Labour Together?

The Labour Together report into the 2019 general election defeat has been spun by the media as support for its preferred narrative, whether that be Corbyn's personal toxicity or that Labour has no chance of recovering by 2024. Both of these are partisan takes, the one focused on the defeat of the left, the other on propping up a Conservative government that has become a byword for incompetence and dishonesty within months of taking office. Predictably, the Guardian's interpretation has been of the first sort. Amusingly, it has gone so far as to foreground the report's point that Labour's vote decline started 20 years ago (under "serial winner" Tony Blair), but it does so in order to dismiss 2017 as an anomaly. There is much emphasis on the "toxic culture" of the party, with the implication of Corbyn's personal responsibility, but without the report's even-handed qualification that: "Our Party has spent substantial periods of the last five years in conflict with itself resulting in significant strategic and operational dysfunction, resulting in a toxic culture and limiting our ability to work effectively. Responsibility for this rests not wholly with one side or part of our movement".

The report makes clear that Brexit was a bigger issue than Corbyn, but the Guardian reverses the priority in its "key points" analysis, giving the opposite impression: "Jeremy Corbyn was deeply unpopular" trumps "A confused Brexit policy". The report baldly states: "The Tories won the 2019 election primarily by consolidating the Leave vote. In contrast, Labour lost support on all sides". There is also a clear difference of interpretation in the analysis of net vote losses. The Guardian makes it sound as if the losses in different directions were equivalent - "Of those who voted Labour in 2017, the party lost 1.9 million remain voters and 1.8 million leave voters in 2019" - but the report is quite clear that it was the loss of leavers that mattered most: "Compared with 2017, in net terms, Labour lost around 1.7 million Leave voters; and around 1 million Remain voters." The difference (explained on page 61) is that the latter was partially offset by people who didn't vote Labour in 2017 but did in 2019. In other words, Labour attracted some remain voters, though typically in already safe seats.

Labour was clearly unprepared for the general election in December 2019, but this cannot be attributed to incompetence or a resting on the laurels of 2017 alone. The party was wracked by internal division and sabotage, culminating in the Change UK defection, and its policy platform was anything but well-established, partly because of the continuing distraction of Brexit and the pressure of the People's Vote campaign. A crucial factor in the December defeat is that the election timing was the worst possible for the party. Leavers had the incentive of formal Brexit within weeks of the result by voting Conservative, while Labour's policy was still not fully settled (let alone persuasive) in the eyes of most voters, and die-hard remainers had the attraction of the Liberal Democrats' kamikaze promise to annul Brexit altogether. Having hitherto blocked an election until there was a guarantee that no-deal was off the table, the EU27's extension of the process to January boxed Corbyn in while the Liberal Democrat and SNP push for an election generated momentum.

One of the key focus group testimonies, highlighted by both the report and the Guardian's summary, is the sole mention of the even older fella with the beard: "Frightened at the possibility of a Marxist government. Disgusted at Corbyn being a terrorist sympathiser. Most disturbed about plan to nationalise BT as I fear it would allow a Labour government to spy on internet users" (page 60). This is described in the report as a "typical" quote, flagged up by "semantic analysis" (explained by an AI waffle footnote). It's a trifecta of ignorance, slurs and conspiracy, but it probably does reflect at least one strand of popular thought. Of course, this is a classic example of someone rationalising their own actions (voting Tory to get Brexit done) by appeal to prejudice. It's disappointing, but not surprising, that neither the report nor the Guardian see fit to interrogate where these beliefs might have sprung from. One reason for this incuriosity is that these claims are bracketed with the popular canard about the party's poor handling of antisemitism complaints, which is taken as beyond dispute. The reality is that the press provided enough propaganda about Corbyn's exceptional unfitness that voters felt that they had "permission" to break their habits and vote Tory, and the Guardian was as complicit in this as the Sun.

The report repeatedly uses the word "entangled" when discussing the combination of antisemitism, Brexit and party disunity in the decline of Labour's popularity between 2017 and 2019, as if these were categorically similar issues, but it is clear that both the behaviour of continuity remain and the attempts to tar the leadership with the charge of connivance in antisemitism were amplified by that party disunity. Both were issues before Corbyn's election as party leader in 2015 - witness the Jewish press's criticism of Ed Miliband and the long history of Labour's divisions over Europe - but it is now obvious that they were "entangled" with the factional desire to defeat the left and wrest back (or maintain) control of the party machinery after 2017. This entanglement narrative also serves to distract from the report's correct emphasis on the secular trends that have affected Labour's vote since the millennium. The loss of the North had been predicted for a long time, due to the party's embrace of neoliberalism and its complacent attitude to its support, and it was obvious that Brexit would be a wedge issue precisely because it gave voice to both concerns over the economic dispensation of the post-Thatcher years and the resentment of metropolitan arrogance. 

The "individual policies good, manifesto bad" paradox is explained in the report as an issue of overall credibility around Labour's ability to deliver and the perceived potential cost to voters. There's an obvious contradiction in this, but it does highlight the failure of the party to counter the routine claims of fiscal incontinence that the Tory press could be expected to indulge in. John McDonnell mastered the role of the avuncular bank manager, but paradoxically his relative caution meant that he wasn't sufficiently persuasive in building a case for fundamental economic and fiscal reform ahead of the manifesto launch. The report's belief that a bold economic programme with added sobriety offers the basis for a winning electoral coalition between the "Red Wall" and the cities suggests that the legacy of McDonnell may be more lasting than that of Corbyn. However, the abrupt change in tone caused by the manifesto goody-bag wasn't the only problem. Labour certainly made a mistake in not focusing on 2 or 3 key pledges that could be easily contrasted with "Get Brexit done", but it was the media that insisted on skating over the substance of its offer in favour of blanket condemnation or reducing it to the caricature of "broadband communism" and nationalised sausages. 

The media is always going to be unsympathetic, so Labour needs both focus and steady preparation. The 1992-97 period is an object lesson in how to do this (even if circumstances provided an open goal and many of the promises were insincere). But what the early days of New Labour also benefited from was a willingness to present a united front, come what may. The key to Labour's failure in 2019 was disunity and the deliberate policy of wrecking that this gave rise to. Paradoxically, its success in 2017 can also be attributed to this. The party right and centre both assumed an election defeat was a foregone conclusion and so did little in the way of active sabotage. Much of the report's analysis of 2019 focuses on poor management, notably in such areas as the online campaign and ground operations, but it is also clear that much of this was due to the lack of cooperation between the factions. The party didn't lose managerial competence over two years, and if we judge it simply by the popular vote share, Corbyn remained a better "manager" in 2019 than Miliband in 2015 or Brown in 2010. 

The report's recommendations are the usual mixture of the bleedin' obvious and managerialist pabulum, suggesting a desire not to tie Keir Starmer's hands, but the comments on the need for unity are largely pious, though they do serve to avoid the need to condemn the unforgivable sabotage. Labour Together has unfortunate echoes of Better Together, and it's hard to avoid the suspicion that this is a work whose intellectual genesis remains the 2010-15 era of policy caution and technocratic centralisation (the involvement of Deborah Mattinson's BritainThinks isn't encouraging). Unity has always been a fetish for Labourites, but it's functional role as a rallying cry is less about papering over the cracks of policy dispute and more about the need to reconstititute the electoral coalition, recognising that the party's support is actually much more fragile and promiscuous than the reassuring myths of "Always Labour" and family inheritance would suggest. The problem is that this report gets no closer to doing this and is still indulging in the language of "tribes" - the old, socially-conservative northerner versus the diverse, metropolitan youth - that ultimately plays into the hands of a Tory party that needs to open new fronts in the culture war as Brexit passes from the stage.