“All parties when they govern are effectively a coalition”, said David Lammy on Thursday night, when the deputy PM was in the unenviable spot of being the first Labour politician up to bat on the BBC’s rolling elections coverage. The question of who Labour’s coalition is has been newly live in recent months, as the strategy that the party has been pursuing up until now has come under fire and lost crucial backers internally (most crucially of all, departed chief of staff Morgan McSweeney).
The until-recently-prevailing idea that Labour can take a firm line on sensitive issues like immigration, and in general actively emphasise certain elements of illiberalism in its programme, as a prophylactic against losing votes to Reform, is appealing in its simplicity. Unfortunately, this simplicity is complicated by several key facts.
Firstly, there is the fact that the government has followed this strategy since the start of its term, and it demonstrably has not stopped the march of Reform. Advocates of doubling down on it must account for why that is.
Secondly, there is the related fact that seats lost from Labour to Reform are often not lost solely – or even largely – because of direct switching from one party to the other. There is a more complicated electoral calculus at play involving a collapsing Tory vote share and, most relevantly, Labour vote loss to progressive parties (per YouGov’s Patrick English, “There is little to no statistical relationship between Reform performance and Labour performance, but a very strong (negative) relationship between Labour and Green performance”). Differential turnout – high levels of enthusiasm among Reform and Green voters to turn out, low levels of enthusiasm among Labour supporters – also still plays a massively underappreciated role.
Thirdly, there is the polling telling us that while those who voted for Labour in 2024 and have since shifted allegiances to other progressive parties are fairly open to coming back to Labour, those who have shifted to Reform are notably unlikely to reconsider switching back (as a headline in the New Statesman from last week put it, “Just 1 per cent of Reform supporters would consider supporting Labour”). This means that even the most hypothetically sympathetic parts of the current Reform vote are not meaningfully winnable for Labour. Labour probably does need to find some voters from the right to maintain its majority, but they may have to come among from a pool of voters who are more like soft Conservatives.
The Labour Party is intensely sentimental about its view of itself and of who it represents, a view that has often been at odds with the actual base of the party. It wants to represent the places that are now electing Reform candidates, and this desire has been coupled with often clear disdain for more left-wing voters, something the Economist has described as a “hippy punching” strategy. Understandably given its history and makeup, Labour does not want to be the party of the financially secure, but seems to have trouble acknowledging that it is not just Reform, but also the Greens, who are now the choice of Britain’s most precarious voters.
The Prime Minister is claiming in the opinion pages of the Guardian that the results mean he will tack neither left nor right, instead seemingly preferring to sit in the empty bathtub of the “broad but shallow” long after the water has drained away. Willingness to not seek the votes of – even to put yourself in opposition to – the interests of certain parts of the electorate who are very unlikely to vote for you is a necessary part of any sound electoral strategy. Problems arise when you incorrectly identify the section who might vote for you and therefore fail to serve the interests of your actual supporters, particularly in our newly multi-party system: there are other places to go.
Much consideration will now go to Starmer’s imperilled leadership and the policy direction of the party. Labour also needs to examine who its supporters actually are, with a view to building from there, and not just who the party would like them to be.
[Further reading: Angela Rayner: Labour isn’t working, bring back Burnham]
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