What went wrong and where do we go now?

Labour’s defeat in the December 2019 general election was not just a numerical calamity. Pundits rightly characterised this election as one posing fundamental choices for the years ahead. A Johnson victory makes Brexit unstoppable, removing the issue from electoral debate for potentially a generation, while at the same time taking Britain into a world of environmental and workplace deregulation and further privatisation, while doing nothing in the face of the escalating climate emergency. Labour’s defeat brings down the most socialist leadership the Party has ever had, with the potential prospect of a slow retreat from the indispensable solutions to the many problems the country faces. Where do we go from here?

The immediate task is to understand what happened and why.

What happened

The Conservative Party now has an absolute majority of seats in the House of Commons - 365 out of 650. Labour has been reduced to 202 MPs. Labour lost 42 seats, 37 of them in areas where a majority of people voted to leave the European Union in 2016.  It gained one, Putney in London. Labour lost most heavily in the former industrial towns of the north and midlands of England, plus 6 out of our 7 seats in Scotland.

In terms of seats this is the worst result for Labour since 1935.  

In terms of votes, the story is more complex. Labour’s 32% share was actually the Party’s second best result out of the last five general elections. Labour won 10.3 million votes, compared to 9.5 million in 2005, when Blair was re-elected with a sizeable majority; 8.6 million in 2010, when Gordon Brown lost his overall majority to a hung Parliament; 9.35 million in 2015, when Ed Miliband led the Party to defeat. In votes, this result was second only to the Corbyn-led Labour Party’s score of 12.9 million in 2017.

In 2019 the Tories gained 329,767 votes compared to 2017. Labour was down by 2,582,011 votes. Where did they go? The Liberal Democrats gained 1,324,562 votes, and the Greens 340,032 votes. In the north, the Brexit Party made gains at Labour’s expense, in Scotland, the SNP benefited. Abstention was also a significant factor.

Official turnout nationally was 67%. But across the country, it varied significantly. Barbara Humprhies explains: “In an area with many young people such as Hove it was 75%. In Leeds North East, also a student community it was 71.5%. In Doncaster North however turnout was 56.2%,  with a 13.7% swing to the Tories, in Hull East 49% with a 12.3% swing, Hull North 52.2% with a 8.1% swing and Leicester West 53.6% with a 8.7% swing.”

Swings too were uneven: “In Leave voting constituencies the swing was anything from 8-13%. In Remain areas such as London the swing was often less than 1%.  In some constituencies there was even a small swing from Tory to Labour - for example in Enfield, Reading East and Putney.”

The latter were blips, however. The bigger picture is that the swing in this election was almost entirely away from Labour. In small-town England it went towards the Tories and elsewhere, by a larger amount, it went to the Lib Dems, SNP and Greens. Paul Mason points out that the polling analyst firm Datapraxis calculated that a maximum of 800,000 Labour voters switched to the Tories, while the Lib Dems gained at least 1.1 million votes from Labour, the Greens 339,000 and the SNP a quarter of a million. “Labour, in short, lost nearly twice as many votes to progressive pro-Remain parties as it did to the parties of Brexit and racism.”

Age, as well as geography, was also salient in this election. The pollster YouGov reckoned that 56% of voters aged 18 to 24 voted Labour and although the Labour vote declined the older the voter was, it was only among the over 60s that the Conservatives had a clear majority. Barbara Humphries concludes: “This intergenerational political dividing line has been played out in divisions on Brexit and much more, influencing priorities on housing and education for example. It explains the difference in politics between large cities and small towns. We can avoid the rhetoric about the so-called ‘metropolitan elite’. There are plenty of people in poverty in Hackney, Tottenham and even cathedral cities such as Canterbury. The difference between them and those in the ‘left-behind’ areas is hope versus despair.”

Why Labour lost

“Within minutes of Thursday’s exit poll predicting Labour’s routing, two explanations were ready to go,” observed James McAsh. “The first is that Labour is too left-wing. The second is that the pledge for a second referendum lost it. There may be some truth in both, but neither can explain the result. We need an explanation that makes sense of the steady decline of the Labour vote over the past decade, and the similar pattern in other countries across Europe and the Americas. They have appeal nonetheless. Why? Because they are comforting. Both explanations, in their own way, offer false hope. To the Labour right, the first suggests that if they regain control of the party the problems are solved. For the Labour left, the second reassures us that once Brexit is over the party can run a similar campaign with no referendum, and then win. Neither seems likely.”

International contexts, media and the crisis of democratic socialism

The international context for this election is especially important. The election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016 has given a licence to rightwing populism globally and Trump’s personal endorsement of Johnson and denunciation of Corbyn was unprecedented. George Monbiot noted in The Guardian: “You can blame Jeremy Corbyn for Boris Johnson, and Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump..But when the same thing happens in many nations, it’s time to recognise the pattern, and see that heaping blame on particular people and parties fixes nothing.... Something has changed: not just in the UK and the US, but in many parts of the world. A new politics, funded by oligarchs, built on sophisticated cheating and provocative lies, using dark ads and conspiracy theories on social media, has perfected the art of persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich. We must understand what we are facing, and the new strategies required to resist it.”

Of course, media hostility is nothing new and any political project that challenges the power of the elites must expect the mouthpieces of those elites to defend their interests vigorously. That said, the bombardment that Labour faced this time was on an unprecedented scale. Hostility towards the Party in British newspapers during the  campaign was more than twice as bad as it was in 2017, Huffington Post reported: “According to researchers at Loughborough University who analysed stories in 11 leading UK newspapers – including The Sun, The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Mirror – Labour accumulated very high levels of negative coverage during every week of the campaign. This peaked during the last few days before the polls opened.”

The Loughborough University survey assessed news stories on television and in the print media during the election campaign. “Each story with positive implications for a leading party came with a +1 score for that party; each story with a negative implication came with a -1 score for that party,” reported one blog. “When weighted by circulation the survey results found consistently that in the first three weeks Labour scored negatively between 60 and 80 million, whilst the Conservatives scored positively between 15 and 30 million. That is a colossal media bias favouring the Conservatives in television and print media coverage.”

As regards social media, research by independent non-profit organisation First Draft showed that 88% of the sponsored Conservative adverts injected into millions of people's Facebook feeds were demonstrable lies, mainly about the cost of Labour's policies, in particular the suggestion that everyone's tax bill would jump by £2,400, despite Labour's costed pledge not to increase Income Tax for anyone earning below £80,000. The research could not find any misleading claims by Labour adverts. Ironically, this finding was mis-reported by the statutorily independent BBC, under the headline ‘General election 2019: Ads are ‘indecent, dishonest and untruthful’, making no distinction between the parties.

This corresponds with other evidence underlining the disproportionate amount of disinformation circulated by the right online and through social media. The Loughborough University survey revealed that those who identify as being on the right are three times more likely to admit to having ‘engaged in intentional disinformation when sharing news’ than those on the left.

Little noticed in the mainstream media was the illegal propaganda campaign run in many marginal constituencies on election day itself, as thousands of posters of Jeremy Corbyn, with the headline ‘Would you trust this man with your children?’ mysteriously appeared, cable-tied to lamp posts across the country.

The scale of media disinformation locates the 2019 election in one international context. There is another: most west European democratic socialist parties are in existential crisis. In 2017, the German SPD, once the jewel of European democratic socialism got its lowest vote since the Second World War - just 20%. In 2018, the Italian Democratic Party, the inheritor of the once mighty Communist Party, polled just 19% of the vote after leading a coalition that foisted austerity measures on its core voters.

The Netherlands’ Labour Party, which produced several of the country’s post-war prime ministers, is a broken shell. After five years alongside the conservatives in an austerity coalition which it promised not to join, Labour got its worst showing ever in the 2017 general election, reduced from 29 to nine seats, making it the seventh largest grouping in Parliament. In France, 2017’s legislative elections saw the Socialist Party reduced to 6% of the vote and just 29 seats. Ireland’s Labour Party, formerly the junior party in coalition government with Fine Gael after getting its best ever showing of 37 seats in 2011, fell to just seven deputies in 2016’s general election, its lowest-ever share in the Dáil.

This is not coincidence. Only two west European democratic socialist parties seemed to buck this trend. One was the Portuguese Socialist Party, which four years ago embarked on an anti-austerity programme, which within the year halved the budget deficit and created sustained economic growth and falling unemployment. The other was Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party which from the outset also rejected austerity and sought to recommit Labour to its core principles, trebling the Party’s membership in the process.

The decline of democratic socialism in western Europe is linked to two processes. From the 1990s on, many of these parties embraced the free market and the rampant individualism that underpinned it. Social solidarity, the guiding principle of the welfare state, was abandoned in favour of workfare targeted at an ‘underclass‘,  created by preceding waves of attacks on the working class. Commitments to social equality were reduced to equal opportunities. Even in the boom years, New Labour failed to eradicate child poverty. The economic crash, a priceless opportunity to demonstrate the perils of unfettered capitalism, found all these parties ideologically bankrupt. Only those that re-committed to redistribution and social equality stood any hope of success.

Class dealignment

But a long-term objective process had also allowed the shift away from class politics. De-industrialisation, from Thatcher on, paved the way in Britain for the erosion of the link between Labour and the smaller industrial towns of the north.

“The decisive blow for Labour in this election was dealt in constituencies across the north of England which in many cases had reliably returned Labour MPs for decades,” observes Craig Gent. “But let’s stop calling them ‘traditional working class’ towns, as if other more multi-ethnic towns and cities don’t rely on heavy industry or manufacturing jobs…The bulk of these towns constitute what should be more appropriately termed England’s mining belt. .. New Labour built an electoral strategy upon the assumption that voters there, as in other former industrial hubs across the UK, had ‘nowhere else to go’. This strategy was, of course, temporarily successful, but it stitched into the fabric of New Labour’s approach the logic that the mining belt would no longer be an actual organising base, but instead kept sweet by the drip of trickle-down social democracy.”

Barbara Humphries agrees. As the mills, mines and potteries closed, “No longer could a unionised workforce guarantee the sustaining of a community which would always vote Labour. At one time the Durham Miners Association could be relied on to get out the Labour vote. MPs did not even have to campaign. The unions provided political education, an antidote to balance the bias of the pro-Tory mass media.  Now there are no working miners in the entire county of Durham, and constituencies such as Bishop Auckland and Sedgefield have the look of a rural area, with small pockets of retired miners. So the Labour vote in these areas was on the decline before Brexit. It was the result of de-industrialisation, but aggravated by the way that many Labour politicians had taken their votes for granted.”

She adds: “Between 1997, a time of hope, and 2015 nationally over 4 million votes were lost to Labour. Take the case of Sedgefield. It was won by Tony Blair in 1997 with 33,536 votes (71.2%). By the 2005 election the Labour vote had fallen to 24,421 (58.9%). With a new candidate in place, (a Blair aide) it fell again in 2010 to 18,141 (45.1%). However, in 2017 the Labour vote increased to 22,202 (53.4%), in an election campaign led by Jeremy Corbyn!”

In 2019, Sedgefield fell to the Tories, as did Dennis Skinner’s seat of Bolsover. Skinner had held the seat for 49 years, but his share of the vote had been in more or less continuous decline at successive general elections, from 74% in 1997 to 47% in 2019.

Laura Pidcock who lost her seat in North West Durham understood this when she posted on Twitter: “Vital to learn the lessons of Labour’s [general election] defeat. However, the answers will not be found at the door of New Labour’s architects. Blair’s legacy still hangs around this party like a millstone, especially in the North East. I heard it time and time again.”

One must also be careful about seeing these areas as the exclusive location of the working class. Sarah Jaffe writes: “The splintering around Brexit highlights the way that the working class itself has changed. Too many people, in both the U.S. and U.K., still hear the term “working class” and see images of white men in hard hats, socially conservative and easily turned off by too much radicalism. But the working class is being recomposed; that Labour (like Bernie Sanders) is overwhelmingly popular among young people reflects that recomposition. Young people in the United Kingdom, like the United States, are less likely to own property, more likely to have student debt, and more likely to be in precarious work.”

That recomposition is geographic as well, as young people leave their homes for the cities where the work is. Ewan Gibbs notes: “A huge divergence in Labour’s electoral fortune was visible between metropolitan areas and former industrial towns. In Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire, the cities voted Labour, but the former coalfields are increasingly coloured blue.”

One can add to this a long term decline in basic class or trade union –consciousness that goes back decades. One email I received lamented “the failure of the trade union movement to organise and recruit in newer industries, new sectors of the economy, and new workplaces, and the weakness of trades unions even where they are long established and have collective bargaining, including much of the public sector. The problems faced by many working people are well known – insecure and casual employment, declining real wages, outsourcing of their jobs and pressure to do more in the working week due to staffing cuts. If trade unions do not address these worries and organise workers to combat them, then those workers are more likely to turn to blaming the EU and ‘foreigners’.”

Furthermore, in much of the country, the only experience of Labour in practice is that of local government. Craig Gent again: “Over time, northern Labour councils have come to be viewed as the establishment, their attempts to stave off the worst effects of austerity communicated poorly to the electorate, while strategists in London no doubt mistook a splash of red on a map for enthusiasm instead of waning support for a long-established default.”

So much for long-term trends. The main immediate reasons people did not vote Labour, according to an Opinium poll was: Leadership (43%), Their stance on Brexit (17%), Their economic policies (12%),

Corbyn himself

Let’s start with leadership. “If you already believe that Labour is too left-wing, it’s easy to find evidence to back you up,” writes James McAsh. “After all, Jeremy Corbyn is the most left-wing Labour leader in recent history and the party has just suffered the worst electoral defeat since 1935.”

However, as has already been noted, Labour’s 2017 result was the best in vote share of the last five general elections. The question must then be: what changed over the subsequent two and a half years?

Those on the Labour right who have been attacking Corbyn since he became leader will not have answers to this critical question. Yet the dramatic drop in Labour’s popularity over these 30 months cannot be explained by their prejudice that the Party or its leader was too leftwing.

The focus then moves to Jeremy Corbyn’s personal characteristics – or rather the image of him that much of the media choose to portray. As Adam Ramsay observes: “Any Labour leader running against the powerful institutions of the country would be pilloried by the media. The outlets that mocked the Jewish Ed Milliband for looking weird (read ‘foreign’) when eating a bacon sandwich, and smeared his refugee father as hating the country, didn’t skip a beat when they smelt a whiff of an anti-Semitism scandal around his successor.”

Many commentators mention Corbyn’s demonization in the media. In fact, the process, which is better called de-legitimisation, was far wider. Much of the establishment, including military figures who warned against the dangers of electing Corbyn, colluded in this process. The Conservative government granted few of the conventional courtesies normally afforded to Her Majesty’s Opposition, underlining the idea that a Corbyn-led party could not possibly be legitimate. It is telling to note that the full fury of her parliamentary party was turned on Theresa May at the moment she invited the Labour front bench in for talks on how to get her Brexit deal through: in one blow she had undermined the entire, carefully-constructed consensus that Corbyn was not a rightful player.

This theme was enthusiastically taken up by the media. It wasn’t necessary to frontally challenge his commitment to the people of this country: it was easier to do it by smears – not bowing deeply enough at the Cenotaph, not knowing the precise time of the monarch’s Christmas Day address, calling for respect for due process and international law following the Salisbury poisoning – all signs that he had failed some elusive tabloid patriotism test. And what greater indication could there be that the man was unfit for high office than the claim that he was a “fucking anti-Semite” – an absurd charge made not by the Murdoch press, but by an embittered Labour colleague, who had known him throughout his political career as an MP of over 35 years and had never raised a scintilla of concern on this score before?

In fact, Corbyn was vilified for being an internationalist, someone who opposed all racism. Luke Pagarani pointed out, “The key charge against Corbyn is that he fundamentally believes British lives are of equal value to the lives of others… A symbolic moment of the campaign was the first leaders’ debate, when Corbyn highlighted the impact that the climate crisis would have on the poorest people in the world and a section of the audience responded with groans and someone shouted, ‘Here we go again!’”

Jeremy Corbyn’s collegiate style of leadership was also condemned for being inappropriate in the modern era. It has been compared to Clement Attlee’s – a break from the well-spun authoritarian image of today’s ‘leaders’. Christine Berry suggests: “It’s perhaps unsurprising that people didn’t see him as prime ministerial, given that he rose to the leadership of the Labour Party almost by accident…itself a symptom of the generational deficit of left-wing leadership figures in the Labour Party: two decades of Blairism had so hollowed out the party that, when this politics hit the buffers, the old stalwarts of the Socialist Campaign Group were the only people left standing who really spoke to the rising demand for change.”

Corbyn also held out the possibility of a new way of doing politics. In the context of unrelenting hostility from much of the parliamentary party, this was always going to be difficult to realise. Nor did it help that much of the Corbyn-supporting left had not really broken with the traditional methods of organising in this challenging environment. The Corbyn movement was broad enough to include the leadership of key unions, above all Unite, and the younger membership of Momentum, but it would not be accurate to say that either wing looked on the other with much warmth, or even trust. Managing these antipathies was always going to be difficult.

Corbyn’s image also suffered in the context of Brexit. In 2017, a major part of his appeal had been the refreshing “honest, straight-talking politics” which distinguished Labour’s leader from nearly every other figure in contemporary politics. 1n 2019, the triangulation that had occurred on the Party’s position on Brexit, with Corbyn offering himself an honest broker between the two warring Leave and Remain wings of his party strained this crucial feature of his appeal.

The upside is that if Corbyn’s personality really was the problem, then this is easily fixed, with Corbyn himself standing down. As Tom Clark points out. If Labour’s MPs “can direct their energies against the Conservatives rather than within their own tribe, then its position would immediately be greatly improved, if not transformed.”

Brexit

So just how damaging was the Brexit? Obviously, Leavers will say we should have left, Remainers that we should have stayed in the EU and each will select the evidence accordingly. But using this disaster just to mount a defence of one’s pre-existing view is not very helpful. There are many different aspects to this.

Firstly, Christine Berry is right to note that “Johnson’s pitch to ‘Get Brexit Done’ clearly resonated across the spectrum. It achieved his key strategic aim of uniting the Leave vote while the Remain vote split, especially after the Brexit party stood aside – Lord Ashcroft’s post-election polling graphically confirms this. Meanwhile, Labour was royally snookered by trying to hold together an electoral coalition that spanned the Brexit divide....there was no easy way out of this dilemma, no cost-free Brexit position that could have won Labour the election.” This problem was compounded by the way Brexit made Jeremy Corbyn personally look indecisive, mentioned earlier.

Richard Seymour agrees: “There was no ‘good’ position on Brexit...Part of the problem appears to be that parliamentary victories against Theresa May and Boris Johnson – regarded as ‘playing a blinder’ by the punditry – were received poorly by a lot of leave voters. They saw the political establishment stopping Brexit. The anti-parliamentary rhetoric initiated by May, and turned into a foghorn blast by Johnson, was operating on real discontents. But how would Labour have justified voting through May’s deal? How much support might that have lost? How many people would have been utterly demoralised and ‘done with Corbyn’ at that point?”

In the immediate aftermath of the election, there was a swathe of articles, with Skwarkbox leading the charge, in which Labour’s shift to a second referendum and away from supporting the ‘will of the people’ was held to be the key reason for the loss of seats in the ‘red wall’. The problem with this analysis, as shown earlier, is first, that it fails to see that Labour’s share of the vote in the seats lost has been in long-term decline for a generation; and second, that, only a small minority of the votes Labour lost between 2017 and 2019 were to the Conservatives.

Paul Mason challenges this narrative frontally: “To understand how much bullshit is being talked about Brexit take a look at the polling averages for 2019. Between April and June Labour’s support slumped from 32% to 22%, while the Libdems surged, at the very moment we rejected the second referendum. If we had followed the advice of the Lexiteers we would have started this election neck and neck with the Libdems, and probably lost numerous activists to the Greens and disillusionment.”

Lexiteers respond by saying the poll results in the spring should be discounted, particularly the EU election results in which the Lib Dems surged and the Brexit party came top, because turnout was so low.

There was certainly some ‘Brexit fatigue’ on the doorstep and a desire, however people may have voted in 2016, that the referendum result be upheld – as Ian Lavery pointed out on election night. But, it can equally be argued that nobody voted specifically for the particular form of hard Brexit, complete with its propensity to unravel the northern Ireland peace process, that Johnson was promoting.  Furthermore, this Brexit was a nationalist and isolationist endeavour.

Paul Mason again: “Let’s be frank: a minority of the working class abandoned Labour for authoritarian conservatism and nativism. It may be temporary, but it should not be a surprise - since this is a phenomenon being experienced by social democratic parties all over the world...I warned in May: "To win back the ex-industrial towns ... Labour needs to talk about more than economics. It needs to fight personal insecurity, crime, drugs, antisocial behaviour and organised crime as enthusiastically as it fights racism. ..For writing this I was accused by Unite's leaders of ‘speaking the language of the right’. Remember that when you hear them blame the internationalist left for this defeat.”

The disruption of class politics in Britain by ethno-cultural nationalism has a long and grim history, even leading to strike action in favour of the outpourings of overtly racist politicians, as Ewan Gibbs has noted. Nor is there anything unusual about this kind of politics being weaponised by the Tories at election time, as Adam Ramsay notes: “When my friends on the left of the Labour Party argue today that they would have won if it wasn’t for Brexit, they imply that Brexit is a one-off event, a unique set of circumstances that can be set aside and discounted for the future. That’s a bit like the comforting notions that Labour would have won in 1983 if it wasn’t for the Falklands war, or in 2015 if Cameron hadn’t whipped up fear of the Scottish National Party. These arguments may even be true, but what they amount to is ‘Labour would have won if it wasn’t for Anglo-British nationalism.’ Which is essentially saying: ‘Labour would have won if it wasn’t for the main reason the Tories normally win.’

The manifesto?

According to Opinium, 12% of people who rejected Labour cited its economic policies. Yet “evidence consistently shows that Labour’s policies are popular,” argues Christine Berry. “For instance, this polling covered by the Independent shows clear majorities in favour of public ownership of the railways and utilities, higher taxes on the richest, and shifting the balance of power back towards workers. And this poll commissioned by NEON found that support for these policies has continued to increase since 2017.”

Far from being extreme, Labour were proposing that public spending be raised to 43.3% as a proportion of national income. In Germany it’s 45.2%, in Sweden 48.4%, in France 55.7%. In terms of tax increases: the Labour manifesto proposed that the top rate of corporation tax be raised to 26%. Italy’s is 27%, Germany’s is 29%, France’s is 34%. One blogger concluded: “Labour’s policies were not the problem: a YouGov Poll suggests that 64% of voters supported the Green New Deal and 61% supported a reversal on austerity measures.”

Jeremy Corbyn was widely mocked for saying a couple of days after the election that Labour had won the argument, but he had a point. Had the Party elected any of his opponents back in 2015, there was every chance that Labour would still be competing with the Tories on how much could be cut in the way of benefits. Instead, Labour’s anti-austerity stance and commitment to public expenditure forced the Tories to play catch-up. “In contrast with the last chunky Conservative wins, in 1983 and 1987, there is no sense of the party riding the tide of ideas,” opined Tom Clark. In fact, beyond “getting Brexit done”, there was little clarity on what Johnson’s Conservatives do have in store.

Even Labour’s liberal commitments,  apparently so distasteful to the ‘left behind’ working class of the |England’s smaller towns, are pretty popular, including reciprocal freedom of movement rights for EU citizens. The notion that the working class is innately hostile to the liberal concerns so beloved of a metropolitan elite party membership is both a mis-framing of the debate and broadly inaccurate.

Writing recently in The Guardian, Kenan Malik tackled the idea head-on:"The working class, runs the argument, is rooted in communities and cherishes values of family, nation and tradition. It has little time for liberal individualism or for the language of diversity and rights. That belongs to the ‘metropolitan liberals’ and to a different political tradition…Labour now faces a choice: either accept that its traditional working-class voters are gone forever or abandon liberal social policies.

“The trouble with this argument is that the key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation. The annual British Social Attitudes survey, which began recording public attitudes in 1983, has tracked ‘the onward march of social liberalism’. On a host of issues, from gender roles to gay marriage, from premarital sex to interracial relationships, Britain has liberalised to a degree that would have left the average Briton of the 1980s aghast. It’s not just metropolitan liberals but society as a whole, including the working class, which has embraced this change…The problem is not that metropolitan liberals have become too liberal or the working class more conservative. It is that social and economic changes have unstitched the relationship between the social and the liberal that defines the left.”

Narrative

The policies were good. The problem was that in a contest widely labelled the ‘Brexit election’, they didn’t get covered. Unlike 2017, when Labour had a clear ser of commitments “For the many, not the few”, in 2019, Labour lacked a clear narrative. “For the Many, not the Few worked the first time round,” suggests Mark Perryman, “because it was so different to what had come before.  But two years later...Labour needed a new story to tell, and there simply wasn’t one.”

Christine Berry argues: “Rather than attempting to tell a story that communicated its plans to reshape the economy, it led the campaign with a shopping list of spending promises – free broadband, free childcare, compensating WASPI women. And rather than consolidate its achievement in 2017 – when it began to win the argument against austerity, with mainstream commentators accepting that its investment plans were actually pretty sensible and the Tories feeling the need to compete by promising more public investment – it doubled down, leaving voters with a general sense that the party was spraying money around like confetti.”

Little groundwork had been done ahead of new policies being announced. An assessment by the Labour Representation Committee, whose president is John McDonnell MP, agreed: “Some of Labour’s proposals, like that for free broadband, were bold and eye-catching. But they appeared before the electorate like rabbits out of a hat. In a period where austerity has lowered expectations and hope for many has been extinguished, with a general lack of trust in the political process, Labour’s programme might have seemed to some to be utopian and lack credibility.”

Part of the problem was the Party’s messaging. One blogger fulminated: “I have no idea whose plan it was to launch a load of surprise policies like free broadband, the 33% rail fare reduction, and the repayment of the stolen WASPI money, but doing it as a sequence of surprise announcements was a terrible idea, because it made the party look incredibly irresponsible. If you want to argue the case for increased public spending and more money in people's pockets, you need to lay the groundwork, you don't just dump it all on people as if it's a load of reckless pre-election bribes.”

James Meadway, a former adviser to John McDonnell, expressed concern about Labour’s framing of its economic policy, in terms of who pays for the spending commitments. “In 2017 we emphasised that the top 5% would pay for our policies,” he wrote. “In 2019, it was fluffed. The 95/5% tax split was still retained as policy, but instead of being used as a way to grant credibility to the programme, it became yet another questionable promise for many – we focused on the ‘no tax rises’ part, instead of pinning down the losers early on. Vague talk about targeting ‘billionaires’ did not cut it.”

Where policies did get across, they were not always well motivated. Often they didn’t get across at all. Christine Berry again: “Labour’s most innovative policies – the areas where it has been at the cutting edge of reinventing socialism for the 21st century, such as local democratic ownership and community wealth building – barely got a hearing, partly because Labour did not choose to profile them in the campaign. It now seems that this was a grave strategic mistake. ”

“In the end,” Paul Mason concluded, “Jeremy Corbyn made the same mistake Ed Miliband had made: that policies win elections, and if you are losing, the answer is to throw another policy into the mix. Policies do not win elections, narratives do.”

Exactly why Labour’s excellent policies weren’t woven into a strong narrative, why the central themes were gradually downplayed in favour of a focus on the NHS and many other elements of the campaign that activists have questioned – all this should be the subject of a much wider study. A post-mortem in The Guardian refers to “clashing egos, confused messaging, and an infuriating lack of clarity about both day-to-day planning, and where the party’s battleground lay.”

Christine Berry complained about a “misallocation of resources. On polling day, we were sent to get the vote out in Bolton West, which my gut told me Labour did not have a cat in hell’s chance of winning. The sitting Tory MP increased his majority by almost 8,000 votes. Meanwhile, neighbouring Bolton North East went Tory by 378 votes.”

Craig Gent makes a related point: “While fighting a ground-game which focuses on marginals makes sense in terms of sheer logistical pragmatism, it treats ‘safe’ seats as monoliths which can quickly be counted and banked before moving on to more lucrative pastures. There needs to be a recognition that this is not politically sound beyond the short-term, not least because it means the places marked ‘safe’ – and the people who live there – go unattended for decades at a time.”

The uniformly hostile Sunday Times hints at darker motives afoot, with campaign organisers deliberately pushing resources into candidates who belonged to their preferred faction.

All of this feels incomplete and speculative. ‘Insiders’ talking to newspapers off-the-record are often as guilty as anyone else of highlighting issues that reinforce their pre-conceived viewpoints. The full story of this campaign, who decided what, when and why will need to be written – but not here.

Conclusion

Ultimately much bigger forces were in play. “The recent UK election was a quarrel about the character of politics,” suggests Adam Ramsay. “On the one hand, the Labour Party argued that it can be used for good, ‘for the many’. They promised to transform lives and communities, to take action on climate change and poverty. The Conservative Party, conversely, claimed that politics is bad. They promised to banish it from your life, to ‘get Brexit done’, so that we can all forget about it and get on with Christmas shopping. The Conservative strategy was, therefore, simple: wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth. Ensure the whole experience is miserable, bewildering and stressful, then ask voters to make it go away...In 49 of the 56 seats Labour lost to the Tories, turnout was down.”

Labour – and Jeremy Corbyn and his key allies – can be immensely proud of their achievement in this four year experiment. The Party ran on two of its best ever manifestoes. It grew to the largest centre-left party in Europe - almost twice as big as the German SPD and the Italian Democratic Party It.mobilised hundreds of thousands to communicate its ideas to much wider layers than before – all in the face of unremitting political and personal attacks from most of the media, the Tory party, the financial, military and political establishment and the rightwing of the Labour Party itself.

But was it the ‘new politics’? Many books and articles have appeared in the last few years arguing for the transformation of the Labour Party into a different kind of movement. In my review for Labour Briefing of Corbynism from Below, edited by Mark Perryman, I counselled caution on this front:

“What form will the movement needed to sustain a Corbyn government take? As someone who has been active in it for nearly 40 years, I would say: don’t put too much hope in the Labour Party. Mark Perryman in his keynote introductory essay notes its routinism and institutional conservatism. Heather Wakefield discusses the way Labour-led councils have rarely prefigured the radical potential of a Corbyn government – quite the opposite. And Jeremy Gilbert writes incisively about the limited impact of the new politics within the Labour Party: ‘Disappointingly, the Labour Party’s 2018 Democracy Review focused entirely on procedural issues... The question of how to encourage, extend, intensify and institutionalise the spirit of self-organised enthusiasm that emerged among so many party members during that historic 2017 election campaign should have been the Review’s central question. Instead, it was ignored.’”

The lesson is stark. The Labour Party is an electoral machine – that’s all. The movement to helps sustain a socialist government, once elected, needs to be much broader and qualitatively different. As Adam Ramsay concludes: “The problem was that Labour ran a campaign with a ‘retail’ offer when voters wanted empowerment.”

Part of that ‘retail’ was a conscious attempt to tone down some of our values in the quest for votes. I canvassed in Harrow East during the campaign, where quite a few Hindu voters raised Jeremy Corbyn’s position on Kashmir. In my limited experience, this came up more than anti-semitism. The Conservatives had gone out of their way to court Hindi nationalism and there was plenty of evidence of hardline Hindu nationalists linked to Modi’s party targeting voters with anti-Labour propaganda. This was after Labour Party Conference unanimously passed a motion describing events in Kashmir as a "major humanitarian crisis" and urging the party to stand with the Kashmiri people "fighting against occupation."

Ahead of the election, Labour’s leadership clarified the Party’s position, explaining that the dispute was a bilateral matter between India and Pakistan in which Labour would not interfere. We were briefed to take this line on the doorstep, which we duly did.

After a few such conversations, however, I felt tempted –although I resisted the temptation – to argue back a bit more. Was it so heinous that Labour’s Conference had taken this position, as 8 million Kashmiris were locked down under weeks of curfew, with thousands thrown in jail? Isn’t it morally right to stand firm in defence of universal human rights, whatever the sensibilities of nationalist voters?

It struck me that these difficult compromises were being made all over the country. When a canvasser knocks on the door, to be greeted with an outpouring of anti-EU bile, it is tempting not to probe too closely the rationale behind such a view. What’s more, if the canvasser him or herself is someone who has good socialist reasons to oppose the neoliberal EU, which forced austerity onto Greece, then empathy may be the first response, as a basis for securing a Labour vote. Probing the motivation of the voter may uncover something considerably darker.

Listening to voters is important, as is persuading them to vote Labour. But how many little compromises of this kind are made in the single-minded pursuit of a Labour victory, and doesn’t the socialist who indulges in them feel a bit grubby at the end of the process? Some canvassers from minority backgrounds especially felt this was a high price to pay. Perhaps it is the inevitable price of electoralism but the end of the electoral campaign will at least allow socialists to concentrate on advancing ideas and campaigning on issues.

Archie Woodrow puts it more bluntly. “Corbyn has spent four years trying to play by the rules. We’ve made every effort to accommodate the broad church of the Parliamentary Labour Party. We’ve made enormous compromises, especially on foreign policy, defence, and criminal justice. And Corbyn has made every effort to act as a moderate, statesman-like figure—a respectable, unifying politician who plays the conventional media and parliamentary games. He has been rewarded with relentless hostility, demonisation, and dishonesty from across our media and political classes in the dirtiest election campaign in decades…It’s time to shift gears. Time to fight fire with fire…No more compromise. No more triangulation. No more pretending that Corbyn and Labour stand above the divides in our society. We aren’t here to smooth over those divisions and ‘rebuild a broken Britain’, but to unite the working class majority—and those progressive sections of the middle classes - and to turn the tables on the exploiters, the monopolists, and the ruling elites…Turn the class struggle into a class war.”

Where now?

What happens next? Immediately, Brexit will ‘get done’. Environmental safeguards and workers’ rights will be binned in the process amid the self-congratulatory bombast. The economy will slow down; the poorest will suffer.

Labour will elect a new leader. Archie Woodrow again: “Right-wing ‘unity will be dishonestly mislabeled as equally radical but free of Corbyn’s baggage, in the same way that Kinnock was promoted as offering ‘Bennism without Benn’ before going on to destroy the Labour left and pave the way for Blairism. But it is worth remembering that Kinnock was able to win and to do so much damage precisely because he was seen as being part of the left.”

Many leading lights have put their hats in the ring, some better than others. None of them have the 32 years of experience Jeremy Corbyn had as a backbencher, standing up to the threats of the party whips, as he, with John McDonnell, attained the joint record for the largest number of backbench rebellions against the Blair government, an honourable badge, but something for which his opponents never forgave him. My worry is that, whoever gets the leadership, given their relative inexperience, they will be much more likely than Jeremy Corbyn to be buffeted about by powerful factions within the Labour apparatus and will be repeatedly required to prove their electability by a series of demoralising attacks on the Party’s left.

Longer-term, as far as making Labour more electable in future, a consensus on the left is already emerging. Mass canvassing may be fun but it was too little, too late. As James Butler pointed out, “five weeks’ enthusiasm cannot make up for decades of neglect.”

“The lesson must be that rebuilding trust takes time, base-building, hard work,” agrees Sarah Jaffe. “There is no perfect message that can cut through the social media-amplified noise campaigns the right will run; there is no one you can throw under the bus to solve the problems. Progressive campaigns must reach the working class everywhere it lives—in deindustrialized smaller towns as well as the biggest cities—and they must do more than make promises or show up at election time. They must prove they are around for the long haul.”

The point is reiterated by Craig Gent: “At a local level, the party should first make sure that it is undertaking community work for no calculated gain – a sign that Labour is not going anywhere and cares about the community whether it is representing the constituency in parliament or not.”

Likewise Christine Berry: “start with rebuilding the Labour Party as a party that is present on the ground in deprived communities, offering practical solidarity and real solutions, and combining this with political education that encourages people to see their individual problems as part of bigger systemic forces that we can tackle together.”

 So we’re all agreed. Let’s get to work.

Mike Phipps is the editor of For the Many:Preparing Labour for Power, published by OR Books,

https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/for-the-many-preparing-labour-for-power/