Labour's one remaining hope?

The ideas of a small but growing tendency hold the key to the fortunes of Starmer and his party

Hartlepool, Hampstead, Hackney. A nice bit of alliteration. But, more importantly, the vital components of the electoral coalition which the Labour party must hold together if it is to achieve electoral success.

Blue-collar Hartlepool, a northern post-industrial town, replete with traditional working-class voters. Hampstead, roosting place of the well-heeled liberal intelligentsia which has traditionally exerted so much influence over Labour party thinking. And Hackney, home of the young, urban, cosmopolitan progressive.

Labour prospers in this day and age when it is able to command sufficient levels of support from each of these groups. It fails when the coalition fractures.

And fracture it has done all-too-frequently in the party’s modern history. On such occasions, it has usually been because the same element – Hartlepool – has been neglected. Hampstead and Hackney tend not to have too much to complain about as far as Labour’s priorities and messaging are concerned.

The same phenomenon just happened again. The results of last week’s local and mayoral elections, plus, of course, a crucial parliamentary byelection, sound the loudest possible alarm that working-class voters across provincial England are deserting the Labour party – again – in droves.

Everyone knows about the victory of Reform, following a seismic swing to it from Labour, in Runcorn and Helsby. But there were other significant – and perhaps more revealing – results. Witness, for example, the county of Durham, historically a hotbed of labour movement activity, home of the famous miners’ gala. For as long as anyone can remember, Labour has been the largest party on the county council. Just 12 years ago, almost 100 of the party’s councillors filled the council chamber.

At last week’s poll, just four Labour councillors were returned. Reform secured 65 seats and swept to control.

Reform’s performance elsewhere was similarly spectacular. In total, it won control of 10 local authorities (there were 23 up for grabs) and two mayoralties. The party is now regularly leading the opinion polls, and all the main bookmakers have installed Nigel Farage as favourite to become the next prime minister. The chances of a Reform government are now very real.

Analysing last week’s results, the doyen of pollsters, Sir John Curtice, found that Reform was ‘particularly popular among those who voted for Brexit in 2016 and for Boris Johnson in 2019’. In other words, it attracted the support of voters who are tired of the hyper-liberal, globalist, technocratic status quo – characterised by radical progressivism in our institutions, open-door immigration, and the erosion of national and economic sovereignty – and are responsive to movements and parties which pledge to challenge it (that the Tories under Johnson ultimately failed to honour that pledge contributed to their wipeout at last year’s general election).

Sir John also informs us that Reform won 39% of the votes in ‘heavily working-class wards’. Its highest vote of all – a remarkable statistic, this – was the 65.1% it secured in Thornley and Wheatley Hill ward, located in Tony Blair’s former constituency of Sedgefield in Durham.

None of this should come as a surprise. Though Labour won a landslide just nine months ago, it did so without commanding much in the way of affection from the electorate. The votes of many were driven as much – perhaps more – by a desire to have rid of the Tories as they were to see a Labour victory. Working-class voters in particular did not return to the party’s fold in any great number. Labour’s share of the C2DEs – the occupational working class – was, at 33%, no higher than it was when it was annihilated at the previous general election in 2019.

Of the 98 seats where Reform came second, 89 were won by Labour – and 60 of those were located in the north of England. Reform parked its tanks on Labour’s lawn last year. Last week, it drove them right up to the front door.

If the Labour government was to ensure its popularity (such as it was) did not plunge early in its term, it needed, as I wrote at the time, to do three things quickly: secure growth in the economy, reduce immigration numbers sharply, and get NHS waiting lists down. It has so far made next to no progress of the first two of these. The danger as the weeks and months drift by is that public hostility to the government, which is growing with each passing day, becomes entrenched. When that happens, it will be almost impossible to turn things around.

When I, as a longstanding Labour member and trade unionist, examine the state of my movement, I see little reason for cheer. But there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. A clutch of Labour MPs have formed the ‘Blue Labour’ caucus. Blue Labour, for the uninitiated, is a tendency within the party which emphasises the importance of family, community and nation and, influenced by Catholic social teaching, seeks to rebuild the politics of the common good. It leans left on the economy but right on social and cultural issues. Socialism with a small ‘c’, as someone once wryly observed.

Blue Labour has no truck with radical progressive ideology and warned from its formation around 15 years ago about the impending rupture between the party and the working-class, which was being engendered principally by the impact of globalisation and mass immigration – two things championed by the party in government – on hard-pressed blue-collar communities. In this prediction, it was prescient.

I declare an interest: I am involved with Blue Labour. Until now, barely any Labour MP was willing to be publicly associated with it. But that’s changing. MPs such as Jonathan Hinder, Dan Carden, Jonathan Brash and David Smith – all of whom represent seats in northern England – have joined the ranks of the new caucus. These MPs know only too well the seriousness of the threat posed by Reform and understand that Labour must reconnect quickly with its working-class base if it is to have any chance of retaining power at the next election.

In an article at the weekend, Hinder wrote that last week’s election results ‘should be the wake-up call we need’. He said Labour had ‘morphed into a hyper-liberal party more than a socialist party, such that secure borders and low immigration are seen as “right wing” within its ecosystem of city-based activists, think-tanks and associated organisations.’ Hinder warned that his party faced an existential crisis. ‘Our drift away from our working-class base has been decades in the making, and goes far deeper than the tenure of any one leader. Platitudes about “listening” and “learning” will not do. It is now or never for Labour and the working class.’

Days later, Blue Labour founder Lord Glasman told the Policy Exchange think-tank: ‘For the last 20 to 30 years … Labour culture has been a hostile environment for working-class people, because if you actually say what you think, you get condemned.’ Few, as I know from experience, understand working-class sentiment as well as Glasman. ‘We [Labour] see people in pain,’ he went on ‘and we call them far right or populists or nativists or racists or sexists. But, no, they’re just speaking.’

Glasman spoke of support for Reform as ‘a working-class insurrection against the progressive ruling class – and the only way to counter it is for the Labour government to lead the insurrection … to celebrate the collapse of the era of globalisation, to embrace the space of Brexit … the protection of our borders, and the resurrection of Labour as the tribute of the working class.’

All of this will resonate with Labour’s traditional working-class voters, as will Blue Labour’s demand that the government commission a public inquiry into the Pakistani-Muslim rape and torture gangs.

In articulating the case for both economic and cultural security, Blue Labour stands as perhaps the party’s only hope of winning back the support of the once-loyal voters who have abandoned it.

Plenty of Labour MPs still represent the priorities of Hampstead and Hackney. And that’s fine. But too few have been willing to speak up for Hartlepool. At least now some have started to do so.

All power to them.

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