What is the Labour Party’s plan for winning an election ?
This was something I wrote last year at the end of August. I still think every single word is correct. Every single fear about the lack of Corbyn electoral strategy has been proven. The only mitigation offered is that membership is on the decrease. The Mayoral victories in May were hardly the sign of breaking new electoral ground more a sign of good indvidual candidates being able to activate voters lost in the late 2000s and were easily offset by the lack of advance outside cities and in Scotland. In the EU ref the non-voters voted against Labour party policy.
So I repeat my question, given Corbyn is calling for one, how does Jeremy Corbyn win a general election?
Election winning blah blah — a rebuttal to the arguments about electoral strategy
I voted for the person I liked. That was Yvette Cooper –she’s not the messiah but she can be quite a good politician, as the last three weeks have shown. A lot else about this leadership election has however been rubbish beyond belief. An irritation that has not gone away however is the increasing level of nonsense about the various strategies for winning elections (not just General Elections). This is was blasted out as a rebuttal to the really bad arguments made about electoral strategy from the far left (I am one week away from handing in my doctoral thesis and bored of editing).*
This is directed at the followers of one particular candidate — that’s why I said who I voted for at the top of the page. Three caveats for what is to follow. First the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn aren’t the only ones engaging fantastic politics. It was highly naive of Liz Kendall to spend so much of the earlier part of her leadership campaign focusing on the Tories without commenting on the votes bleeding to Labour’s left as well. It fell into the awful New Labour trap of assuming that left-wing voters have ‘no-where else to go’ ; that may have been true in the mid-1990s but they now do and will move if they want to. That said, the Corbynites (the segment of Corbyn’s supporters who make the arguments provided below) are also making fantastic arguments but of a much greater magnitude.
Secondly winning is important. There is a faction of Corbynites that don’t want to win elections full stop. That for many reasons is an absurd argument to make not least because it kind of defeats the point of proposing policy in the first place, but that’s not really what this post is about. The much more nuanced version of this is an argument I have seen a lot of quite clever people making; a Corbyn win means shifting the terms of the policy debate even if there is not a chance of winning an election. Intriguing as this argument is, and there are a number of additional problems with it as it is still dependent on the policy arguments being made from a position of power. The TUSC and the Greens are making many of the arguments Corbyn is but haven’t managed to shift the Overton Window significantly. In short the power to shift the terms of debate is to a reasonable extent dependent upon an ability to actually pose a threat to government of the day.
Thirdly the armchair-General argument is often made that “none of them can win an election” or to flip it around “you don’t know what the next five years will hold — so what’s the point in speculating.” This is true all four could and could not win a General Election in 2020 as Labour leader — predictions of this nature are invariably guesswork from this distance in time. That however misses the point; there is a difference between prediction and assumption. The latter are important as they will provide a guide as to how a would be leader would navigate the next few years, adapt to changing circumstances, shape policy and devise electoral strategy not just for 2020 but for the elections held in 2016, 2018 and 2019. After all Miliband’s 35% strategy was contingent upon a set of assumptions that turned out to be largely bogus.
The Fabians’ have already published a highly damning piece on Corbyn’s electoral strategy but there are three core additional problems that are worth stressing here
1) Non- Voters versus Tory Voters
The argument goes that 33% of the population didn’t vote so mobilising them should be a priority rather than winning support from the Tories — a proposition endorsed by Labour List readers in an online poll. This is built on a false assumption that non-voters are a homogenised mass of left wing support when there is reasonable evidence to show that their concerns are split fairly evenly between parties of the right and left. An increase in non-voting turnout would not necessarily help Labour and there is some evidence to show that high turnout elections have not necessarily helped Labour. A column in this week’s New Statesman, drawing on TUC research of non voters, notes that very few non-voters in 2015 did not vote because there wasn’t a sufficiently left-wing option on the ballot paper and many non-voters had views well to the right of Labour’s 2015 manifesto.
Also as the director of Progress has noted the important point about winning back Tory voters is that Labour’s main opponent has to then go looking for fresh voters expending energy and resources of their own. Non-voters are often concentrated in areas that are not necessarily helpful to Labour such as safe Labour or Tory seats, meaning that whilst it is certainly a moral duty to get many more people into the voting booth it cannot be the lynchpin of an electoral strategy. It’s important to note that many Corbynites and the Corbyn campaign are often framing this as choice between the two — not as a twofold problem. In terms of the leadership election campaign this is smart politics, as that implicitly underscores their candidate’s strength but in terms of an election campaign it would be disastrous. Pursuing a non-voters strategy to the exclusion of a Tory voter’s strategy abandons the field to the Tories to sure up their existing majority winning share of the vote which is far better distributed than the non-voting share. Finally the elephant in the room — the boundary review — is likely to significantly dilute down the impact of non voters.
Useful takes on this are
New Statesman on non Voters http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2015/09/can-non-voters-win-next-election-labour
The non-voter myth https://medium.com/@AlexWhiteUK/the-non-voter-myth-9162897a7895
2) Building a left-wing pact
I remember an early tweet from the Corbyn campaign that said in 26 seats the margin of victory of a Tory or Lib Dem victory was that of the non-Labour anti austerity parties combined. Taking this statistic at face value that means that had Labour had a non aggression pact or pursued a woo- the-hard-left strategy it might have won 256 rather than 232 seats — far short of the 331 seats held by the Tories. Then there is Scotland — let’s play the imagination game that Labour held it’s Scottish seats from the 2010 General Election that is somewhere around the 295 mark again still well short of an overall majority. In fact you can go on slicing the data and imagining pacts negotiated by Labour from the left and the result would almost certainly still be the same. The Green vote is absurdly concentrated and geography of votes and party power is too weak to either meaningfully cannibalise or form an alliance with the left in England and Wales (Scotland is a different story).
Plus there are three often under commented on assumptions in this argument. Firstly it assumes that the current Labour vote is fixed — it isn’t many moderate and right wing labour voters may simply walk away in the event of leftwing pacts or significant shift leftwards to capture support. Given the numbers the ratio of support lost to support gained is unlikely to add up. Ironically the far left of the party fall into the Blairite right’s analytical trap on this point as they assume that Labour voters have ‘nowhere else to go’ and are therefore safe. Secondly the late Tory swing in the last week of April this year was largely down to fear among undecided voters of a potential pact between Labour and a party to its left. It is unclear barring an absolute earth-shattering event, why this would change and why an actual pact with left-wing parties would not simply result in a repetition of 2015. Thirdly the assumption that the SNP voters can be won back on mass by moving to the left is simply not borne out by the latest round of focus groups and polling showing that less than 20% of former Labour voters could be won back by Corbyn in SNP held seats. A couple of seats here and there could be won in Scotland by this strategy but simply not enough to counteract the other problems which could result in seat losses further south.
Useful takes on this are
Corbyn in Scotland (h/t Kenny Flemming) https://medium.com/@Kennyf1283/corbyn-gallus-5e69f0c6222b
3) Factionalism
An understated aspect of this whole argument is how bad some of the left are at winning over more moderate support. As one friend once put it “even after yelling “go and join the Tories” for so long some Corbyn fans will be astounded when people do actually go and join the Tories.” In a very thoughtful piece a pro-Corbyn commentator recently noted that the keyboard-warriors-for-Corbyn were their own worst enemy in that paranoid shouts of conspiracy and betrayal were likely to heavily alienate rather than persuade people. This is not all Corbyn supports, but a vocal chunk of them and this only likely to get much worse in the event that Corbyn is successful. There are already open calls from some to embark on deselections and other internal wars. This is vigorously disavowed by the official Corbyn camp who know that their candidates ability to lead will depend on the good will of the PLP. But there is undoubtedly a section of Corbyn’s supporters that will want action taken against people like Tristan Hunt and others (probably even lowly people like me for writing and posting this — sorry comrades). This is unlikely to be officially sanctioned but some people will try to mount deselections and it will get a huge of amount of publicity and lead to further infighting.
This is likely to look appalling to the wider public and will lead to Corbyn’s base splitting (much like the Tribune Group did in 1981 after Benn decided to challenge Healey for the leadership). More importantly in the short term it will turn people off voting Labour exacerbating all of the above problems. This is obviously more of a structural problem than an assumption but there has been precious little thought as to what could be done to rectify this seeming toxification of Labour that has seen 10–12% leads for the Conservative party when they held leads in the low single digits at this point in 2010.
Useful takes on this are
Adam Bienkov on Corbyn Supports (as quoted above) http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/09/02/jeremy-corbyn-s-supporters-risk-undermining-their-own-cause
Raphel Behr on Social media and the ecoho sphere http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/19/social-media-politics-reformation
If someone reads the above and goes — “ well I am voting JC anyway because I like his policies” then I guess this isn’t targeted at you. I voted for Cooper because I liked what she said and there seemed to be an election strategy without these problematic assumptions. I am also lost as to why a major political party should adopt an electoral strategy which makes them unlikely to have a chance of actually putting principles into practice. If the above offends you feel free to have the argument with me and others — I like debate. This was intended as a giant rebuttal piece to arguments that annoy me.
