Chris Johns
Brexit Britain
Boris routs Starmer. The great post-Brexit British political realignment continues. Or not. During a crisis, incumbents always win. The vaccine bounce. Shower voters with cash while not raising taxes. Who is going to vote against free money? Starmer is invisible and nobody knows what Labour stands for any more. And so on. Take your pick: there is an explanation for everyone in the audience.
Pundits demand simple explanations from a complex phenomenon: a set of election results. When there is no one single explanation, everyone has their favourite. Every vote has a potentially unique driver - or, more likely, a set of drivers. But some trends can be discerned from the numbers.
Labour, without the word ‘New’ in front of it hasn’t won a general election since the party was led by Harold Wilson in 1974, nearly a half century ago. Britain, both its society and economy, is, in 2021, a very different place. A long-term perspective matters and helps us to peer through the statistical fog and commentariat noise.
Labour’s old electoral base, the industrial working class, has shrunk towards vanishing point. The UK is no longer an industrial economy. There are lots of ways to make this point and lots of implications flow from it, so it’s worth looking at the raw numbers1. They are stark.
Chart 1. UK Manufacturing jobs
Chart 1 just looks at manufacturing. That’s some decline. There go all the car, ship and steel workers. There are many sources of other industrial employment, not just manufacturing. Whichever way we look at these kinds of jobs, they have been in decline, pretty much since ‘old’ Labour was last in office. Chart 2 broadens out the definition to encompass things like construction workers. The picture is the same - almost exactly the same - just as stark, albeit at a higher level for obvious reasons.
Chart 2. UK Industrial Jobs
It’s a simple narrative: if the jobs of your supporters, the jobs of the people whose interests you seek to represent, disappear, then maybe your electoral base is at risk. Of course, you can still be ‘working class’ if you are in the service sector. But Old Labour was, in the first instance, organised around industrial workers and, to introduce another important factor, their trades unions.
Chart 3: UK Unionisation Rate
If the source of your core vote is the unionised worker, it is notable that membership of trades unions peaked in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher came to power. Correlation isn’t causation: Thatcherism wasn’t the only driver of declining union power, wasn’t the only reason why manufacturing jobs shrank.
It’s also worth noting here that Labour’s core funding, to this day, comes from union members. If you don’t have the money to organise then you will probably be disorganised.
There is a widespread view that the whole deindustrialisation thing was caused by globalisation in general and China in particular. Another complex phenomenon that defies simple explanation: there is plenty of evidence that it’s a story more about technological change than companies offshoring jobs. Yes, some employment has shifted to low cost locations but blame also rests with the rise of the robots. The UK, like the US, produces a lot more manufactures than it did in the 1970s, albeit with far fewer employees.
So, Labour’s base has been shrinking for decades. Tony Blair managed to reach out beyond that base, but only by (a) turning Labour into an electoral machine via a military-style campaign that controlled the message. He (and Campbell) managed the media, PR: all forms of comms and (b) pushed a clear message of what New Labour stood for. Today, few people in Britain could name a member of Keir Starmer’s cabinet; even fewer have any idea what Labour’s offering actually is.
Corbyn’s legacy is still a factor, not because he is still remembered but more because the factionalised Labour party that he created still exists. It’s been correctly observed that Labour is more interested in talking - having fist fights - with itself rather than engaging with the electorate.
Brexit split Britain in ways that now look set to last for a generation - at least. Labour lost Hartlepool in no small part because they fielded an unabashed Remainer. That’s no way to convince an electorate that Brexit is done, over and no longer a salient issue.
Johnson’s lies, mendacity and dodgy funding of the refurbishment of his flat does not interest the electorate. More so than most elections, this was all about a single issue: Covid. And short memories mean that early mis-steps were forgotten and the vaccination campaign featured heavily in the electorate’s judgement. Starmer was doing well against Johnson a year ago on the chosen battleground of competence. Thanks to the vaccine success, Johnson now wears that cloak of competence. It’s a strange world.
Anti-EU sentiment has hardened with the rows over vaccines and the obvious mistakes made by Brussels. If you are anti-EU then you are pro-Tory. Sometimes it is simple. Nobody said it was fair.
The right wing of British politics has one party: the Conservatives. The left, including the centre-left, is split across a myriad of parties, not just Labour. That represents a potential, if somewhat unlikely, coalition of voters that could, in theory, beat the Tories. It’s worth noting in passing that the Greens can be quietly pleased with their vote, if not their number of seats.
So, there are multiple forces pushing the Labour vote down. Some have been around for years, others are shorter term in nature (and may or may not be sustainable).
The shrinking of Labour’s natural base and source of income. Covid and the vaccine roll-out. Johnson as a high-spending/no tax rises Tory (that’s one thing that’s definitely unsustainable). Starmer’s charisma by-pass. What is Labour’s proposition?
The UK political map is weird. England is mostly Tory-blue with a few lonely pockets of Labour-red. Apart from London of course which, just about, justifies its description as a Labour stronghold. London should fear these election results: the Tories have learned what works and it doesn’t include being nice to the capital or its citizens. Appealing to and stoking anti-London atavism works in the shires.
In Wales, Labour matched its best ever results. Incumbency again. But also a party that is united, an electoral machine, listens to voters and appears to love the country in which it lives. Labour is not just the party of luvvies in the capital. (There are no luvvies in Wales).
Scotland and a contested independence referendum battle in the courts awaits Johnson. It will give himself something to do as long-term trends and short-term mismanagement continue to crush the Labour vote. As important will be the split coalition Johnson faces. He only needs 35% of the vote when the majority 65% is split across four or five parties. That’s the tyranny (or glory, you choose) of first-past-the post voting systems.
As with all data sets there are measurement and definitional issues which we we won’t dwell on here. The data in Chart 1 draw on a long-run bank of England dataset, with some of my estimates tacked on the end.
Succint and insightful. Thanks