Britain feels better for putting an ugly byelection contest behind it. The very worst of politics was on display in West Yorkshire, with homophobia and intimidation taking root in the campaign to be the next MP for Batley and Spen. The harassment endured by Labour’s candidate, Kim Leadbeater, disgusted all those tired of the hate that has envenomed political debate. But the right result was obtained: her narrow victory over the Conservatives.
Ms Leadbeater is the sister of Jo Cox, who was the constituency’s MP until she was murdered in 2016 by a white-supremacist terrorist in the run up to the Brexit referendum. Labour’s candidate had the energy, charisma and mental toughness to withstand the divisive politics of George Galloway, who seemed bent on stirring up resentments in the Muslim community in a seat where a classroom row about the depiction of the prophet Muhammad remains unresolved. Satisfyingly, he failed. By contrast, Ms Leadbeater wanted to bridge divides rather than widen them.
Mr Galloway’s playbook had worked before: he unseated Labour in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005, and Bradford West in 2012, by making mischief when his former party was in difficulty. His aim this time appeared to be to cause an upset not by winning himself but by splitting Labour’s vote. Unable to succeed in the court of public opinion, Mr Galloway is somewhat optimistically threatening to win in front of a judge and overturn the result. One can only hope that the traces of the poisonous campaign are washed away by Ms Leadbeater’s victory.
Mr Galloway did his best to turn the contest into a referendum on Sir Keir Starmer. Since 2019 the tectonic plates of politics have been shifting rapidly and the rhetoric of Sir Keir’s Labour party has been failing to keep up. This translated into a series of electoral earthquakes. In May, a shock defeat for Labour in a byelection in Hartlepool saw a poor north-eastern town elect its first-ever Conservative MP. Last month the party slumped to its worst-ever byelection result in Chesham and Amersham, a leafy commuter-belt seat. Losing Batley and Spen, which has been Labour since 1997, risked delivering a coup de grâce.
Labour won by getting its residual vote out in West Yorkshire. It was helped by a lacklustre Conservative party ground operation. Voters were none too impressed to discover that the Tory health secretary, Matt Hancock, had – with his lover – broken social distancing guidelines that he expected the rest of the country to follow. The Conservative candidate was a Leeds councillor who could not attract the 6,000 supporters of a parochial Ukip breakaway party in 2019 that did not contest the byelection. Ms Leadbeater, the only major candidate who is from Batley, ran on local issues.
It seems wishful thinking to claim that Labour is winning back substantial numbers of 2019 Tory voters. The party has conspicuously failed to win back the Scottish voters it lost to the SNP and the leave voters it lost to Mr Johnson; now it risks alienating Muslim voters. Labour needs to work out what its winning electoral coalition is, and start focusing on the issues that would convince these voters to back it. Sir Keir can’t defeat Mr Galloway’s politics by emulating them. Labour cannot allow the progressive vote in the south to disintegrate into Liberal Democrat and Green support. Neither can it afford to let the Tories make gains at its expense in the north. Before Batley and Spen, 60% of people polled said Sir Keir was doing a bad job as leader. To improve, he needs to display a deep understanding of how Labour can win. Boris Johnson is beatable. But Sir Keir must show that he has a plan to beat him.
