A Tory triumph in Batley and Spen would have rewarded scandal, nepotism and a bungled pandemic. Labour’s success, then, is a moment to cheer in bleak times. Yet in the wave of triumph expressed by Keir Starmer’s cheerleaders, it may be unpopular to speak honestly, but the truth should be spoken even if it is shouted down. Starmer has won some much-needed breathing space to turn his leadership around, because frankly Labour is in a terrible mess.
Labour owes its victory to a rightly popular candidate, a highly effective ground campaign, revulsion at George Galloway and the Matt Hancock scandal. Kim Leadbeater’s local roots and campaigning zeal – often leaving her team exhausted as she leaped from doorstep to doorstep – fused with widespread sympathy after she was aggressively berated in the street by Shakeel Afsar, who led protests against LGBTQ-inclusive education in Birmingham. Labour’s get-out-the-vote operation remains second to none thanks to the party’s membership. And Galloway – a toxic demagogue who campaigned alongside Nigel Farage and voted Tory earlier this year – succeeded both in eating into the party’s Muslim vote, and driving other residents into Labour’s camp in opposition. Fury at Hancock’s flouting of the very social distancing rules he championed mobilised voters across the political divide. The victory owes little to Starmer, who was largely absent from the campaign.
Before Labour lost Hartlepool, there had been just two occasions on which an opposition party lost a byelection in the past 50 years. Furthermore, opposition parties contesting byelections usually outperform their general election results – Labour won its lowest share of the vote in the history of the seat. Other than Hartlepool and the 2017 defeat in Copeland, this result represents the biggest swing towards a governing party in four decades.
Starmer’s Labour isn’t attracting new voters and is haemorrhaging support among those who remained loyal in 2019. In Hartlepool, Labour’s share fell, and in Batley and Spen, Muslim voters defected en masse because of a belief that Labour is failing to take a stance on injustices in Palestine and Kashmir, the party’s perceived failure to tackle Islamophobia, and a sense that their votes are taken for granted. They are not paranoid: one Batley Labour campaign source bragged to a journalist that they “basically built a new electoral coalition in six weeks. Lost the conservative Muslim vote over gay rights and Palestine, and won back a lot of 2019 Tory voters.”
Yet despite Galloway’s own appalling rhetoric particularly on trans rights, Labour campaigners on the ground report very little evidence of Muslim voters referring to LGBTQ rights as a cause of their disenchantment with Labour, a party many of them voted for when it repealed anti-gay laws in government. Despite the lack of evidence, it is a useful narrative for those within the party who have no interest in dealing with the real grievances – not least given the electoral beneficiary here was Galloway, seen as a fringe figure rather than as an electoral threat.
Contrast this with the consensus that the disillusionment of white voters who plumped for Ukip and the Brexit party, and the movement’s leader Nigel Farage, should be taken seriously. The belief that British Muslims will vote for Labour come what may (86% of British Muslims report voting Labour in 2019) is the same approach that lost the party seats in Scotland and much of the so-called “red wall”.
Labour is struggling, we are told, because of the vaccine rollout. Yet this did not prevent a stunning against-all-odds victory by the Liberal Democrats in Chesham and Amersham, and does not explain why other western governments are struggling in the polls, even despite Britain’s almost uniquely disastrous handling of the pandemic.
The consensus among Labour MPs is that the principal cause of Starmer’s woes is he lacks a vision – even if they do not agree on what that vision should be – leaving voters with no sense of what Labour stands for any more. Despite backroom reshuffles, there has been no promotion for any figure interested in formulating a coherent policy vision for the party, while factional figures – who are more interested in punching leftwards than offering a distinct political alternative to the Tories – remain entrenched in their positions.
Almost no one currently believes Starmer – who privately made clear during the 2020 leadership election that he found campaigning to be leader tedious – has hidden assets that would suddenly materialise in a general election. It is an open secret among MPs that Labour’s right flank believe he is a dud who will never win an election, and they plan to keep him in post until they can change the party’s leadership rules to ensure one of their own succeeds him before a general election.
What sustained the Corbyn project in the bleak political moment before the 2017 election was two things: the party leader’s campaigning fervour and policies that had widespread public support. As dire as Labour’s prospects are, Starmer has been granted a second chance to win back public support, and fend off any leadership threats. He was elected with a mandate to retain big-vision domestic policies from the Corbyn era (which remain popular to this day within the electorate, and many of which have been co-opted by the Tories), to unify the party, to professionalise the operation and to make Labour electable. No one can credibly argue this mandate is being fulfilled, but there are those who bemoan Boris Johnson’s dishonesty corrupting political life who openly demand Starmer abandon those commitments.
That mandate could turn Starmer’s fortunes around. It would put flesh on the policies he committed to in the leadership election, knit them into a coherent political vision, build a broader shadow cabinet and give him the opportunity to exercise a killer instinct towards the Tories.
It remains the case that the only time senior Tories have had panic-stricken, ashen faces in the past 20 years (at least when they were defeated in 2005, they were emboldened by substantial gains) was in the aftermath of the 2017 election. Labour didn’t win, but a rational political party would debate why this remains the only election in which it gained seats since 1997. If not, the party’s fortunes – and Starmer’s leadership with it – will continue to crumble, and those opportunistically embracing him will dispose of him when they believe the moment is right.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
