Politics

Labour needs to embrace aspiration to appeal to the whole country—not just the “red wall”

Voters across the UK want pragmatic optimism from politicians, not anger and condescension

May 10, 2021
Starmer campaigning in Hartlepool. Photo: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
Starmer campaigning in Hartlepool. Photo: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Last week’s election results were like a political Rorschach test for the Labour Party. Everyone interpreted the ink blot in the way that fitted their pre-existing perception of the world.

To one faction, the defeat in the Hartlepool by-election was evidence of a need to veer to the radical left; to another it was proof that Keir Starmer needs to do more to woo Leave voters. What the first group saw as a butterfly, the second interpreted as a man on a motorbike, but all sides are in danger of missing the bigger picture.

The shadow cabinet reshuffle kerfuffle is all but irrelevant, although it has further undermined the Labour leader’s authority. The Tory success shows that the political realignment exemplified by the Brexit vote is not over yet. The world at Westminster is still shifting on its axis and party allegiances continue to scramble as people decide who to support on the basis of values, rather than class. There is, however, a danger in misinterpreting the change, and also a risk of stereotyping the voters who are switching from Labour to the Conservatives. 

The so-called “red wall” was first identified by James Kanagasooriam, the super-bright strategist who helped Ruth Davidson briefly transform the Conservatives’ fortunes in Scotland when she was the leader there. I remember going to a dinner with him in 2019, several months before Workington Man had been invented as a key Tory target voter. Kanagasooriam explained to the assembled Tory advisers and MPs that he believed the Conservative Party had been underperforming in successive elections because of the inconsistency of its appeal across the country.

There were, he argued, dozens of seats in the north and the Midlands that on the basis of the demographics of the area should vote Tory, but did not do so because of long-standing cultural hostility to the Conservative Party. He described it as a “red wall” stretching from North Wales into Merseyside, Warrington, Wigan, Oldham, Barnsley and Doncaster. These were, he said, constituencies with similar levels of home ownership and entrepreneurship as other true blue Tory seats. His key insight was that voters there were as aspirational as those in southern market towns, yet there was something that held them back from ticking the Conservative box. 

As Kangasooriam tweeted around the same time: “The history of an area matters—the leave voting 55yr old plumber living in a detached house is more likely to vote Tory in Bournemouth than Wigan, even on the same salary. If the Tories manage to culturally de-toxify in certain seats there is a huge unlocked vote there.” A few months later that is exactly what Boris Johnson did. The Brexit referendum unlocked these votes for the Conservatives, with shared Leave instincts superseding the underlying mistrust of the Tory Party. And Labour simultaneously had made itself toxic to these same voters by electing Jeremy Corbyn as leader. The brand problem that applied to the Tories for all those years now clings to Labour even after a change in leadership.

There are several implications for Starmer that go way beyond who he has in his shadow cabinet. Just as Johnson had to counter the deep suspicion of his party in order to bring these seats into play, so the Labour leader now has to overturn profound and enduring anxieties about voting red. That will require an element of political “shock therapy” to highlight the scale of change.

It certainly means dumping the policies from the last election manifesto, which were categorically rejected by the voters—particularly the tax and spending pledges that undermined Labour’s reputation for economic competence. Starmer must distance himself from his predecessor on policy as conspicuously as he did on antisemitism. So far the Labour leader has, as one shadow frontbencher says, “put party unity over direction,” and that means “he’s making no impression on the voters.” 

It is ridiculous to suggest that people who switched to a more right-wing party might be wooed back to Labour if it becomes more left-wing. These voters are aspirational as well as hard-working. They want to go on holiday, drive a nice car, earn a good wage and not be made to feel bad about it. In Hartlepool, around 60 per cent of people own their own home, far more than in the metropolitan liberal areas that voted for Starmer’s party.

There is a tendency among some in the Labour Party to stereotype the voters in the “red wall” as what Peter Mandelson once called “horny-handed sons of toil,” with Alf Garnett views on immigration and women. In fact, as one Tory strategist says, the typical “red wall” voter is more likely to be “an IT worker from Doncaster.”

Too often, Labour gives the impression that it disapproves of the people it should be trying to win over. Tony Blair always respected Conservative voters—partly because his father was one—but now Labour MPs boast that they could “never be friends with a Tory,” when they should be putting every effort into getting alongside and understanding people who voted Conservative. Starmer denounces Johnson’s party and, by extension, its supporters as the “same old Tories,” but they are not. The danger for him is that people perceive that his party is the “same old Labour” as under Corbyn.

David Blunkett, the Sheffield-born former home secretary, says Labour needs to realise that “people are the same in Hull or Basildon. The last thing they want is to be ‘done unto.’ They want to be liberated, not patronised or treated as victims.” Ambition, not anger, is the key to regaining the trust of these voters. They are looking for pragmatic positivity—not performative patriotism.

This has the advantage that the same message will appeal in a so-called “blue wall” of Tory-held seats that are vulnerable if Johnson continues to play the populist tune. In their book Brexitland, Rob Ford and Maria Sobolewska identify 34 Remain-supporting constituencies won by the Conservatives in 2015 in which the party’s support has fallen by 5 percentage points or more over the last two elections. In 20 of them the Tories are still hanging on, but the authors argue that there could be a political shift that is the mirror image of the change in Leave-supporting areas. They write: “Conservative MPs in this ‘blue wall’ risk falling victim to the same cumulative demographic and electoral trends as their Labour ‘red wall’ colleagues,” particularly if Johnson continues to focus on wooing his new northern and Midlands voters. There are some signs of this in the local election results from Cambridgeshire to Tunbridge Wells.

Too often political strategists segment the electorate by class, gender, education or age, giving the impression that it’s a choice between winning back the “red wall” and retaining the support of liberal voters. Starmer needs to hone an optimistic and aspirational message that appeals to the whole country.