Caught beneath a landslide: can Labour win (again)?
The uncertainty and unevenness of economic growth means Labour may need to embrace retail politics, if it wants to replenish its base to win a second term in office
I started to write this piece two days after the Labour Party had won a landslide victory… somehow it doesn’t quite feel like the right time to be worrying about the next election! But it is a political reality that the 2029 election campaign has already begun, because next time Labour is going to be judged on its record as an incumbent government.
The narrative that Labour’s support is ‘shallow’, with a remarkably low vote share delivering an historic win only because of the anomalous nature of First Past the Post and/or the impact of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on the Tory vote, has begun to take hold. But are these circumstances really so worrisome? This narrative needs to be corrected or at least contextualised.
Labour needs at least two terms to transform the UK. The party can obviously win again with the same commitment to an ‘efficient’ electoral strategy. But it is just as obvious that the voters will be asking different questions of Labour at the next election, focused on its record in office, particularly on the economy. The 34% Labour relied upon in 2024 might not be available in 2028 or 2029.
Even if Labour succeeded in its economic plans, growth is never uniform. The policies Labour needs to improve the UK’s economic performance will have uneven distributional consequences across the electorate. There will be losers among the 34% who voted for Labour, and indeed among the 66% – and the latter may prove more amenable to efficient electoral strategies by Labour’s opponents next time. In this article, I wonder out loud what Labour might need to do about it.
Brexit poll
The notion that Labour’s vote share reflects poorly on the party’s popularity, compared to its near-success under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, is, at best, highly simplistic. The 2017 and 2019 general elections took place in the shadow of the 2016 referendum. Despite the ambivalence of both main party leaders, Labour’s 40% vote share was largely a product of the mobilisation of remainers, and the Conservative Party’s 42% vote share resulted from the mobilisation of leavers.
This is not to suggest that Corbyn’s anti-austerity message made no difference, but it was not a decisive factor, especially given that Theresa May’s platform also signalled a move away from neoliberalism. If Corbyn had been clearer in his opposition to Brexit, the election – or at least the popular vote – might even have been won, because the 10% vote share won by the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party (SNP) would have been up for grabs.
By 2019, with May and then Boris Johnson having moved the Conservatives towards the centre ground, remain had become an albatross around Labour’s neck. A majority of voters in most parts of the country wanted Brexit to be ‘done’. But a significant minority had hardened their position against Brexit, leaving no option for Labour other than to lean into calls for a second referendum. The geographical concentration of these voters in areas Labour already held magnified electoral difficulties. Despite the sneering of some on the Labour right, the attempt to disrupt a Brexit-centred discourse and appeal to working-class voters with an ambitious social democratic programme – with more meticulous costings than any Labour manifesto had offered before (or since) – was based on a sound calculation of the constraints and opportunities facing Labour at the time. But it was never going to be enough to turn the tide.
Corbyn himself – with his image distilled by a hostile media – had also become a drag on the party’s vote as the electorate became familiar with the Labour leader. Corbyn never made a concerted effort to change people’s minds in this regard. Keir Starmer was taking notes.
Ironically, the 2019 strategy owed a great deal to Starmer. The political instincts that led Starmer to position Labour to defend against an electoral wipeout five years ago are the same as those that led him to reverse Labour’s opposition to hard Brexit as soon as he became leader. The landslide win would not have been possible if he had not done so. Johnson’s conduct as Prime Minister and the impact of Brexit on the economy and living standards (exacerbated by COVID-19’s impact on public services and global production networks) meant, under Starmer, Labour repositioned itself as little other than an anti-Tory vehicle.
Brexit’s negative economic impact created the space for this strategy to succeed – but acknowledging this truth would have meant undermining the core message. The Conservative Party is almost entirely to blame for the form Brexit has taken. But nuance is too easily misinterpreted in UK politics. Labour understood that voters needed to see the problem as the ruling party itself, not necessarily the things that the government had done. The Conservatives are too good at disowning their mistakes, no matter how monumental. But it is harder to disown themselves. (We should of course also recognise the less favourable fiscal environment as a constraint on Labour’s policy activism since the pandemic.)
In another irony, it was the success of this repositioning, rather than its flaws, which led Labour to under-perform in terms of vote share in 2024. A simple anti-Tory message helped Labour to gain support before the election, while focusing all dissatisfaction on the governing party. But it also meant that people were encouraged to vote tactically at the election itself, distorted by First Past the Post. Labour’s vote was, accordingly, held back significantly in Conservative/Lib Dem marginals (at the same time, Labour also benefited from tactical anti-Tory voting in Scotland, but with a smaller number of votes at stake).
Reform UK’s ability to mobilise likely non-voters as well as the Tory right also put an artificial dent in Labour’s vote share. These were not voters who were ever going to support Labour anyway. Alongside Lib Dem voters, Reform UK supporters helped to take the shine off Labour’s win in terms of the popular vote, while fortifying Labour’s parliamentary majority. In other words: a very small price to pay for Labour.
Shallow end
It is not entirely erroneous to describe the 2024 Labour vote as shallow. It is evident that, for many voters, the opportunity to vote against the Conservatives was at least as important as the opportunity to vote for Labour. There is limited evidence that voters had bought into Labour’s retail offer (but that might be because they did not make a substantive retail offer). And support for Labour was fickle enough to ebb away when it was clear that victory had been all-but-secured, especially when campaigning resources were rerouted to seats with ever-larger Conservative majorities.
It is reasonable to argue that Labour receiving fewer votes than it has previously in seats it already held – such as Starmer’s own Holborn constituency – is evidence of a lack of enthusiasm. However, this outcome is mostly a product of Labour effectively closing down its ‘get out the vote’ operations in areas the party was confident of retaining. This backfired in some seats, particularly those where Gaza was a major consideration for voters. But in general it worked exactly as intended. I suspect there is a strong correlation between those commentators pointing to Labour’s declining support in some areas, and those with a limited understanding of how direct contact with voters can influence turnout among all but the most dedicated electors.
The main problem with the shallow argument, however, is that it represents a rather, well, shallow understanding of the political implications of the 2024 result. The insinuation is that support for Labour will begin to dissolve almost automatically.
There are of course major risks to Labour on the horizon. First, we can expect the right to regroup. Rishi Sunak marched the Conservative Party into no man’s land. His successor will either move the party back to the centre, reclaiming some of the support lost to Labour and the Lib Dems in 2024, or strike a deal with the far-right to enable the absorption of Reform UK’s support, one way or another.
Second, the SNP are very unlikely to win only nine seats at the next general election. The surge to 56 seats in the 2015 general election was a reaction to the party’s narrow defeat in the Scottish independence referendum in 2014. But it remained largely intact for the next two elections, before falling victim to the party’s leadership chaos and, as noted above, an anti-Tory tactical vote. Support for independence remains high, and a strong SNP in Westminster is vital to the cause.
The third and most important risk relates to Labour’s ability to reward key electoral segments through meaningful policy change. In contrast to the first and second risks, this is a contingency over which Labour has a significant degree of control; the likelihood of losing votes to the Conservatives and the SNP in 2019 is all the more reason for Labour to focus on replenishing its base.
A demographic breakdown of the 2024 vote is not available at the time of writing, but I would point to three main groups in this regard:
Public sector workers, particularly women, who have experienced a deterioration of their pay and conditions while witnessing first-hand the collapse of public services. The cuts baked into spending plans will clearly need to be reversed simply to stand still. And there will need to be a meaningful offer to public sector workers on working conditions and career development that distinguishes the Labour and Conservative government as employers.
Young people experiencing low paid and precarious employment, as well as high living costs, especially housing. Even if the private sector can be encourage to build more family homes, it won’t feed through to lower prices for all quickly enough, particularly renters. The state will almost certainly need to make more forceful interventions to serve this group’s interests.
The older poor, particularly late boomers; they are victims of the demise of defined benefit pensions provision but not beneficiaries of automatic enrolment. They will experience higher state pension ages but not necessarily higher healthy life expectancy. Labour needs to discover what will make the greatest difference to this overlooked demographic – and one size is unlikely to fit all.
It is not the case that these groups are currently disinclined to support Labour – quite the opposite. But their lives and livelihoods are being shaped by longstanding socio-economic problems that a Labour will not find easy to fix, even if it was determined to do so. Insofar as these groups placed their faith in Labour in 2024, loyalty cannot be taken for granted.
I would point to two additional groups who might be able to contribute to Labour’s next majority – or alternatively constrain it.
The disparate but growing group to Labour’s left, loosely defined, chiefly motivated by foreign policy or climate action. We can probably put hardcore remainers in this category too – a group that will grow in number unless UK economic performance quickly improves. These voters are more willing than ever to challenge Labour, and the growing preponderance of security and environmental crises will mean their concerns will increase in salience.
People wholly or largely dependent on benefit income, especially single parents and/or large families, and people receiving incapacity benefits. It is an inconvenient truth that centre-left parties are rarely motivated to favour these groups, not least because they are much less likely to vote. But they expect more of Labour than they did of the Conservatives, having suffered enormously at the hands of the latter; they could be persuaded to mobilise against the former if their expectations are dashed.
Opposition parties are lucky, in some ways. Incumbent governments don’t have the luxury of efficiently targeting voters with key campaign messages and contact points; they are already part of voters’ everyday lives, and people will have formed a view on the government’s record that cannot be easily overridden. But we can flip this around. The most important thing downplayed by the shallow argument is that Labour now has the opportunity to deliver for the electorate; if it succeeds, it will deepen the esteem in which the party is held.
Growing pains
For the Starmer government, delivering means economic growth. Growth is rightly being prioritised for its own sake: we desperately need to raise living standards, increase economic resilience, and put the public finances on a more sustainable footing. But it is also Labour’s hope that by growing the economy, it can avoid the need for difficult distributional choices. Everybody’s slice of the pie will get bigger, increasing the tax take without increasing tax rates (the ongoing income tax thresholds freeze notwithstanding).
Alas, growth without reform is a distributional choice. The persistence of an accumulation regime dependent on both financial and business services exports, and the retail and hospitality industries dependent on imports and/or a low-paid workforce, is not only no longer a sustainable route to growth, it will not benefit the demographic discussed above in any direct sense.
Labour clearly understands the UK’s existing growth model has reached its zenith, and wants to build upon residual and/or nascent strengths in advanced manufacturing and renewable energy. Liberalising planning in favour of infrastructure projects and establishing Great British Energy to crowd in private sector investors are small but important steps forward in this regard.
It is encouraging to see the new government building upon recent, stuttering moves towards a comprehensive industrial strategy, seeking to scale up public and private investment more generally. On this, Labour has rightly taken inspiration from the Biden administration's economic agenda in the United States. But it perhaps also needs to note two things about the politics of Bidenomics: firstly, most American voters do not currently believe the positive story that the economic data is telling them, and secondly, the first thing won’t actually matter if the benefits of Bidenomics are concentrated among the swing states the Democrats need to hold onto at the next presidential election.
The Labour government doesn’t have the scope to match the economic or political ambitions of the Biden industrial policy agenda. This is partly because, firstly, the UK is already too far behind in the development of some key advanced manufacturing industries, further hampered by the impact of Brexit on trade with EU countries and chronic skills shortages. The UK does not have the luxury of picking and choosing. It is also worth noting that, even if the right kind of growth emerges, future ecological and geopolitical shocks over which the UK has little control are likely to interfere.
And secondly, the narrow scope of Labour’s industrial strategy is due to the limits on public investment created by challenging fiscal circumstances, exacerbated by self-imposed fiscal rules. This has influenced the design of new investment vehicles such as the National Wealth Fund, which will use government guarantees to de-risk infrastructure investments that enable industrial decarbonisation – avoiding up front costs for the public sector, but allowing returns to be captured primarily by private investors.
As it stands, there is no direct route from successful supply-side interventions leading to gains for the electoral segments Labour most needs to appeal to. There are hopes that pension funds can contribute to a private investment boom in a way that benefits their members (i.e. ordinary workers) as well as the economy as a whole, but the myriad barriers to this have yet to be addressed, and at the moment the risks to members probably outweigh the potential rewards.
Starmer’s insistence that Labour will form ‘a government of service to all people, whether they voted for us or not’ is commendable. But it helps to explain Labour’s ostensible focus on economic performance at the aggregate level rather than distributional issues – picking winners among industry but not picking winners among the electorate. Inevitably, however, even if Labour succeeds, there will be losers as well as winners, or at least groups who win a lot less.
There is no such thing as an apolitical economic strategy. And given the uphill struggle Labour will face in trying to achieve its growth mission, there may come a time when some groups will need to be prioritised in service of the party’s re-election campaign. The new government is, at the moment, seeking virtue in its willingness to make ‘tough decisions’ that disappoint its supporters. However, I suspect much tougher decisions are ahead of them, when a government sincerely focused on serving the whole electorate – irrespective of whether Labour has the correct policy programme to achieve this – will need to turn its attention to rewarding its base in service of self-preservation.
This does not mean that voters are unwilling or unable to form views based on ‘the greater good’, looking beyond the immediate impact of policies on themselves, their family, their local community, etc. But nor should we replace cynicism with naivety. Some of the ruthlessness that seemed to characterise Labour’s election campaign will need to be carried through to government.
Ultimately, the Labour government may need to embrace retail politics. It will be interesting to see how long Rachel Reeves’s welcome intent for a more sober approach to fiscal events, with enhanced Office for Budget Responsibility, lasts if the polls tighten over the next five years.
Finding ways to deliver immediate financial benefits to certain groups, without jeopardising long-term policy objectives, is of course easier said than done, especially where significant spending commitments will be necessary and/or new policies would be contested fiercely by the right. But it will be too difficult for the party to hold onto support without tangible initiatives, directly improving living standards or appealing to certain political values, that offer supporters straightforward evidence that Labour is making things better.
Labour learned in 2019 that offering voters a lot of policies they like is not enough to topple an incumbent government that the electorate can see is already delivering some of the things they want. The 2024 campaign, in contrast, was a masterclass in ensuring that a failing government was seen to be failing on its own terms. The next election will be different. Labour will be judged on what it has delivered.
A 34% vote share might be enough again. But it will not be the same 34%, and Labour needs to govern in a way that maintains and replenishes its base. If the right regroups, the bar might be much higher anyway. Prioritising economic growth is understandable; if achieved, it will have a largely progressive impact. But the barriers to a significant and sustainable uptick in economic performance in the UK are considerable. And there will be unevenness regarding beneficiaries in the short-term. At some point, Labour is going to have to offer something other than the greater good to the voters it needs.