Labour is suffering from a bad case of “long Morgan”

Chasing Reform voters on immigration is a bad strategy that is being badly executed by this government

Keir Starmer’s government is suffering from a bad case of “long Morgan”. The former chief of staff may have gone, but the McSweeney malady lingers on. Labour’s defeat in Gorton and Denton was self-inflicted after the deliberate blocking of Andy Burnham as a Labour candidate for the seat – a Pyrrhic victory as it turns out, and one that has established the Greens as a credible challenger to Labour and catapulted them into second place in some polls.

This is a moment of choice for Labour. Either it can listen to voters, as it did at the time of the SDP insurgence in the 1980s, when the party modernised and changed direction, or it can act like the Liberal Party in 1906. At the moment of the latter’s great landslide, it overlooked the growth of the Labour Representation Committee – the Labour Party’s early incarnation – from two to 29 seats. This grave strategic error eventually meant that the progressive 20th century would belong, mainly, to the Labour Party.

Labour faces a similar existential dilemma today. As one notorious American concession speech went: “The people have spoken,” then, after a beat, “the bastards.” Starmer appears to have taken that as an instruction manual rather than a warning.

In his response to the defeat, the Prime Minister attacked sectarianism – echoing Nigel Farage’s own response. And we know what they both meant. This was an attack on Muslim voters for choosing the Greens. But it was Labour voters – brown and white, working class and middle class – who made that choice as the best way to beat the far right. And they are the core of the electoral coalition Labour will need to win a second term.

There is no method here, only madness. As Paul Ovenden, the former No 10 director of strategy, gleefully made clear in a piece in the Times this week, where he describes Labour values as variously “plainsong” (beautiful), “ritual” (meaningful), “whisky” (useful), and “sackcloth” (mournful). Ovenden could not be more confused if he were Matt Goodwin himself. Those Labour values are the energy source of the party that gave us the welfare state, the minimum wage, council housing, peace in Northern Ireland, equal pay, women’s equality and the strongest anti-racist laws in Europe.

But in the era of “long Morgan”, those achievements are seen as the barnacles on the boat, not as the glories of the Labour movement. In reality, Ovenden’s article, neither writing nor typing (in Mary McCarthy’s helpful classification), is a crude attempt to rally support within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) for Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s immigration reforms, which are a mixture of the sensible and the sinister. Sure, clamp down on loopholes and speed up processing. But why give responsibility for a 30-month review of refugee status to a department that has proved repeatedly unable to manage normal processing? Is the Home Secretary intent on creating her very own backlog?

To be fair, the purpose of mimicking the performative cruelty of Suella Braverman is easy to understand. It’s the pursuit of Reform voters. How wise is that? Well, all politicians should remember “Sutton’s law”. Asked by the FBI why he had robbed so many banks, Willie Sutton replied, “because that’s where the money is”. Political parties should go where the voters are, and as Ben Walker wrote recently for the New Statesman: “Polling suggests almost two million Green voters, one million Lib Dems, and almost two thirds of a million Conservatives are up for grabs.” In contrast, “Just 300,000 current Reform voters say they would consider voting Labour in an election today”.

There is a real “progressive alliance of the mind” among voters at the moment. Why does Farage’s support stick around 25-30 per cent? Because at least 70 per cent of the country doesn’t want him anywhere near No 10. Given the chance in Caerphilly, voters who wanted to defeat Reform flocked to Plaid Cymru. Similarly, in Gorton and Denton they flowed to the Greens. Though to be honest, those Greater Manchester voters were just handed over by Labour. The tragedy is that the Labour Party should be leading the UK’s progressive bloc. Its history and its achievements in the UK should guarantee that. Yet, despite hugely popular policies from rent controls to rail nationalisation, Labour is not seen by progressive voters as the vehicle for their politics. Time for an emergency brake on Labour’s immigration reforms.

[Further reading: Who is Keir Starmer really?]