Back in late-2014, I suggested that the popularity of the Greens was bad news for Labour because it indicated a conservative turn in politics, even if the immediate effect in the forthcoming general election would be to siphon off votes from the Liberal Democrats after their disastrous period of office in coalition with the Tories. And so it proved. The Greens won almost 1.2 million votes (3.8%) in 2015, a quadrupling of their otherwise decent 2010 showing of 286 thousand (1.0%) and a greater quantum increase than that recorded by the Conservatives (600 thousand). This fell back in 2017 to just over half a million votes (1.6%), showing how much Corbyn succeeded in attracting their more progressive supporters (and probably the younger cohort in particular), but then jumped up again in 2019 to 836 thousand (2.7%). While it was leavers in "Red Wall" seats who largely monopolised the media's attention, with a minor walk-on roll for centrist "spoilers" in constituencies like Kensington, there is no doubt that the Greens now have the potential to split the anti-Tory vote in consituencies nationwide.
As Phil Burton-Cartledge noted this week, in the context of Keir Starmer's alienation of the left, "Labour does not stand to lose some core support in the big cities as per the calculations in LOTO, what's at risk is its core support everywhere. Which is why the Greens' performance at the 2015 election is instructive. It did not capture huge votes in the big cities, but did do (relatively) well with a thousand votes here, a thousand votes there right across the country". In contrast, while Stephen Bush anticipates that the Greens might squeeze the Liberal Democrats into fourth place, he is not concerned about the potential threat: "Labour will probably be able to use the brutal reality of the electoral system as a pretty effective cudgel at a general election to get the Green vote down to its core where they need to". This strikes me as dangerously complacent, particularly when you consider Labour's performance in Scotland between 2010 and 2015, and also its brief rally in 2017 before crashing again in 2019. There's clearly a tipping-point in general elections (as the Conservatives also found in Scotland in 1997), even if it is often localised.
In theory, Labour has litle to fear from the Greens because their vote isn't concentrated geographically in the way that the SNP's is, and nor do they appeal to a decisive subset of the party's traditional supporters in specific locales, as the Tories now do in the so-called Red Wall seats. But this is to ignore that their national diffusion means that a strong showing by the Greens could serve to stymie Labour's advances in precisely those same seats because of their marginal nature. This isn't simply a case of the protest vote moving from the Liberal Democrats to the Greens. The former will retain a core of supporters and will still offer an electoral home for the comfortable middle classes whose sense of self depends on being anti-Tory while believing that the coalition was generally on the right track. The latter will increasingly appeal to leftists dismayed by Labour's rightwards turn (the same bloc that boosted the Greens in first 2010 and then 2015). In other words, it's the combination of the Greens and the Liberal Democrats that poses a potentially greater threat to Labour's ability to win back these seats because it offers a broader alternative. Which comes third and which fourth is a minor consideration.
It would be a mistake to assume (as I suspect Bush does to a degree) that Labour-Tory marginals in the North and Midlands are stereotypically ageing and socially conservative. Many, like Bishop Auckland, have substantial middle-class populations and while some have seen many of their youth depart, we shouldn't assume that the environmentally-conscious vote is confined to the young. The Greens exhibit a contradictory ideological mix among their supporters, reflecting their social diversity, with virtue-signalling often being the pragmatic glue that holds them together. The traditional core of the party is a mix of anti-state libertarians, with an emphasis on alternative lifestyles and post-60s ecological angst, and small-state, bucolic conservatives with a tendency towards the misanthropic. But around this core is an outer layer that can accommodate various strains of more worldly progressive, from liberal to communist, many of whom see the state as the only realistic lever for environmental change. Though unstable, this party ecology allows for rapid expansions and contractions in their vote, as the last decade showed.
The Liberal Democrats' popularity during the 2000s was largely down to Labour alienating progressive voters over Iraq and civil liberties, not because of a popular interest in the Orange Book or a burgeoning desire for electoral reform (as the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum proved). With the party eviscerated in 2015 and 2017, and its efforts to monopolise the remainer vote in 2019 successful only in drawing off Labour voters in seats it couldn't win (Kensington, again), it now faces the possibility of political irrelevance as Labour very publicly shifts towards the political centre, albeit in a manner that suggests the party right's historic disregard for natural justice and support for conservative foreign policy has not been ameliorated by electing a "human rights lawyer" as leader. Those civil libertarians and internationalists put off during the first decade of this century may once more be looking for a new electoral home, but it seems that they are increasingly looking towards the Greens rather than the Liberal Democrats.
Though we saw a return to two-party politics in the 2017 and 2019 elections, the ongoing collapse of the Liberal Democrats and corresponding rise of the Greens actually offers a broader alternative for voters disenchanted with both main parties, albeit one that is likely to produce even fewer MPs due to the first-past-the-post system. As ever, calls for electoral reform can be taken as a proxy for that disenchantment. Such calls may become deafening if the next general election produces a nightmare scenario for Labour: modest gains in target demographics that are more than offset by widespread losses elsewhere leading to the party actually losing even more marginals, resulting in the sort of landslide not seen since 1931 when Labour won 30% of the vote but was rewarded with only 52 seats because its vote was so diffuse. To put this in perspective, Labour won 232 seats on a 30% vote share in 2015 but that outcome was dependent on both holding the Red Wall marginals (it won only 202 seats on a 32% share in 2019) and its actual heartlands in the big cities.
That scenario might seem unlikely today when Labour is polling at around 38% nationally, but it's worth bearing two factors in mind. First, the complacent belief that Labour can afford to lose progressive votes in the cities can encourage those voters to switch, partly in irritation at that complacency and partly in the belief that a protest vote won't let the Tories in. Second, the expectation of a national loss can motivate some people to switch their vote to a protest party on the grounds that it would be less "wasted" by being expressive. This shift in attitude can easily develop a momentum of its own in an era of social media. In other words, there is a tipping-point. If Labour's national polling share drops back to under 35%, while the Tories remain at or above 40%, we may see the emergence of a popular belief that the Conservatives are bound to win the next general election and that there is no point treating Labour as the vehicle for an anti-Tory alliance (that the loudest voices arguing against this pessimism will be those who were calling for a government of national unity in 2019 premised on Jeremy Corbyn being defenestrated won't be the least of the ironies).
Labour's strategic mistake under Starmer may prove to be chasing their old (in both senses) demographic to the exclusion of all else. The complacency about cities also extends to the collapse of the Liberal Democrats. There is an assumption that this has freed-up a centrist voting bloc, which is currently keeping Labour in the high-30s in the polls. This ignores the many former Lib Dem voters who opted for the Tories in 2015 and after (which is why the Tories are at 40%) as well as the progressives who were attracted to the third party because it seemed more left (sic) than Labour in 2010. In neglecting its newer demographics, particularly the progressively-inclined young and the socially-conscious of all ages who find flags an irrelevance, Labour is risking its vote not just in the cities but nationwide. The Greens' core vote in Red Wall seats is small but their prospective vote could be decisive in marginal contests both there and in other parts of the country. Labour's anti-left strategy may work in attracting some in a subset of constituencies that voted Conservative in 2019, but it could equally drive away more of those who boosted the vote in 2017 right across the country. If the May council elections go ahead, the most interesting result might be the progress of the Greens.
No comments:
Post a Comment