Fungible Voters

Helen Pidd's now-notorious vox-pop in Wednesday's Guardian, in which she sought to assess the response of Leigh - "a 'red wall' constituency in Wigan, Greater Manchester, which had just gone Conservative for the first time in more than 100 years" - to the stimulus package announced by the Chancellor this week, has provided a couple of days of fun. Critics have deconstructed the piece itself, noting both how unrepresentative it was of the electorate (there are still plenty of Labour voters there) and how inaccurate and bigoted some of the individual opinions were. In an attempt to justify her work, Pidd added fuel to the fire by claiming, in so many words, that a pizza restaurant owner is working class and that Labour needs to listen to racists. I would dismiss this out of hand as simply lazy, pseudo-reporting, presumably commissioned to provide grist for some commentator's mill about "what Labour must do now" (my money's on John Harris), but there is a serious point buried underneath the dross.

In responding to criticism on Twitter, Pidd said: "Reporting involves... reporting what people say. If you want to understand why Labour lost places like Leigh, listening to what their ex voters say is important, whether or not you (or indeed I) agree with their views". The trouble with this take is that the piece was clearly not a sociological enquiry but another attempt to push a favoured narrative, as was made all too clear by the headline: "Imagine the state we’d be in if Corbyn had been in charge': the view from the 'red wall'". This reinforces the claim that the reason Labour lost the last general election was the offensiveness of its then leader, yet all the subsequent polls and analyses (carried out with a lot more rigour than Pidd's vox-pop) have shown that Brexit was the predominant issue and that antipathy to Corbyn on the doorstep often required prompting while for many his caricature as the terrorist's friend was merely a post-hoc justification for changing lifelong voting habits. Pidd may claim that she doesn't write the headlines, but as the Guardian's Northern Editor I doubt she is kept in the dark about them until publication either.

What caught my attention is the idea that political parties must privilege their ex-voters when "listening" after defeat. This is dubious advice. An election loss is just as likely to have been due to a failure to attract new voters as a failure to hold onto old ones. One thing that has come across in the various post-mortems of Labour's 2019 campaign is that the party pursued an ambitious strategy, focusing resources on Tory marginals that it thought it could win. This was criticised after the fact because the party leadership didn't realise how vulnerable its existing seats were, particularly in the Midlands and North of England. However, many of those critics were the same people who built a career taking those very same seats for granted after 1997, despite the clear warning sign of waning affection (a point the Labour Together report was honest enough to admit). That Labour lost heavily does not mean that it was wrong to campaign to win more seats, or that its manifesto was "unrealistic" in being hopeful and visionary. After all, a more cautious approach (the notorious "35% strategy") and a comically timid manifesto tanked in 2015, while optimism put wind in the sails in 2017.

Last December, the Tories were the party who best captured the optimism (however misplaced) of the electorate, with the promise that Brexit would cut the Gordian knot of decades of dissatisfaction over regional imbalances and fraying public services. The electorate is steadily changing, both in composition and in attitudes, so the job of parties is, in large part, to project where they think the electorate wants to go, not simply where they've been. The pivotal elections of recent British history, such as 1945, 1964, 1979 and 1997, were all about envisioning a future that a new electoral coalition could coalesce around. This point is well understood by liberals when it serves their interests, hence the FBPE trope that as leavers die off the country will inexorably shift towards remain. But that morbid calculation ignores that if attitudes correlate with age, remainers are steadily converting to leavers at some inflexion point on the gradient. This thought is suppressed because it offends the linked ideas that liberal values are the product of reason and that they are historically posterior to conservatives values.

Despite the media impression of loyal blocs and a pivotal floating vote in the middle of the spectrum, the truth is that voters are much more dynamic and promiscuous. One example of this is the many voters who claim to have always voted for party X who turn out to have voted for other parties or to have abstained in the past. This isn't poor memory or "shyness". It's just coherence in action: the self-delusion that we have always been consistent in our attitudes. A good example of this is the recent claim by some that they couldn't vote for Labour while Corbyn was in charge - i.e. they were prevented from being consistent by forces beyond their control - when in reality many just wanted to "get Brexit done" and were prepared to vote Tory to do so. A more narrow example is the many Jews who claimed they couldn't vote Labour in 2019 because of antisemitism under Corbyn's leadership, which ignored that the Jewish vote switched decisively to the Conservatives during the 2010-15 period when Ed Miliband was leader. If you're voting Tory for the third time in a row, you are no longer an ex-Labour voter in any meaningful sense.

Voters are fungible. A vote gained counts as much as a vote lost. This tends to be obscured in the analysis of net vote shifts in elections, though pollsters and psephologists are now paying more attention to the currents beneath the surface. What was clear in December last year is that Labour lost voters equally in all directions: to the Tories, to the Liberal Democrats and Greens, and to the SNP and Plaid Cymru. The injunction that the party should listen to voters who deserted it loses some of its force when you consider that they aren't about to speak with one voice. The Guardian's focus on the 'Red Wall' is a selective interpretation of Labour's challenge, and one that pretty obviously seeks to privilege an anti-left vocabulary in order to coax the party back to the centre. To this end, a small business owner and a racist retiree can be presented as "authentic" Labour voices. It doesn't matter that their claims are untrue ("The government has basically invested in us", "Whole sections of Leigh that are colonised with new entrants") so long as they are willing to support the narrative that Labour must change.

A bias towards retaining existing voters is by definition conservative, but it is also pessimistic in that it believes opinions are fixed and the possibility of persuasion is limited (this is partly liberal condescension: I am capable of reason and can change my mind; you are set in your ways and cleave to your tribe). This advice is ironic coming from the Guardian, given that newspaper's steady insistence from the late-70s onwards that Labour needed to stop listening to its "traditional" voters, particularly trade unionists in the North of England, and try to attract the "younger", emergent classes of professionals and aspirational skilled workers in the South and the Midlands. This first produced an attempt to supersede Labour in the form of the SDP, and then the successful attempt to colonise the party and overthrow its old "class war" politics and proletarian culture in the form of New Labour. At every stage there was an emphasis on radical departure and optimism ("Things can only get better").

Pidd's contribution won't even merit a footnote in the future histories of the Labour party, but the question of whether it should seek to win back its lost voters or try and build a future coalition will be central to any understanding of the early years of this decade. So far, the signs are that the Starmer leadership is leaning more towards the former than the latter, though this may be based on a strategy of consolidation ahead of the bold economic platform that we have been promised. A more pessimistic take is that the current manoeuvres to attract conservative voters will inevitably slide back into the groove of the cautious fiscal management and punitive social sanctions of late-period New Labour. In its desire to marginalise the left and encourage Starmer's retreat to the centre, the Guardian risks squeezing out progressive voices in favour of reactionary tropes and a waspish intolerance of the "woke". But perhaps this isn't seen as a problem. The irony is that the paper long ago stopped worrying about retaining old readers as it surveyed the opportunity of a more internationalised, online audience.