LABOUR’S local election debacle shows that the Tory advance in England has not been reversed by the pandemic. It has accelerated.

The appalling Hartlepool result – in four years the constituency has gone from voting 52 per cent Labour to 51 per cent Conservative – was accompanied by hundreds of council seat losses and, in key mayoral contests, the re-election of incumbent Tories with increased margins (Andy Street in the West Midlands ended up with an eight-point lead over Labour, that had been 0.8 points in 2017; in Tees Valley, Ben Houchen turned a knife-edge 51-49 per cent win over Labour then into a 73-27 landslide). 

This was not the pattern everywhere, but it was the general pattern. Tory inroads into Leave-voting Labour areas seen in 2019 are redrawing the political map.

The Labour leadership’s reaction so far is to double down on a failed strategy. The “root-and-branch policy review” is openly discussed as an opportunity for the right to jettison the range of left policies that Labour was committed to when Keir Starmer became leader in March last year, most of which the party has already shelved in practice (the Green New Deal, extension of public ownership over transport and utilities, bans on zero-hours contracts, higher wages). 

No matter that when Jeremy Corbyn was leader even the Tories had to announce the end of austerity to compete with the popularity of these policies; nor that none of the post-mortems of the 2019 election suggest that Labour’s policies were behind its defeat; nor even that recent polling commissioned by the Communication Workers Union in Hartlepool itself showed that these policies remain popular. 

Starmer’s supporters are already blaming the left for his electoral humiliation and the policy changes and shadow cabinet reshuffles being trailed all involve further lurches right.

The Labour left has a strong riposte to this, eloquently put by MPs including Richard Burgon and Diane Abbott over the weekend. It is Starmer’s total failure to oppose the Conservatives that enables the ruling party to get away with its catastrophic handling of the coronavirus crisis; it is his relentless war on Labour branches and members that bled the party of tens of thousands of committed activists it needed to fight an election campaign, while simultaneously presenting the public with a picture of a divided party obsessed with fighting itself.

The left are right that the attempt to blame “long Corbyn” for defeat is nonsense: it cannot explain why Starmer is doing worse than Corbyn did in 2019, and of course relies on the conspiracy of silence that politicians and media apply to the 2017 election. More problematic is the charge that both 2021 and 2019 are symptoms of a much longer-lasting decline, one that has seen Labour support fall consistently in the Midlands, northern England and (faster than either) in Scotland for decades. 

Bright spots in last week’s results (victories in Manchester and London, say) don’t provide much hope at national level: Labour can never win a general election as the party of major urban centres alone. But this increases the importance for the left of revisiting the election that our rulers are determined to erase from history: 2017, the year that Labour bucked the trend.

The right don’t talk about 2017, while liberals try to explain away Labour’s biggest vote share increase in 70 years as being unrelated to Corbyn or the socialist manifesto (though surveys at the time made the connection to the manifesto very clear). 

It has even been claimed that the 2017 surge was an anti-Brexit vote. The claim doesn’t stand up. If Labour’s vote increase in 2017, when it was committed to respecting the referendum result, was an anti-Brexit vote, why didn’t it hold up in 2019 when it was actually anti-Brexit?

Nor does the argument explain the most significant aspect of the 2017 advance — its near-universal nature. Though there were warning signs in some Leave areas like the loss of Mansfield, this was not typical. 

In that election, in scores of Labour seats, sitting MPs saw massive increases in their majorities. This applied to Leave-voting Hartlepool (where the vote rose 16.9 per cent on 2015) as well as to Remain-voting Streatham (up 15.5 per cent). Its vote rose significantly in Wales and rose too in Scotland, though less markedly. It surged in longtime Labour strongholds but also in true-blue Tory country. Though it was victory in Canterbury that made the headlines, massive vote increases were taking place all over, from Cornwall’s Camborne and Redruth (up 19.2 per cent to just a couple of points shy of the Tory winners) to the Cotswolds constituency in Gloucestershire (where Labour came from nowhere to replace the Liberal Democrats in second place). 

If the right ignore the 2017 election, much of the left has ignored this vital aspect of it. The leaked report exposing internal sabotage of the election by Corbyn opponents in Labour HQ has rightly provoked outrage, but I’ve written before of the dangers inherent in arguing that Corbyn could have formed a government with a couple of thousand extra votes in the right places.

Socialist change is a tall order and, as we have seen over the last six years, those fighting for it face enormous institutional hostility from the British state and mass media as well as from within the labour movement itself. This can only be overcome by winning mass political support. 

There is no road to socialism through minority governments or “rainbow coalitions” with parties like the Liberal Democrats, who are still sometimes bizarrely cited as components of a “progressive majority” of non-Tory voters, despite the blatant and recent evidence that not only will Lib Dems pick coalition with the Tories over alliance with Labour, they will enthusiastically pursue aggressive attacks on working-class communities and the public sector when in government. 

Misreading 2017 has had serious consequences. It was a major advance but an insufficient one. 

Labour should have maintained the mass-movement politics that delivered its surge, and invested heavily in building and maintaining a local political presence in “enemy” territory: there was no iron law that Cornwall and the Cotswolds could not have gone the way of Canterbury. As the slogan of the anti-austerity movement of the 2010s had it, it should have aimed to represent “the 99 per cent,” because Britain is genuinely an oligarchy in which wealth and power are wielded by a tiny minority, and most Conservative voters are exploited by the capitalist system too. They need to be won.

Instead, the attitude that soon came to dominate was that Labour were “almost there,” and could manoeuvre themselves into government not by winning majority support for socialism but by cobbling together a non-Tory majority in Parliament, a strategy implicitly predicated on actually disenfranchising a majority (because such coalitions were only conceivable as “stop Brexit” alliances). 

This resulted in catastrophe in 2019, and the wounds inflicted on Labour in Leave areas are very much still in evidence in 2021. Yet it is still evident in a lot of left discourse. 

Momentum’s push for proportional representation is an example. That PR would be an advantage over first-past-the-post is true enough, but making it a central demand is predicated on that mythical “progressive majority,” when in reality the fact that most people don’t vote Tory is no more significant than the fact that most don’t vote Labour: the assumption that all the non-Tory options are “progressive” is incorrect. 

The demand for PR leads us to avoid the hard political work of winning people to socialism, because it assumes that most people are on our side already and discounts a very large chunk of the working class (those who vote Conservative) as lost causes.

The same attitude is reflected in calls from parts of the left to embrace the “culture war” element of the Tory-Labour divide and write off those perceived to be on the other side as “gammon” or blinkered bigots. 

Criticism of Starmer’s “flags and battleships” act is correct, but because the assumption that “the working class” are into flags and battleships is itself deeply patronising. 

Before the 2019 election, journalist Paul Mason advised this strategy. Noting that Leave-voting areas were switching away from Labour, he called for winning them back not by respecting the Leave vote but by emphasising Labour’s support for Nato and nuclear weapons. Mason read the Leave vote as straightforwardly right wing and projected other right-wing attitudes onto it which he then advised Labour to appease. But the idea that the working class are pro-war is not evidenced. 

The left should neither concede reactionary positions in the hope of winning over working-class votes nor reject working-class voters on the assumption that they hold reactionary positions. It should fight for socialist positions and seek to engage and persuade.

In the process it may be pleasantly surprised, as we discovered in 2017 when Corbyn came out for a foreign policy based on peace and internationalism, which proved unexpectedly popular. The salient example from the recent elections is the CWU’s Hartlepool polling showing support for nationalisations and raising public-sector wages. There is a real “progressive majority” on most economic questions — polls consistently show that most people want the railways or gas and electric back in public hands. But there is no large political party strongly advocating those positions. When there was, in 2017, it made enormous gains.

Politics moves on and we cannot simply reset to 2017. The Tories are reconfiguring the political landscape in their favour and the damage done by Labour’s Remain shift and Starmer’s war on his own party will not be easy to reverse. But understanding why we won when we were winning is vital to turning things around.

That should inform the immediate changes of course that the left wants from Labour. Rebuilding in communities means listening — not to focus groups, but to people in them, including its own members. If Labour HQ thought it knew better than local CLPs as to what makes a successful candidate, its imposition of Paul Williams on Hartlepool has shown how wrong it was. There should be no more selections fixed by the party machine — local members should decide who their candidates are.

Unfortunately too many at the top think the opposite. Croydon North MP Steve Reed’s reaction to Hartlepool was that Starmer was not the problem — it was Labour itself. This contempt for the membership pervades the parliamentary party and the HQ. As one Labour member told me after the Equality and Human Rights Commission report on anti-semitism, “the report is a long list of ways the party HQ let down the members. But the response is to subject the members to more diktats from party HQ.”

This attitude has to be challenged. Labour will not rebuild while it silences and distrusts its own. 

For Starmer, Peter Mandelson and the anti-left brigade, that may not matter so long as the left is crushed. But for most MPs and affiliated unions it should. Starmer cannot be allowed to use a defeat he caused to double down on his march to the right and a dictatorial attitude to local parties. The “policy review” should involve the whole party and CLPs should assert their right to debate what they want. 

And the left needs to recognise the scale of the uphill struggle we face. A movement that is repeatedly trounced in elections does not have the luxury of no-platforming others or mocking and belittling people who don’t vote for us. We need to reclaim the spirit of 2017: a majority can be won for socialism. Our difficult task is to do exactly that.