compass DIRECTION FOR THE DEMOCRATIC LEFT thinkpieces REBUILDING LABOUR’S MAJORITY By Timothy Stanley and Alexander Lee compass contents Rebuilding Labour’s Majority • Labour & the Voters • The Impact of Triangulation • ‘Renewal’ “Milburn pointed out that Labour had lost a considerable degree of popular support. Drawing attention to the fact that his party had ‘lost votes among the young… and more worryingly among aspirant C2 voters,’ he argued that Labour support had ‘slumped’ to the point were ‘an historic fourth term’ seemed unlikely.” Compass publications are intended to create real debate and discussion around the key issues facing the democratic left - however the views expressed in this publication are not a statement of Compass policy. compass Rebuilding Labour’s Majority By Timothy Stanley and Alexander Lee Compass Thinkpiece 17 Labour and the voters Shortly after the 2005 General Election, Labour’s campaign co-ordinator conducted a grim post-mortem for the Times. In a surprisingly frank article, Alan Milburn warned that the government’s electoral future was in doubt. Despite having been returned to office for a third time with a sizeable majority, Milburn pointed out that Labour had lost a considerable degree of popular support. Drawing attention to the fact that his party had ‘lost votes among the young… and more worryingly among aspirant C2 voters,’ he argued that Labour support had ‘slumped’ to the point were ‘an historic fourth term’ seemed unlikely. Raw statistics confirm the accuracy of Milburn’s remarks. At the most superficial level, Labour had indeed haemorrhaged support at the 2005 Election. Its majority had been slashed from 160 to sixty-six, and seats which had previously been seen as ‘safe’ now became patently vulnerable. In London, Labour’s share of the vote had dropped by an average of 8.4 percentage points since 2001. In parts of the capital, the picture was even worse than this. In the case of Poplar and Canning Town the party lost 21 per cent of the vote.This pattern was not confined to London. In Edinburgh South, for example, the vote fell by 21.3%.The same picture was repeated around the country, with polls demonstrating that, as Milburn had suggested, support had declined most significantly amongst voters aged between 25 and 35, and amongst the skilled working class. But the real crisis of the 2005 General Election occurred not in swing seats, but in Labour’s heartlands.Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Labour could rely on the fact that over half of its MPs would be returned with immense majorities by constituencies concentrated in the North-West, the North-East,Yorkshire and Humberside and in the capital.There was a strong positive correlation between habitation in a heavily industrialised urban centre and Labour support which weathered even the party’s darkest days. By 2005, however, this pattern had changed.While Milburn was content to accept the diminution of the party’s backing amongst the skilled working classes, he omitted to mention that Labour’s support amongst C2 voters had dropped by 9 percentage points since 2001 and by 8 percentage points amongst DE voters.The effect of this was more damaging than might initially be thought, and was most apparent in those seats which the party actually held at the 2005 election. In Sheffield Central, for example, (represented by Richard Caborn since 1983), Labour enjoyed over 60% of the vote in each election from 1983 to 2001, yet in 2005, its share abruptly dropped to 49.9%. In Yorkshire and Humberside, the North-East and the North-West, the swing of support away from Labour amongst its traditional social constituency may not have dramatically affected the number of MPs returned to Westminster, but majorities have been slashed and the party’s share of the vote dented severely. The impression that Labour is losing support amongst those groups which, when highly concentrated, have traditionally provided the basis of its electoral success is emphasised more strongly when voting patterns are compared against socio-economic indicators. Looking at the 208 English constituencies with a level of unemployment above the national average in May 2005, an indisputable relationship can be observed between the level of unemployment and the decline in Labour’s share of the vote. Put simply, the higher the unemployment in a constituency, the greater the swing away from Labour. Events since the 2005 General Election have confirmed these trends.The May 2006 Local Elections were extremely disappointing for Labour. Not only did it lose 319 seats nationally, coming in third place and suffering the worst defeat of a governing party since the 1980s, but it was also beaten in a number of traditionally safe areas with a high proportion of low-paid manual workers and a high level of unemployment. Labour lost control of councils in Newcastle-Under-Lyme, Bury, Stoke-on-Trent, Lewisham, Merton and Camden. Moreover, in some heartlands, it even suffered embarrassment at the hands of ‘extremist’ minor parties. In Barking, the BNP took 11 seats, contributing to the return of 27 nationwide. In Tower Hamlets, Respect gained 11 seats to become the opposition party, sapping support specifically from Labour. The most dramatic indication of this collapse of traditional Labour support was, however, recorded in the Blaenau Gwent bye-election. While it is true that voters often take such events as an opportunity to ‘send a message’ to the governing party, it is rare that the message is so clear and rarer still that it is sent by that party’s former supporters. In Blaenau, voters re-elected an independent in an historically Labour-dominated seat, which had been served by both Aneurin Bevin and Michael Foot. Although it could be argued that this represented a specific protest against the Labour’s Party’s internal machinery, the details confound such a comfortable interpretation.The independent victor, Dai Davies, accurately summarised the attitude of his constituents in arguing that Labour was REBUILDING LABOUR’S MAJORITY www.compassonline.org.uk PAGE 1 compass being punished for a failure to deliver on its promises.‘What has New Labour done for Blaenau?’ he asked rhetorically.‘When New Labour moved into the South East [of England], it stayed there. It left its bedrock communities to wither on the vine.’This failure to deliver is intimately connected with the socio-economic problems experienced by the people of Blaenau Gwent and, as Mr. Davies correctly identified, is linked to falling standards of living since 1997.‘We’ve got the highest [rate of] unemployment in Wales, deprivation is up and death due to heart disease is rising.’ The impression that Labour is losing support amongst its natural social constituents because it is failing to address positively their socio-economic concerns was confirmed by Jon Cruddas MP.Trying to explain why his constituents in Dagenham abandoned the party to vote for the BNP in such large numbers at the local elections, Mr. Cruddas pointed specifically to the party’s record.‘I cannot look them in the face and say another year of outstanding, relentless achievements.They look at you and they think you are trying to mug them off.They think “hold on, our real wages are in decline.”’ Like Dai Davies, Cruddas has argued that in limiting its economic objectives to macroeconomic tweaking, New Labour has shown itself to be unwilling to deal with complex patterns of deprivation. Constituents have rebelled and turned to whatever alternative presented itself. In Tower Hamlets, the best organised alternative was Respect, in Barking it was the far-right and in Blaenau it was a socialist independent.With marginal constituencies already under threat, the collapse of the party’s traditional social constituency casts Labour’s long-term electoral future in serious doubt. The impact of Triangulation In our recent book,The End of Politics, we demonstrated that patterns of electoral behaviour since 1997 had been seriously affected by the development of the strategy of ‘triangulation’ pioneered by New Labour. An innovative and initially effective approach to policy formation, triangulation involves the determination of the party’s position in relation to a perceived centre ground for immediate tactical gain.The spectacular success of the 1997 and 2001 General Elections are testimony to the extent to which triangulation not merely succeeded in out-flanking the Conservative and Liberal Democrat opposition, but also managed to reach out appeal to the widest range of voters. In the period 2001-2005, however, this strategy began to falter. As we have seen, the effect of Labour’s triangulation of policy was to alienate not only swing voters eager for positive solutions to key national issues, but also core supports for whom the retention of power was a means and not an end. The disaffected amongst Labour’s traditional social constituency have turned away not necessarily because of triangulation in itself, but rather because they perceive it to have led to disappointment in specific policy areas. Previously devoted party supporters, fully aware of the government’s activities in recent years, have been persuaded to stay at home or change their allegiance because they feel that particular concerns – usually those which Labour has historically protected – are being ignored. In April 2005, MORI polls found that the five most important issues in determining voting behaviour were (in declining order of importance) healthcare, education, law and order, pensions and taxation.The same issues were of similar significance in shaping voters’ decisions in both 1997 and 2001. Amongst those who said that healthcare was an important issue for them, 51% stated that Labour had the best policies on the eve of the 1997 General Election. By 2001, this had fallen to 44% and by April 2005, it had dropped to 36%.Those who mentioned education as important displayed a similar decline in enthusiasm.