Rearranging the Deckchairs

Newspapers that were at the forefront of the moral panic over populism and its supposed erosion of democracy have also been at the forefront of the criticism of Boris Johnson as an out-of-touch and amoral elitist, thereby employing a classic populist trope. "One rule for them and another rule for us" is far more of a populist slogan than the Corbyn-era "For the many not the few" (which was actually an example of New Labour pabulum), though it's worth noting that it's arguing for the consistent application of the law, regardless of how bad that law might be, not for the primacy of the interests of the majority. Another paradox of the moment is that the clamour for Boris Johnson to be sacked from his job and shunned by polite society is a textbook example of that rare phenomenon, the cancellation. Of course, he isn't going to disappear from view any more than Kathleen Stock has. Equally ironic is that a man who made his name as a journalist by misrepresenting the EU and judging others harshly has been reduced to insisting that he has been misrepresented and was ignorant of the crimes he has been accused of.

We are in an period of politics in which the substance of policy has been marginalised in favour of personality, and no personality is more artificial and dominant than that of the Prime Minister. Johnson's ascent and decline is a classic morality tale, but he also serves as a common reference against which every other politician can define themselves. Thus "Starmer is the anti-Johnson", an entirely meaningless phrase in terms of policy. The Conservative's general election victory in 2019 owed much to the idea that Johnson was atypical, that he was running against the wider establishment (and not just the stubborn remainers who had thwarted the people's will in Parliament and the courts since 2017). The sight of Christian Wakeford crossing the floor this week will have done little to dissuade voters from thinking of MPs as venal careerists with flexible principles, a view that has been commonplace since the 2009 expenses scandal and which has been reinforced recently (and not just for those on the left) by both the factional behaviour of Starmer's Labour Party and the evolving scandals over the VIP lane for Tory friends and family. The disillusion with Johnson stems from the recognition that he is cut from the same cloth and has no intention of cleaning the Augean stables of Westminster.

What was notable in Wakeford's decision to cross directly over to Labour is that he didn't choose the more ideologically proximate Liberal Democrats. I don't think this suggests that Labour has moved to the right of Ed Davey's merry band. A little discussed feature of the political moment is that all three parties have shifted rightwards over the last two years, despite the talk of a revived social democratic state that the pandemic has given rise to, and despite the evidence that the country had been moving leftwards since 2015 on issues such as inequality, public services and nationalisation. The simpler explanation is that Wakeford reasonably calculates that his chances of remaining an MP, with all the benefits that entails (his Wikipedia entry does rather highlight his interest in remuneration), will improve if he stands as a Labour candidate. That outcome is by no means certain and his defection also carries strategic risks for Labour well beyond Bury South. To understand why, we need to look at the general election results in the constituency.

Between 2017 & 2019 the Tories added only 432 votes to their total, winning by a margin of 402. Labour lost Bury South because its vote dropped by almost a fifth from 27,165 to 22,034, though this was still slightly more than the 21,272 votes that it got in 2015. Since 1997, when the previously marginal seat flipped from blue to red, the Tory vote had been eroded first by the Liberal Democrats up until 2010 and then by UKIP in 2015. Labour's success in 2017 owed a lot to it eroding that UKIP vote through its jobs-first Brexit stance. But many of those voters then turned to the Tories when Labour's commitment to getting Brexit done was called into question by the People's Vote campaign. 2019 saw the Conservative Party maximise its share of the non-Labour vote while Labour was hit by abstentions. The latter's chances of retaking the seat at the next election will depend on both attracting back those who abstained (which may have been about antisemitism as much as Brexit, in a seat with a large Jewish population) and on the Liberal Democrats reviving to erode the Tory share of the anti-Labour vote. The seat was probably in the bag already, but that might not be the case now.

While winning over a careerist Tory MP is not the same as winning over the electorate, it does send a message that centre-right voters will not feel out of place supporting a Starmer-led Labour Party, a message reinforced by Rachel Reeve's most recent paeans to business, fiscal rectitude and the expulsion of anybody suspected of socialism from the Labour Party. The problem, which the psephology of Bury South highlights, is that Labour's real challenge is not winning over the infamous "lifelong Labour voters" who defected to the Tories in 2019 (many of whom probably only voted Labour once, many years ago), but persuading the genuinely regular Labour voters who abstained at the last election because of the party's position on Brexit, or because of doubts about Corbyn, to turn out. For many of them, Labour welcoming an unrepentant Tory MP, who has willingly supported all of the illiberal and anti-working class legislation of this government, is probably a turn-off, and that may offset the positives of the party accepting Brexit.

A small portion of the anti-Labour vote in 2019 went to the former Labour MP, Ivan Lewis, who stood as an independent. He had been suspended by the party in late-2017 after sexual misconduct allegations and then resigned a year later citing his somewhat convenient concerns over antisemitism (the misconduct allegation then being voided). After first registering as a candidate, he then backed out of the 2019 contest, concerned that he might split the anti-Labour vote, but did so too late to have his name removed from the ballot. It's impossible to know how the 1,366 votes in his favour might have affected the result had his name been absent, but his willingness during the election campaign to publicly urge a vote for the Tories to keep Corbyn out of Downing Street suggests an ironic continuity in treachery and self-interest between Bury South's recent MPs. The point is not that Lewis's intervention was decisive in 2019 but that he gave the electors of Bury South another reason to believe that who they vote for is irrelevant: the same bastards get in regardless of party affiliation. 

There is a fundamental divide in political science between those who see changes in vote shares as the product of mobilisation and/or demotivation on the one hand, and those who see it in terms of public choice theory - i.e. retail politics in the frame of economic utility - on the other. This is obviously an ideologically charged division, but it also reflects a divide over political strategy that is as much about the strengths and weaknesses of the party infrastructure as it is about ideological preferences. For example, whether you've got the ground troops to mobilise lukewarm supporters or whether a reliance on focus groups leads you to target specific demographics with tailored offers. The question for Labour is whether it should be looking to a combined strategy that seeks to mobilise its own supporters and demotivate Conservative voters (i.e. prompt their abstention), or whether it should be looking to make a more persuasive offer to those who voted Conservative in 2019 (e.g. "swing" them over by appeals to patriotism and responsible spending). As things stand, Labour appears to be committed to the latter, but how does that sit with the recruitment of a sitting Tory MP?

Some people have interpreted the Wakeford defection as another tactical blunder by Keir Starmer, not least because it has stymied the Tory rebellion against Johnson and turned an issue of personal probity into a partisan contest, but I think it was probably the only realistic option given Starmer's electoral strategy. Labour has clearly been cultivating Wakeford for some time, so there is no reason to believe this was a spur of the moment decision. He wasn't going to cross the floor unless he was assured of a welcome and, presumably, a guarantee that he will be the parliamentary candidate at the next election. What Starmer didn't want was for Wakeford to sit as an independent. While this would have kept the focus on Johnson and might have encouraged more Conservative backbenchers to resign the whip, it could quickly have escalated into the demand for a new centre-right party formation along the lines of Change UK (Anna Soubry would have been all over the media). As Starmer is clearly aiming to colonise that same territory, this would have been self-defeating. Far better to absorb Wakeford into the Labour fold, even if it does let Johnson off the hook for now. 

The strategic risk for Labour is that the Wakeford defection doesn't just wind-up the left, which for many in the party leadership is a positive, but also demotivates those more ideologically diverse Labour supporters who sat out 2019. At some point, Labour needs to meaningfully distinguish itself from the Tories. That means adopting policies that Christian Wakeford would in the past have dismissed as madness. Either he is on an intellectual journey that will see him repudiate at least some of his past beliefs, or he has been assured that Labour actually overlaps significantly with the bulk of the parliamentary Conservative Party and isn't going to frighten the horses. His claim that he was elected "as a moderate and a centrist" suggests the latter. This is not only demotivating for left-leaning voters who want Labour to stand for something more inspirational than "Under new management". It won't energise those congenital Labour supporters who genuinely would never consider voting for a Tory. And, perhaps most damaging in the long term, it reinforces popular cynicism about electoral politics.