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Britain’s Labour Party Faces an Existential Crisis

Britain’s Labour Party Faces an Existential Crisis

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Boris Johnson’s decisive victory in last week’s U.K. general election is a watershed moment. It means that for the first time, there is a majority in the House of Commons for a specific course of action on Brexit, which will now happen next month. And that majority –- the Conservative Party’s largest since its glory days in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher -- gives him breathing space if any lawmakers prove rebellious during the next phase of trade negotiations.

But electorally, the performance of the opposition Labour Party is even more significant. It is hard to overstate how catastrophic this result is for Labour. Its total of 203 seats is worse even than its 1983 meltdown under Michael Foot -- until now the yardstick of choice for electoral disaster -- and has no parallel in modern times. Despite Labour having been in opposition for virtually the entire decade, during which time growth in real incomes has been almost zero, home ownership rates have fallen, the Conservatives have pursued unpopular fiscal tightening policies and have changed leaders repeatedly, Jeremy Corbyn’s party managed to lose 59 seats to an opponent with middling ratings who many voters find it hard to trust.

Labour lost districts where defeat would once have been unthinkable, many of them precisely the areas that were hardest hit by deindustrialization under the Conservatives in the 1980s, and then hit hard again by spending cuts in the 2010s. Many more were held narrowly -- and may be vulnerable in the future if Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party disappears and its vote falls to the Conservatives.

The early debate within Labour has seen a division between those blaming Jeremy Corbyn and his allies and those blaming Brexit, with honorable mentions for the party’s radical policy platform. Who’s right?

It is true that Corbyn’s ratings are appalling, that Labour’s flip-flopping over Brexit confused voters and pleased neither side, and that its policies, though mostly popular in the abstract, weren’t seen as a credible offering by voters. But all of these failings are in turn symptomatic of something much deeper.

Labour has become a party talking mainly to itself, and not one listening to voters. While many individual MPs maintained dialogue with their constituents, much of their feedback from the doorstep has fallen on deaf ears in the party. And the obsession with polls and focus groups of the 1990s has been replaced by an open, sometimes vitriolic hostility to public opinion research.

Against this backdrop, many other things begin to make sense. Labour took the wrong lessons from its defeat in 2017, treating it as a victory against expectations rather than a yet another defeat. It ran on an even more left-wing platform than two years ago. And in the 2019 campaign, there were numerous reports of Labour activists arguing with voters on the doorstep.

That Labour lost votes to both pro- and anti-Brexit parties suggests its main problem isn’t solely a cultural disconnect from its one-time voters. But that is still a significant problem.

The party has repeatedly managed to send signals -- to no apparent upside -- that it sneers at its traditional base. In 2010, Gordon Brown had to apologize after being caught calling a voter concerned about immigration “bigoted” on open mic. In 2014, Emily Thornberry had to resign from the shadow cabinet after a tweet widely taken as mocking patriotic blue collar workers.

And since the 2016 Brexit vote, when around 4 million Labour voters voted to leave the EU, many of this group have said in focus groups that they felt their former party views them as “racist,” “stupid,” or thought they didn’t know what they were voting for.

Over this period, the sorts of areas where Labour lost out last week had trended heavily against it. The damage was not done in one term, or even since Brexit, but over a long period that began at least a decade before Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader.

They tend to be the places with the fewest college graduates, and are much more socially conservative than Labour’s new urban seats. When experts have pointed out the problem, as Paula Surridge at University of Bristol did recently, the reaction from many of Labour’s activists is along the lines of “so you’re saying we have to be racist to win votes?”

This puts Labour in a worse situation than it found itself in in the 1980s. Back then, its biggest problems were much more related to policy. That may be part of the story once again, as is leadership (Jeremy Corbyn has already said that he will resign once a successor is elected). But a long-building culture gap, exposed though not started by Brexit, is a much harder problem to solve.

So where should Labour start? Firstly, it needs to start listening. That involves realizing that opinion polls are a useful way to do that, not a conspiracy against the progressive agenda. Secondly, it needs to understand the mistakes that led it here, particularly those that go beyond policy. And thirdly, when it comes to choosing a new leader, he or she needs a credible plan to get back to government.

Labour has been in dire straits before and may yet save itself. But the next few months will be crucial; choosing the wrong leader and allowing a false narrative to take hold will consign the party to even longer term irrelevance.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Matt Singh runs Number Cruncher Politics, a nonpartisan polling and elections site that predicted the 2015 U.K. election polling failure.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.