Will Labour Learn From Their Election Defeats?
The decline and inevitable death of a party
As the results of the local elections in England have come through, one thing has become more and more clear and that is that people are sick of . Granted, their popularity has been plummeting in recent months, and this is due to a number of factors. Possibly chief among which is the fact that they haven’t delivered at all on their promise of change and have instead opted to simply continue with the same Tory policies of the last 15 years.
The most notable news regarding the local elections is that Reform has gained a massive number of council seats, particularly in the North. In total, which is unprecedented for such a new party.
Starmer has said that he understands the feelings of voters in the wake of this and has promised that Labour will deliver. Now, the problem here is that he’s not going to be delivering the change that people want. Just today Wes Streeting was pushed by Trevor Phillips about the direction Labour are going and questioned as to whether this is the right direction for Labour only for him to say they need to go “harder and faster” on policies like deportation.
Many people, including and Nadia Whittome, have pointed out that this is never going to work and it’s the wrong from the beginning. You’re never going to beat the likes of Reform and Nigel Farage by giving in to their framing of the problems in society, you’re only going to legitimise them and make them stronger.
Even beyond this though, people who would vote for Reform are never going to vote Labour because they see them tapping into the same anti-migrant rhetoric as them. Why would they vote for diet Reform when they can get the full sugar version? Purely from a tactical standpoint it makes no sense to respond to Reform by conceding their arguments. All Labour are doing by this is abandoning their base and making them less likely to vote for them in the future.
It’s funny because this Labour government has been compared to that of Tony Blair due to the fact that they have moved to the right from the previous leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Keir Starmer even shared a stage with Blair at his “ back in 2023. The thing is, though, for all Tony Blair’s faults (of which there were many) he at least understood that you can’t totally abandon your base but this seems to be something that Starmer and the current Labour leadership are hellbent on doing.
Labour’s voting base has historically always been the working class and people of a more progressive political mindset, yet Starmer isn’t even doing the bare minimum of paying lip service to progressive ideas. He even said that people who don’t like the changes the 2024 Labour conference, stating that “We’ve changed the party”.
Even in the wake of the Iraq War and the lead-up to the 2005 General Election, on the side of progress and fought back against the critique from the left that he was just another Thatcherite. Now, all of this was nonsense as he clearly was a Thatcherite but he was still trying to court more progressive people to vote for Labour. Starmer isn’t even trying to do this.
I return to what Wes Streeting has just mentioned today, they seem to be intent on going even more to the right, despite the fact that this is the reason why they are losing so much support and why their popularity is falling off a cliff. Keir Starmer even said that he was fine being labelled as fiscally conservative in an interview with Laura Kuenuesberg. You don’t have to be a political genius to realise that totally scorched-earth on your voting base like this is a bad thing.
All you have to do to realise where Labour could improve is look at the reasons why people are abandoning support for them. By far the biggest reason why they’ve lost support since the general election was their decision to cut the Winter Fuel Allowance. If Keir Starmer really was going to listen to voters as he has said, then reversing the cut would be his top priority.
Unfortunately however, that doesn’t seem like it’s going to be the case at all. You don’t even have to take my word for it, or Wes Streeting’s as I’ve previously cited. Morgan McSweeney, the director of Labour Together and a key figure in Starmer’s rise to power, has said he plans on moving into a . In other words, they plan on going exactly as they have been and continuing to mess things up for the great majority of people.
Some people might look at this and assume that Labour are either totally incompetent or that they are intentionally sabotaging their own efforts and I don’t think this really gets to the point. Don’t get me wrong, we have seen Labour work against their own interests in the past. We know that many people within and make sure he’d lose the 2017 and 2019 elections, but this is different from what they’re doing now. Back then, they were working against Corbyn because they’d rather lose elections than concede to the left.
Now, the Labour right have everything they could possibly want, total control of the party with the left being stamped out for good and a massive majority in government. The reason why Labour are now making the decisions they are isn’t because they’re stupid or they’re trying to intentionally make themselves look bad, decisions they like.
It’s part of why they that’s actually causing problems for people right now. All they have is more of the same and it’s not because they’re clueless, they’re just so trapped in their neoliberal ideological bubble that they literally can’t see outside of their own perspectives and see why they and their ideas are the problem.
