The Labour MP and shadow cabinet minister Jon Trickett says he warned the party’s leadership earlier this year about the risks of ignoring northern voters, but his research was “unwelcome and suppressed”.
Trickett and his shadow cabinet colleague Ian Lavery collaborated on a 36-page study called Northern Discomfort, based on research into 50 seats, the vast majority of which Labour went on to lose in last week’s general election.
The pair said they had taken their findings to Jeremy Corbyn, warning that Labour risked being abandoned by voters outside London.
But the pamphlet was never published. Trickett said: “It went into the ether. It got lost and we couldn’t get it signed off. We formed the impression that it was unwelcome and suppressed.”
He added: “I don’t think it was understood how significant the problems in the north were – though there was little excuse for not understanding it.”
The pamphlet called on Labour to “abandon the notion that we do not need to resource traditionally ‘safe’ Labour seats” and recommended the party considered “an extensive northern ‘Marshall Plan’” for “post-industrial and coalfield communities”.
They also recommended a dramatic constitutional shakeup, to return power to northern communities.
“Carrying out a once-in-a-generation shift in the location of power and wealth of our country away from a privileged few, based as they are in a small part of central London, is the only way to change the alienation and anxiety which is felt by millions of people,” it said.
Trickett added that a senior figure in the Labour hierarchy had told him on election day that his own Hemsworth seat in Yorkshire was “rock solid”.
“The staff were saying that the north was fine,” he said. “In the event, his majority was trimmed to 1,180, while a string of other historically Labour-held seats, including frontbencher Laura Pidcock’s in North West Durham, fell to the Conservatives.”
The title of Lavery and Trickett’s report was a deliberate inversion of a Fabian pamphlet called “Southern Discomfort” published by Giles Radice in the wake of Labour’s 1992 defeat, which argued that the party needed to build its appeal in the south.
Lavery, who was Labour’s joint campaign coordinator, was careful not to criticise the way the party fought the campaign – laying the blame solely on its Brexit policy.
He told the Guardian: “At every juncture, every shadow cabinet meeting, I was telling people what was going to happen here: I was banging my head against a wall, saying what was going to happen.
“There were these voices on the shadow cabinet who were absolutely determined that the real issue was the Liberal Democrats. And I said, it’s not the Liberal Democrats we need to worry about, it’s the Tories and the Brexit party in the north. And I was sneered at. I was sneered at by leftwing intellectuals,” he added.
Lavery, who is considering running for the deputy leadership, said, “I would want to get the shadow cabinet in a bus, and drive them up into the Midlands, east and west, into Yorkshire, Humberside, and the north-west and the north-east, and show them there’s a different land out there: there’s a different place, and it’s called ‘outside London’. People need to realise that people are living differently.”
