Diagnosis of Defeat | Lord Ashcroft Polls 2 CONTENTS

DIAGNOSIS OF DEFEAT Labour’s turn to smell the coffee Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC February 2020 © Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC February 2020 Diagnosis of Defeat | Lord Ashcroft Polls 2 CONTENTS Introduction 4 Methodology 6 1. Election Explanations 7 2. Where Did It All Go Wrong? 15 3. The Future 24 4. The Leadership 30 About Lord Ashcroft 36 Diagnosis of Defeat | Lord Ashcroft Polls 3 INTRODUCTION After the Conservatives lost their third consecutive election in 2005, I published Smell constituents. Brexit therefore became a metaphor for a party that no longer listened to the Coffee: A Wake-Up Call for the Conservative Party. I felt that the Tories had failed to them, taking their votes for granted while dismissing their views as ignorant or grasp the reasons for their unpopularity and needed a serious reality check if they were backward. “They were saying, ‘it’s the adults talking now, leave the table and we’ll sort ever to find their way back into government. With Labour now having been rejected by it out for you’,” as one former supporter put it. Another linked Labour’s apparent the voters four times in a row, I thought it was time to do the same for them. attitude on Brexit to Gordon Brown’s encounter with Gillian Duffy in 2010: “He tarred her with the bigot brush rather than listening to what she had to say. It’s the same with No doubt some will be suspicious of my motives. I’m a Tory, after all – indeed, a former Brexit.” These impressions – of a party unready for office and unwilling to listen – will Deputy Chairman of the party. There are two answers to that. The first is that the not vanish just because the Brexit legislation is complete. country needs a strong opposition. Britain will be better governed if those doing the governing are kept on their toes. Moreover, at its best, the Labour Party has been a It was reported that Labour’s official inquiry “exonerated” Jeremy Corbyn from any great force for decency, speaking up for people throughout the country and ensuring blame for the election result. I can only assume this was a compassionate gesture for nobody is forgotten. We need it to reclaim that role. an already-outgoing septuagenarian leader, because no serious reading of the evidence could reach such a verdict. “I did not want Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister” The second answer is that you don’t have to trust me – just listen to what real voters topped the list for Labour defectors when we asked their reasons for switching, have to say in the research that follows. Last month I polled over 10,000 people, paying whether they went to the Tories or the Lib Dems, to another party, or stayed at home. particular attention to those who voted Labour in 2017 but not in 2019. We have also Though a few saw good intentions, former Labour voters in our groups lamented what conducted 18 focus groups in seats Labour lost, with people who have moved away they saw as his weakness, indecision, lack of patriotism, apparent terrorist sympathies, from the party (often feeling that the party had moved away from them). The report failure to deal with antisemitism, outdated and excessively left-wing worldview, and includes extensive quotes from these discussions, since they explain Labour’s obvious unsuitability to lead the country. predicament better than any analyst could. They are all the more powerful when you consider they come from people who were voting Labour until very recently and But the feeling that the Labour Party was no longer for them went beyond Brexit and probably never expected to do otherwise. the Corbyn leadership. While it had once been true that “they knew us, because they were part of us,” Labour today seemed to be mostly for students, the unemployed, We also polled over 1,000 Labour Party members, and conducted focus groups with and middle-class radicals. It seemed not to understand ordinary working people, to members of the party and of Labour-supporting trade unions, to see how the Labour disdain what they considered mainstream views and to disapprove of success. The “pie movement’s understanding of the election differs from that of the electorate at large in the sky” manifesto of 2019 completed the picture of a party that had separated itself and whether – and how far – they think the party needs to change. from the reality of their lives. From election night on, senior Labour figures have argued that the result was all about As far as many of these former supporters were concerned, then, the Labour Party Brexit – with the implication that their lost voters will be back in force once that issue is they rejected could not be trusted with the public finances, looked down on people off the agenda. While there is no doubt that Brexit played a huge part in the election, who disagreed with it, was too left-wing, failed to understand or even listen to the Labour would be wrong to draw too much comfort from that. Yes, many voted to “get people it was supposed to represent, was incompetent, appallingly divided, had no Brexit done.” But they also thought Labour’s policy of renegotiation and neutrality was coherent priorities, did not understand aspiration or where prosperity comes from, simply not credible: it stemmed from hopeless division and proved the party was disapproved of their values and treated them like fools. nowhere near ready for government. Despite all this, the defectors we spoke to do not rule out returning to Labour. Indeed, More serious still for these voters was the principle that Labour had refused to many now clearly relish their new status as floating voters, ready to hold governments implement the democratically expressed wishes of the people, and often of their own to account and take each election as it comes. But they won’t do so until Labour Diagnosis of Defeat | Lord Ashcroft Polls 4 changes, and most expect the necessary transformation to take years. While many Labour members grasp the need to change in principle, it is clear that they would find some of the shifts voters say they want to see – such as a less liberal stance on immigration, or much stricter fiscal discipline – harder to stomach in practice. This report is not a road map to recovery: different people can draw sharply different conclusions from the same data, and I’m sure that will be the case with this research. But the first step is to come to terms with your starting point. What follows is a pitiless but objective assessment of where that is. Michael Ashcroft February 2020 Diagnosis of Defeat | Lord Ashcroft Polls 5 METHODOLOGY 10,107 adults in Great Britain were interviewed online between 14 and 20 January 2020. Eighteen focus groups of former Labour voters were held in January 2020 in former Data have been weighted to be representative of all adults in Great Britain. Labour constituencies won by the Conservatives in 2019: Bolsover, Bridgend, Burnley, Don Valley, Scunthorpe, Sedgefield, Stoke-on-Trent North, West Bromwich East and 1,073 members of the Labour Party were interviewed online between 10 and 14 January Wrexham. Participants had voted Labour in 2017 but stayed at home or voted for other 2020. parties in 2019, or had voted Labour in 2015 but for other parties in 2017 and 2019. Full data tables are available at LordAshcroftPolls.com. Four focus groups of Labour Party members and members of Labour-supporting trade unions were held in London and Birmingham in January 2020. Diagnosis of Defeat | Lord Ashcroft Polls 6 1: ELECTION EXPLANATIONS How did it happen? Labour defectors – who voted for the party in 2017 but not in 2019 – believed the top two factors were that Brexit dominated the election, and that Jeremy Corbyn was not In our polls of the general public and Labour Party members we offered twelve factors an appealing leader. Voters as a whole also considered these the main reasons. Next on that might have contributed to the election outcome and asked them to say how the list for defectors were the view that Labour were divided, that the party no longer important they thought each one had been in explaining the result. really represented its traditional voters, and that its election promises were not believable. Labour members concurred that Brexit had dominated the election (though they gave it a higher importance score than voters as a whole), but agreement ended there. Next on the list were an unfair media portrayal of Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, voters believing Conservative lies, voters not understanding what was at stake and the Conservatives exploiting many voters’ bigoted views on race and immigration. Did Labour deserve to lose? More than six in ten voters overall said that Labour deserved to lose the election, including nearly two thirds of Labour defectors and 95% of those who switched from the Labour to the Conservatives. However, only just over one in five Labour members agreed, and 73% of them said the party had not deserved to lose. This rose to 87% among members who had voted for Jeremy Corbyn in the 2016 leadership election; more than half of those who had voted for Owen Smith said the party had deserved the result in December. Diagnosis of Defeat | Lord Ashcroft Polls 7 constituents, voted to leave. They’re working for us, that’s what they’re getting paid for, and they didn’t do it. I think that’s why.” Why did you defect? Those who voted Labour in 2017 but not in 2019 were given a list of nine factors that may have contributed to their decision and asked which applied to them.

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