Historically, the UK electoral system has generally worked to the advantage of Labour and the Conservatives. Small parties the Brexit Party, UKIP, and the Greens find that even if they gain a healthy vote share across the UK, they end up with virtually no representation in parliament, because of the way their vote is often thinly spread out. However, this does not mean that they do not have a very significant effect on politics - because if they draw enough votes away from Labour or split the vote in crucial marginal constituencies, they can enable the Conservatives to win. But in 2019, the Brexit party did much more than that - it decided to selectively help sitting Conservative MPs while targeting Labour in constituencies across the UK. By standing in Labour marginals (and key Labour target seats) but not standing in Conservative-held seats, Nigel Farage encouraged Leave voters to vote Conservative where it would hurt Labour, while simultaneously taking Labour votes in seats the party desperately needed to keep or win. This chart shows the correlation between the Brexit Party's vote share in seats where they stood candidates, and the resultant swing to the Tories in those seats.
Source: LSE/Pippa Norris
This allowed the Tories to win Labour seats across the North, the Midlands and Wales which had been Labour-held for decades. Even though the Conservatives vote share increased by just over 1.2% since 2017, the distribution of their votes and the damage done to the Labour vote in crucial seats meant that the Conservatives won a big majority in Parliament.
In 2019, Labour had to deal with defectors from the right of the party who had left the party to stand against it, either as an independent, ChangeUK or LibDem candidate. None of them were elected, but defectors from both Labour and Tories greatly harmed Labour by splitting the vote in a key Labour marginal or target seat, helping the Conservatives take or keep the seat:
The Tories failed to show up to TV debates, which meant they avoided negative scrutiny. Additionally, although the BBC initially planned to subject all the party leaders to an Andrew Neil interview "grilling" and the other party leaders went ahead on this basis, after some prevarication, Boris Johnson refused to do his interview. The Tories also utilised dirty tricks on social media, with 88% of their Facebook ads were deemed misleading by FullFact - like the deceptive editing of a social media post to make it seem as though then Shadow Brexit Secretary, Keir Starmer, could not explain Labour’s Brexit policy (which he had championed). Unlike previous elections, the Conservatives promised huge (but uncosted) levels of public spending, for instance, building 40 "new" hospitals. Although these pledges often unravelled under close scrutiny, they may have nevertheless resonated with voters.
The 2019 election was once again called entirely on the Tories' terms and was scheduled in order to provide them with maximum political advantage (the LibDems and SNP gave crucial support to the Tories over the precise timing of the election as they believed it would benefit them too). Boris Johnson was able to frame the election around a single issue, finalising Brexit, an approach which the media seemed happy to endorse (for instance, Sky News carried rolling daily coverage under the headline "The Brexit Election"). It was timed when new leader Boris Johnson was still enjoying a bounce in the polls from his recent overwhelming success in the Tory leadership election. He sought to project a nationalistic message to Leave voters in anticipation of a bright future after Brexit, while portraying Labour and the LibDems as blocking "the will of the people" and castigating parliament for its paralysis. In doing so, he played almost a Trumpian card, appearing to distance himself from the record of his own political party and casting himself as an anti-politician who was fighting the elite. His messaging tapped into a widely-held sense of exhaustion with the whole divisive issue of Brexit, a desire to see it resolved at long last. Johnson blocked the release of a government report into Russian interference in UK elections, meanwhile the Tories accepted millions in donations from Russian donors linked to Putin, some of whom were believed to be mentioned in the suppressed report. The Tories' budget on online advertising and elsewhere dwarfed anything the other parties could deploy.
Opinion polls showed individual Labour policies were very popular with voters. But after four years of relentless negative media coverage, from the right-wing press but also from outlets like The Guardian, Corbyn continued to have highly unfavourable ratings across opinion polls, partly because of the negative coverage around the issue of antisemitism in the party. However a breakdown of the reasons for his unfavourability indicate that the main factor driving people away was actually Brexit:
Sources :YouGov (Corbyn) YouGov (Labour's Economic Policies)
The party leadership was regarded as having the wrong policy on Brexit and for displaying indecisiveness on the main issue of the day. Labour lost votes to the Conservatives/Brexit party AND to the LibDems on either side of the Brexit divide. The party's policy to "appeal to both sides" with a 2nd Referendum appeared to please no-one, as the LibDems (who gained 4.2%) and other opposition parties were able to outflank Labour by being more overtly Remain, while Leave voters felt that Labour was trying to overturn the referendum result. Because Labour Remain voters were more highly concentrated in cities where Labour could withstand losses, it was the desertion of Leave voters (in the "left-behind" towns of the North, Midlands and Wales) which caused the decisive collapse in the number of seats.
Although Labour's vote share in 2019 was better than 2015 or 2010 (and the party got more votes than it did in 2005), it was where Labour lost votes which mattered. Concentrated numbers of votes were lost in Leave-voting areas, which hit Labour hard due to the way the electoral system works. Of the 54 seats the party lost in England and Wales, 52 were in Leave-voting areas. Adopting a simplistic but strong Brexit message ("Get Brexit Done") the Tories saw a surge in support, while Labour were cast as ditherers and out-of-touch.
Labour's Path To Power: Conclusion
In these five articles we've explored how UK party politics has been fundamentally transformed since the mid-1990's. Unlike in 1997, when most seats were simple contests between Labour and Conservative (and the LibDem vote acted to inhibit the Tories), today's multi-party politics is much more divided by region and features cross-cutting competing contests between several different parties across the political spectrum, plus across the Leave/Remain divide. Labour faces ongoing challenges from rival opposition parties, including a more regionally widespread threat from the LibDems who have shown previously that they are prepared to reposition themselves to the left of Labour if Labour attempts to move to the right. Disillusionment with traditional party politics and an increasingly polarised and volatile electorate exacerbates the problem.
Labour's inexorable decline from 1997, plus its poor vote share and comparatively popular vote totals in 2001, 2005, 2010 and 2015 do not reflect well on the politics of centrism. Copying the Conservative tax and spending plans in 1997 was a controversial approach and it may have temporarily convinced some Conservative voters to switch to Labour. However, there was a much higher long-term cost in terms of loss of vote share. Competitor parties gained a foothold in areas where Labour used to be unchallenged, making Labour's route to an outright majority much more difficult in any subsequent election.
Disillusionment with Labour caused the party to flatline up to the 2017 election, when the party changed approach and enjoyed a significant and rapid boost in electoral support. The unique circumstances of the 2019 "Brexit election", combined with the fact that the Brexit party worked tactically to boost the Conservatives and hurt Labour, plus the "baggage" of Corbyn's media portrayal must all be taken into consideration before jettisoning the party's socialist manifesto.Labour must seek to combine popular policy pledges with an effective communication strategy and an electoral strategy that takes into account the diverse political landscape of the whole UK. The nature of this challenge, plus the complex realities of the electoral system (and the very different context of politics today versus the mid 1990s) make it unwise to make knee-jerk assumptions about the relatively electability of socialism versus centrism.
The continuing popularity of socialist policies (and the overlapping threats posed by rival opposition parties that took hold under Blair/Brown/Miliband) indicates that simply emulating Tory rhetoric and copying Tory policies as Blair once did is not a guaranteed path to power - still less a way of building a solid, long-term base of support for Labour among the electorate.
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