The Labour election broadcast in election week has a simple message: if you voted for Boris in 2019, it’s safe to come over to Labour. This was supported by the beautifully stage-managed defection of Dr Dan Poulter, a former Conservative health minister, to Labour last weekend. It was greeted by the headline in the communist Morning Star newspaper ‘Labour Welcomes Tory Rat’. The Labour strategy is clear, as is the opposition to it.
Under Starmer, we are making a direct appeal to the millions who deserted Labour under Corbyn. We are showing that a changed, modern Labour Party is worthy of their support and trust. We get why they ran a mile at Jeremy Corbyn’s uncosted policies, political extremism, weakness on security and defence, and inability to communicate with the electorate. We are working hard to regain their trust. The Morning Star, and the rest of the constellation of Corbynite media, rejects the idea of switchers from Tory to Labour, preferring to call them rude names instead.
Calling people rude names is the hard left’s stock-in-trade, of course. Like Donald Trump, they love a label. Geroge Orwell pointed out the Marxist penchant for name-calling in his Politics and the English Language: ‘hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard’. Modern incarnations include ‘melt’, ‘slug’, ‘zio’, and my personal favourite ‘Red Tory Scum’.
I’m not wholly convinced that insulting the voters is a viable electoral strategy. Labour tested this proposition to destruction between 2015 and 2019. Winning 14% of the vote in the Euro elections in May 2019 was a harbinger to the catastrophe of December 2019, when Corbyn ‘led’ Labour to the worst defeat since 1935. It is clear that the only way Labour will prosper at the polls – this Thursday and at the General Election a few months later – is to win over people who voted Conservative before.
That means several things. One is total reassurance on defence and security, hence the announcements that Labour would increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, supports the nuclear deterrent, backs Ukraine to the hilt, and rejects the anti-west, anti-NATO rhetoric of ‘Stop the War’ and its component parts. This stretches from our full-throated support for the Western Alliance, to the call for more police on the streets.
Second, is fiscal competence of the kind exemplified by Rachel Reeves and her team. No uncosted spending plans. No eye-watering sums of cash magicked from thin air. No punitive tax rises on people of whom we disapprove. No sense that our economic policies owe anything to Cuba or Venezuela. No hint that a Labour treasury will ‘do a Truss’ on the British economy.
Third, is policies that speak to common sense and the moderate middle ground. Labour is capable of great radicalism in office, but only with public support. On economic and social issues we have to chime with where the public is at: more dentists, fix the potholes, make GPs appointments easier, help with housing, tackle shoplifting. Straightforward things that make life better not worse.
All of which adds up to an appeal to millions who voted for Boris Johnson, but consider the Tories a total pantomime ever since. It’s a huge ask. Even in 1997, of the four million people who had voted for Major in 1992 only one million voted for Labour or Lib Dems. Half a million went to the Referendum Party, and two and a half stayed at home. Tony Blair only persuaded one in four former Tories to switch, but failed to persuade three-quarters of them. And Blair was good at that stuff.
To defeat Ben Houchen and Richard Parker will take a political earthquake. Ben Houchen won 70% of the vote in 2021, for heaven’s sake. To overturn most of Conservative police and crime commissioners in the county constabularies will require Tory abstention and tactical voting on an industrial scale, especially now the Tories have regressed to first-past-the-post for these elections. My sense is that it ain’t happening. In other words, we shouldn’t expect fireworks as the votes are counted over the weekend.
Instead, we should expect steady progress. There will dozens of new Labour councillors, and the deserved return of Sadiq Khan. However, there may even be some reversals of fortune, as the odd independent or populist may pop through the two-party system. The results will show that some switchers have started to switch, but many more will stay at home. Labour’s job in the remaining months of this lamentable Parliament is to keep on keeping on, reassuring the doubters, and motivating those glued to their sofas. Time is short, and the task remains huge.
If you enjoyed this blog, see Paul’s previous piece ‘Be trusted, and be seen to be trusted: Labour and policing‘.
