when compared against the poll they ran last week. A serious push to get those voters back before it’s too late would put a few more seats in the South in play; it might even help them retain some Northern seats where the Green vote could make the difference between Labour and the Tories winning; and it would certainly turn around the backward momentum that appears to be setting in.

But Starmer has to act quickly.