Britain’s Labour Party lost many of its “safe” seats in 2019. Can it get them back? First it must know why it lost them. Two books explain why, after decades of voting Labour, voters deserted the party
The Red Wall is a group of parliamentary seats in England’s North and Midlands that have traditionally voted Labour; they form a line across the north and Midlands, hence the name. Depending on who you ask, there are about 43 of these seats. In the 2019 General Election, the Tories took 29 of them (and a 30th, Hartlepool, in a by-election some months later). These seats were a large proportion of the 47 that Labour lost to the Tories in 2019, leading to their severe defeat.
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| Hartlepool: A Labour loss (Alexander P. Kapp/Wikimedia Commons) |
Sebastian Payne is Whitehall correspondent of the Financial Times; he also pops up on Sky News and elsewhere quite often as a political commentator. He is only 31, looks younger and seems one of those infuriating young people who have risen without trace. But he is very well-connected; some very prominent people talked to him for this book, and they had a lot to say. Deborah Mattinson has long been a Labour advisor and strategist. She worked until May 2021 for Britain Thinks, a market research and strategy, a research agency that she co-founded, and for which she undertook numerous research and public opinion jobs on behalf of Labour. She is now Director of Strategy for Labour leader Keir Starmer.
Their fieldwork took place some time ago (in Deborah Mattinson’s case, in early 2020) and both books were published before the autumn of 2021, when Boris Johnson’s government made a series of missteps that have cost it crucial support. If the polls are to be believed, the Tories wouldn’t hold many of these seats in an election now. But there could be nearly three years to go before the next election, and as Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in politics. So Labour still needs to know how it lost those seats in 2019. After all, as Mattinson points out, it needs a net gain of 124 seats next time if it wants an absolute majority of just one. So it needs these seats back. Besides, both these writers are politically influential and their opinions on the Red Wall are of more than passing interest, whatever the polls may have done since.
First, Sebastian Payne.
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In 2020 and 2021 Payne braved the COVID pandemic to visit the so-called Red Wall seats. Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England is the result. On the basis of this book, I’d say that Payne is a Tory – perhaps with political ambitions of his own. But he’s a good journalist; he’s talked to a lot of people from both sides, and the fact that he’s himself from Gateshead will have helped. At the end, you don’t have to accept his conclusions. This is a good enough book to help you reach your own. |
| Not liked in the North? Corbyn visits a hospital not long before the 2019 election |
Payne also cites the party’s refusal to fully get behind Brexit although its northern voters had supported it. On the latter point, he detects real anger across the North. He is clearly at least part-right about Brexit being a driver for the Labour loss in 2019; it’s pointless Remainers trying to deny that. But was this was about Brexit itself or the turmoil it unleashed? It could be argued that voters simply wanted the whole wretched business over and done with. Still, Payne stresses the anger that some voters felt when Labour seemed anxious to frustrate the Brexit vote, and the resentment they felt at being told “you voted wrong”. It’s a point clearly acknowledged by Labour MPs Payne talks to, such as Lisa Nandy, who tells him: “We were told that these people are xenophobic, they were racist. Or we were told that people were just in so much despair about how terrible their communities were that they had nothing to lose. All of which is deeply offensive and completely wrong.” Nandy could have added that the Remain campaign in 2016 was hopelessly complacent, and should take some blame for its own defeat.
This disillusion is widespread and again, it may be that Brexit had become a vehicle for it, rather than a cause in itself – something Payne does not really unpack. But he does point out that the defeat wasn’t as sudden as it seemed; the Labour vote in some Red Wall seats had been slipping for a while. Northern voters had been losing faith in Labour for a long time, but the party continued to take them for granted – something that comes across also in Mattinson’s book (more of that below).
But there are also forces that Payne notes, but perhaps underestimates – and which may have been key factors behind the Brexit vote and its aftermath, especially in the old industrial areas. One is the whole question of lost identity. Early in the book he meets Dan Jackson, an NHS executive but also a local historian of Northumbria (and author of a book, The Northumbrians). Together they visit a colliery, long closed now but site of a long-ago mining disaster, and tour a rather tired-looking Blyth shopping centre. Mining has gone. So has shipbuilding, an industry in which Tyneside was once preeminent. (As a child I twice crossed the Atlantic in ships built on Tyneside.) New industries and activities have emerged to replace these, and besides, one wouldn’t necessarily want them back; mining was a dangerous, dirty and uncomfortable industry – a point Neil Kinnock makes to Payne when they speak. Fishing was also physically demanding and very hazardous. But they carried with them an identity and a sense of community that (say) a software startup does not have.
Payne certainly does get this, whether he realises its importance or not. He writes that “Maintaining some sense of community spirit part is a crucial part of where English politics heads next. Jackson’s departing remark circled in my mind. ‘The north-east was about big industry, we never did small boutique firms. That’s why the region was hit so hard when the heavy industry began to close.’” He seems to doubt that newer jobs can replace the sense of identity that the big industries gave. Later, in Grimsby, Payne comments on the effect of the collapse of the fishing industry. “Whether it was mining in Northumberland, steel in County Durham or fishing in Lincolnshire, there was a collectivized lifestyle in the red wall that bound people together.” A friend of mine from the north of England tells me that this is true – and thinks this has changed people’s values, making a link with the new aspirational class referred to earlier. “My cousins who work at Nissan feel nothing like the same pride or solidarity of their forbears, “ my friend tells me. “They now focus on owning their own house, the best car and the individual needs of their family.”
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| The old identity: An anchor chain for the Mauretania, Tyneside, 1907 (Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums) |
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave,
eats a bread it does not harvest,
and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.
Is this the driver behind a lot of the discontent that Payne finds in the Red Wall seats? Might it also be the driver behind Brexit – a search for an identity, especially among the English? Is nationalism replacing the old collective identities? Payne never says so; he may suspect it, but I wonder if it’s something he underestimates.
More of this identity question later, when we look at Mattinson.
There was much to like about this book, but I did feel Payne had ignored some elephants in the room. Two of them Mattinson also ignores – again, I’ll come to them later. But with Payne in particular, there was a failure to challenge some dubious statements by his interviewees. Thus he talks to Imran Ahmad Khan, who won Wakefield off Labour's Mary Creagh, and who tells him: “Nothing has lifted greater numbers out of the pernicious state of poverty than free trade, and for free trade we also require free markets.” But Ahmad Khan is a Brexiter who supported removing Britain from the only really large free market there is. Payne does not challenge him on this hypocrisy.
There are other points where Payne’s interviewees says things that he could have at least questioned. During his visit to Grimsby he talks to Lowestoft fish auctioneer June Mummery, part of Fishing for Leave and a former MEP. She tells Payne she is furious about the fishing deal, turning down all interviews at the end of 2020: “I couldn’t speak for three weeks. ...This government just took away our aspirations and opportunities. By handing over our industry straight back to the EU when our prime minister said he would take back full control.” But Boris Johnson never meant to fulfill those promises; he knew full well he couldn’t – he just did not hold enough cards in his negotiations with the EU, and had bigger fish to fry, so to speak. Loads of people could see that at the time, and Mummery damn well should have done too. Payne does ask the new Tory MP for Grimsby, Lia Nici, to comment on the fishing question but her answer seems evasive. Again, he does not really challenge her. Payne could argue that he was there to listen, not to put his own view; but taking that approach means some readers might assume he is endorsing Mummery’s, or Khan’s, views. Is he?
Even so, this is a book with huge strengths. Payne has made a long journey and spoken to a lot of people on both sides – including both party leaders. He also speaks to Tony Blair – who, predictably perhaps, blames the defeat on Labour’s swing to the left under Corbyn. And he has an interesting conversation with Neil Kinnock (now Baron Kinnock). He does not speak to Jeremy Corbyn, which is unfortunate given how much he blames him for Labour’s defeat. However, he doesn’t say why he didn’t; it may be that he was just not granted an interview. He does talk to one or two key Corbyn allies, including John McDonnell.
Payne does seem to be a Tory, but that hasn’t stopped him listening carefully to his Labour interviewees; in fact, on a personal level, he seems to have liked them more. In Hartlepool, Payne has an extended interview with Boris Johnson himself, but one senses he does not really like him that much, though he doesn’t say so. On the same day he meets Angela Rayner and seems to respond to her quite warmly, as he does to Lisa Nandy. You can quarrel with Payne’s analysis (or lack of it, sometimes), and I thought he should have challenged some of what he heard. But he lets his interviewees speak, and their views are frank and interesting. And some of his insights seem very shrewd.
So to the second book, Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next?, by Deborah Mattinson. She is from the other side of the political spectrum, and since writing the book she has become Director of Strategy to Keir Starmer.
For her book, she talks to an entirely different group of people. Payne drives around much of the Red Wall and speaks to MPs, ex-MPs and prominent locals, but doesn’t do a deep dive with the voters themselves. Mattinson does, organizing focus groups in February-March 2020 in Accrington, Darlington and Stoke. (Stoke had to be virtual as the pandemic kicked in while she pursued the project.) But some of her conclusions are strikingly similar.
For her “deep dive” in Hyndburn (Accrington), Stoke-on-Trent and Darlington, Mattinson specifically recruits people who have historically voted Labour but voted Tory this time. There is an obvious danger here of getting people who felt more strongly than the average. But she did the selection indirectly, using an attitudinal questionnaire to select those who fitted her profile, rather than asking outright for those who had switched parties. She restricts her choice somewhat by looking for people from the C2DE social grades – manual workers, carers, drivers, construction workers and factory workers. But she does go for a representative spread of age and ethnic identity.
The key messages Mattinson gets are not so different from Payne’s. Labour had stopped listening. Early in the book she makes a startling admission: “Other than the occasional by-election, at no point in the decades that I spent advising Labour did we ever consider running focus groups or polling in any of the Red Wall seats. Their reliability was seen as a given.” This is revealing, as is a later passage when she records that she did once do such an exercise in Scotland and found clear disaffection with Labour; she then spent what she says was an uncomfortable afternoon briefing the then Scottish Labour leader, Johann Walton, who she says “pushed back” on all her findings. The party lost most of its Scottish seats to the SNP very soon afterwards. For decades, Labour didn’t listen to its core supporters – and Mattinson knows it.
Again, Corbyn was loathed. Mattinson finds a very strong feeling among her participants that Labour represents London middle-class people and students, not them. This is also reflected in priorities that seem sometimes to obsess Labour activists, but are of no interest to the voters. An example is Trans rights, which were “dominating the leadership contest when I was up in Accrington in March 2020….’How many trans people are there?’ one asked the others in the focus group. ...’There’s thousands of kids here with no work and no hope. Why don’t they think about them instead?’” Mattinson at no point suggests that Trans rights do not matter. But as she says, this looks to many voters like a politically correct, morally superior Labour, fixated on priorities irrelevant to most people, antagonistic to northern voters and tied up with Corbyn, who they deeply dislike.
This cultural divide is also reflected in attitudes to patriotism. Mattinson finds that the latter is very strong amongst Red Wall voters, more so than down south. (She backs this up, quoting a 2018 survey that found folks in the northeast, Yorkshire and the Midlands were more than 10 per cent more likely to be ‘proud to be British’ than people living in London.) A perception amongst Northerners that Corbynites and the like were not patriotic like them clearly hurt Labour. Mattinson is thoughtful about this, connecting it to the participants’ feeling that their towns have declined, leaving them less to identify with. “If they… feel little sense of belonging either to nearby cities or the capital, it is perhaps not surprising that they look to the country as a source of pride,” she writes. She also detects a deep sense that the industrial heritage of which many were proud has disappeared; while there may be new jobs in some places, they can’t replace that. It fits with Payne’s finding that the loss of mining, steel and fishing brought a sense of lost identity.
But while both writers pick up on this, neither seems to see its long-term dangers. People who feel they do not belong will look for something to which they feel they do. The search for identity – for belonging to a group, nation, race, what have you – is a key element in authoritarian politics, a phenomenon described (in rather different ways) in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), in Jan-Werner Müller’s more recent What Is Populism? (2016), and in Peter Ftizsche’s intriguing dissection of the rise of Nazism, Germans Into Nazis (1998). There is a potential hellscape here and the Brexit vote may have been an early warning.
Unlike Payne, Mattinson isn’t uncritical of the attitudes or statements she hears. She makes one comment that I found very striking: While Red Wall voters have some genuine grievances (she doesn’t deny that for a minute), they need to take more responsibility for the decisions that affect their lives, rather than expecting solutions to be delivered to them. If democracy is to work, she says, then voters must not just expect government to deliver solutions and then be “furious” when they fail. I was also struck that her participants seem to have real hatred for the south of England and its people, although some have never really been there. This isn’t reasonable. It’s true the south has had a lot more spent on it. But as a southerner, I wondered how many of her focus-group members had ever struggled to breathe on a Central Line train at rush hour, or despaired at house prices that mean they will never own their own home. (It should be said that none of Payne’s interviewees expressed this hatred for the south, and a northern friend of mine strongly questions that it exists – rather, he says, there is hatred for a distant Westminster etstablishment. He also points out that many Londoners have never been to the north of England and still think everyone there wears clogs.)
Mattinson gives a short list of measures that Labour need to take if they are to recover these seats. Voters, she says, need to know what Starmer believes in. This is surely important. In his own book, Payne says that almost none of his Labour interviewees could tell him what the Labour “big idea” should be. The only exception is Kinnock, who tells Payne that the source of individual liberty is collective provision. If Labour can be the “security party” in terms of personal security, employment, national security and everything else, he says, they can appeal across the divisions in British society. “It was the first convincing thought I’d heard about how Labour can reconnect to its lost voters,” writes Payne. Mattinson offers nothing like this, but clearly sees the need for Starmer to offer a clear statement of belief. It may be that, as the new head of strategy, she has discussed it with Starmer in private. If she hasn’t, she needs to; it is sorely lacking.
Mattinson also thinks Labour needs to convince people that it can be trusted with the economy, and talk to them more about their real concerns, like immigration and crime. She also says Labour must address the north-south divide. Lastly, she says Labour must be positive about Britain. As one person says to her, “I want to see them really stand up for the country. Show they believe our history is great, not evil.” She does not point out an inconvenient fact: that unfortunately, some (not all!) of our history actually is evil. And as I suggested above, a search for identity can lead to some horrible places. Labour may want to be a bit cautious about this one.
These are both interesting books, by two people who have gone out, met people, asked the right questions and really listened to the answers. They are also both well written, Payne’s in particular. I came away with a clear, credible explanation as to why Labour lost its “safe” seats in 2019. To be sure, the authors are less clear on what Labour should do about it. But they could argue that that wasn’t their purpose.
However, as I suggested earlier, I felt that both books ignored two huge elephants in the room. They’re as follows.
First, there’s the electoral system. I’ve written about the UK’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system before (see link) so won’t do so at length here, but it’s worth noting its relevance to Brexit and the Red Wall. Mattinson notes that the EU referendum was the first time these northern voters’ voices had been heard. I am sure this is true, and that it intensified their anger when some politicians seemed to want to overturn the result. However, Mattinson and Payne both ignore the role of FPTP in this; basically, it means parties need not listen to most voters. This is because the system delivers victory on the basis of wafer-thin margins, as there are usually only two serious candidates in each race. The House of Commons Library states that, in 2019, 67 out of 650 seats – more than one in 10 – were won by a margin of 5% or less of votes cast. (In 2017 it was worse, with 97 such seats.) This means that even in the few marginal seats that decide the election, the parties have to appeal only to the very small percentage of voters who might change their minds; under FPTP, they have no need of second preferences. So elections are usually fought on narrow ground, and reflect the concerns only of those voters who might change sides. In short, a party only need listen to a minority of voters, and the rest can sod off.
In their 2017 book Brexit and British Politics, Geoffrey Evans and Anand Menon argue that in recent years all debate has been concentrated in the ideological centre; as Labour chased Basildon Man, a broader polity disappeared. One might call this centrification (my phrase, not theirs). They refer to it as an elite consensus, within which globalization and values on matters such as gay marriage and capital punishment were not open to question. So the Brexit vote actually was the first time people felt they had been asked about anything. They saw a chance to rebel against this elite consensus. Oddly, Evans and Menon, too, ignore the influence of the electoral system in this, but it surely helped drive the phenomenon they describe. Candidates need appeal only to those who may give them their first vote; they have no need of second preferences, so will not bother with anyone else. In a safe seat they need not bother with anyone at all, as the voters have nowhere else to go. This is why Labour had felt able to neglect the Red Wall seats for so long, and why the voters took a rare chance in the referendum to kick them in the teeth. Three years later, their patience with Labour snapped altogether.
The second elephant in the room was political morality. I was frustrated by both authors’ tendency to quote interviewees as saying “Labour ignored its voters over Brexit” and present this as a failing, at least by inference. Are they saying that Labour MPs should have got wholeheartedly behind Brexit? Some did, but others (and some Tory MPs) made a moral decision that a “hard Brexit’” was bad for the country and they could not vote for it. Are Mattinson and Payne saying those MPs should have voted for something they knew was wrong? What are the moral implications of that?
Mary Creagh, the prominent Labour MP who lost Wakefield in 2019, tells Payne: “I can’t bring myself to do something that I know will cause hardship to people who are already struggling. I can’t pretend that something bad is somehow going to be good.” In Grimsby, former MP Melanie Onn also tells Payne of the anguish she felt deciding whether or not to vote for a withdrawal deal that she really did not believe in (she eventually did). This is a tricky moral area for MPs; if your constituents want something bad, should you vote for it anyway? If you push that to its ultimate conclusion, Hitler could have said he was simply following the will of the people. I didn’t feel Payne confonted this question – and Mattinson doesn’t either; given that she’s now Starmer’s Director of Strategy, that worries me.
Mattinson’s fieldwork was nearly two years ago, Payne’s 18 months. Mattinson admits that there is never a good time to end a book like this because things can change so quickly – especially now. “In years of monitoring public opinion, I have never known it to be so volatile,” she says. Moreover the autumn of 2021, after both she and Payne had gone to press, saw a series of missteps and outright blunders by the Johnson government, starting with the release of sewage into British waterways and followed by empty shelves and dry petrol stations because of the driver shortage. Then came the botched attempt to shield Owen Paterson, a Tory MP and former minister facing corruption allegations. Finally it transpired that Johnson had permitted wholesale breaches of lockdown in No 10 itself, with multiple parties and gatherings in the garden, the Cabinet Room and even in the PM’s flat. On January 19 2022 a poll by J.L. Partners for Channel 4 News suggested that, if an election were held then, the Tories would lose all but three of their Red Wall seats.
This should not make Labour too optimistic about the next election. It could be nearly another three years before it comes around, and once again, a week is a long time in politics. Moreover, as Mattinson warned, Labour will need a gain of 124 seats to secure a majority of just one. Even if the Tories are wiped out in the Red Wall and its seats there all revert to Labour, it’ll need big wins elsewhere as well; it must remember that as well as a Leaver north of England, there is a Remainer south, where much of its support now lies. It needs to retain it, and so far liberal Remain voters I know are not very impressed with Starmer’s leadership. There is a risk that the party could lose the support it still has without really regaining its traditional voters.
Labour should also remember that it must believe in something if it is to govern, rather than cut its cloth to focus groups. For all their importance, these books are not instruction manuals.
Sebastian Payne, Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour's Lost England (Macmillan, September 2021)
Deborah Mattinson, Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next? (Biteback, September 2020)
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There are other points where Payne’s interviewees says things that he could have at least questioned. During his visit to Grimsby he talks to Lowestoft fish auctioneer June Mummery, part of Fishing for Leave and a former MEP. She tells Payne she is furious about the fishing deal, turning down all interviews at the end of 2020: “I couldn’t speak for three weeks. ...This government just took away our aspirations and opportunities. By handing over our industry straight back to the EU when our prime minister said he would take back full control.” But Boris Johnson never meant to fulfill those promises; he knew full well he couldn’t – he just did not hold enough cards in his negotiations with the EU, and had bigger fish to fry, so to speak. Loads of people could see that at the time, and Mummery damn well should have done too. Payne does ask the new Tory MP for Grimsby, Lia Nici, to comment on the fishing question but her answer seems evasive. Again, he does not really challenge her. Payne could argue that he was there to listen, not to put his own view; but taking that approach means some readers might assume he is endorsing Mummery’s, or Khan’s, views. Is he?
Even so, this is a book with huge strengths. Payne has made a long journey and spoken to a lot of people on both sides – including both party leaders. He also speaks to Tony Blair – who, predictably perhaps, blames the defeat on Labour’s swing to the left under Corbyn. And he has an interesting conversation with Neil Kinnock (now Baron Kinnock). He does not speak to Jeremy Corbyn, which is unfortunate given how much he blames him for Labour’s defeat. However, he doesn’t say why he didn’t; it may be that he was just not granted an interview. He does talk to one or two key Corbyn allies, including John McDonnell.
Payne does seem to be a Tory, but that hasn’t stopped him listening carefully to his Labour interviewees; in fact, on a personal level, he seems to have liked them more. In Hartlepool, Payne has an extended interview with Boris Johnson himself, but one senses he does not really like him that much, though he doesn’t say so. On the same day he meets Angela Rayner and seems to respond to her quite warmly, as he does to Lisa Nandy. You can quarrel with Payne’s analysis (or lack of it, sometimes), and I thought he should have challenged some of what he heard. But he lets his interviewees speak, and their views are frank and interesting. And some of his insights seem very shrewd.
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So to the second book, Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next?, by Deborah Mattinson. She is from the other side of the political spectrum, and since writing the book she has become Director of Strategy to Keir Starmer.
For her book, she talks to an entirely different group of people. Payne drives around much of the Red Wall and speaks to MPs, ex-MPs and prominent locals, but doesn’t do a deep dive with the voters themselves. Mattinson does, organizing focus groups in February-March 2020 in Accrington, Darlington and Stoke. (Stoke had to be virtual as the pandemic kicked in while she pursued the project.) But some of her conclusions are strikingly similar.
The key messages Mattinson gets are not so different from Payne’s. Labour had stopped listening. Early in the book she makes a startling admission: “Other than the occasional by-election, at no point in the decades that I spent advising Labour did we ever consider running focus groups or polling in any of the Red Wall seats. Their reliability was seen as a given.” This is revealing, as is a later passage when she records that she did once do such an exercise in Scotland and found clear disaffection with Labour; she then spent what she says was an uncomfortable afternoon briefing the then Scottish Labour leader, Johann Walton, who she says “pushed back” on all her findings. The party lost most of its Scottish seats to the SNP very soon afterwards. For decades, Labour didn’t listen to its core supporters – and Mattinson knows it.
Again, Corbyn was loathed. Mattinson finds a very strong feeling among her participants that Labour represents London middle-class people and students, not them. This is also reflected in priorities that seem sometimes to obsess Labour activists, but are of no interest to the voters. An example is Trans rights, which were “dominating the leadership contest when I was up in Accrington in March 2020….’How many trans people are there?’ one asked the others in the focus group. ...’There’s thousands of kids here with no work and no hope. Why don’t they think about them instead?’” Mattinson at no point suggests that Trans rights do not matter. But as she says, this looks to many voters like a politically correct, morally superior Labour, fixated on priorities irrelevant to most people, antagonistic to northern voters and tied up with Corbyn, who they deeply dislike.
This cultural divide is also reflected in attitudes to patriotism. Mattinson finds that the latter is very strong amongst Red Wall voters, more so than down south. (She backs this up, quoting a 2018 survey that found folks in the northeast, Yorkshire and the Midlands were more than 10 per cent more likely to be ‘proud to be British’ than people living in London.) A perception amongst Northerners that Corbynites and the like were not patriotic like them clearly hurt Labour. Mattinson is thoughtful about this, connecting it to the participants’ feeling that their towns have declined, leaving them less to identify with. “If they… feel little sense of belonging either to nearby cities or the capital, it is perhaps not surprising that they look to the country as a source of pride,” she writes. She also detects a deep sense that the industrial heritage of which many were proud has disappeared; while there may be new jobs in some places, they can’t replace that. It fits with Payne’s finding that the loss of mining, steel and fishing brought a sense of lost identity.
But while both writers pick up on this, neither seems to see its long-term dangers. People who feel they do not belong will look for something to which they feel they do. The search for identity – for belonging to a group, nation, race, what have you – is a key element in authoritarian politics, a phenomenon described (in rather different ways) in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951), in Jan-Werner Müller’s more recent What Is Populism? (2016), and in Peter Ftizsche’s intriguing dissection of the rise of Nazism, Germans Into Nazis (1998). There is a potential hellscape here and the Brexit vote may have been an early warning.
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| Lisa Nandy thinks the approach to Leave voters was "deeply offensive and completely wrong" (Kevin Walsh/Wikimedia Commons) |
Mattinson gives a short list of measures that Labour need to take if they are to recover these seats. Voters, she says, need to know what Starmer believes in. This is surely important. In his own book, Payne says that almost none of his Labour interviewees could tell him what the Labour “big idea” should be. The only exception is Kinnock, who tells Payne that the source of individual liberty is collective provision. If Labour can be the “security party” in terms of personal security, employment, national security and everything else, he says, they can appeal across the divisions in British society. “It was the first convincing thought I’d heard about how Labour can reconnect to its lost voters,” writes Payne. Mattinson offers nothing like this, but clearly sees the need for Starmer to offer a clear statement of belief. It may be that, as the new head of strategy, she has discussed it with Starmer in private. If she hasn’t, she needs to; it is sorely lacking.
Mattinson also thinks Labour needs to convince people that it can be trusted with the economy, and talk to them more about their real concerns, like immigration and crime. She also says Labour must address the north-south divide. Lastly, she says Labour must be positive about Britain. As one person says to her, “I want to see them really stand up for the country. Show they believe our history is great, not evil.” She does not point out an inconvenient fact: that unfortunately, some (not all!) of our history actually is evil. And as I suggested above, a search for identity can lead to some horrible places. Labour may want to be a bit cautious about this one.
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These are both interesting books, by two people who have gone out, met people, asked the right questions and really listened to the answers. They are also both well written, Payne’s in particular. I came away with a clear, credible explanation as to why Labour lost its “safe” seats in 2019. To be sure, the authors are less clear on what Labour should do about it. But they could argue that that wasn’t their purpose.
However, as I suggested earlier, I felt that both books ignored two huge elephants in the room. They’re as follows.
First, there’s the electoral system. I’ve written about the UK’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system before (see link) so won’t do so at length here, but it’s worth noting its relevance to Brexit and the Red Wall. Mattinson notes that the EU referendum was the first time these northern voters’ voices had been heard. I am sure this is true, and that it intensified their anger when some politicians seemed to want to overturn the result. However, Mattinson and Payne both ignore the role of FPTP in this; basically, it means parties need not listen to most voters. This is because the system delivers victory on the basis of wafer-thin margins, as there are usually only two serious candidates in each race. The House of Commons Library states that, in 2019, 67 out of 650 seats – more than one in 10 – were won by a margin of 5% or less of votes cast. (In 2017 it was worse, with 97 such seats.) This means that even in the few marginal seats that decide the election, the parties have to appeal only to the very small percentage of voters who might change their minds; under FPTP, they have no need of second preferences. So elections are usually fought on narrow ground, and reflect the concerns only of those voters who might change sides. In short, a party only need listen to a minority of voters, and the rest can sod off.
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| Not everyday wear: Clog dancers in Skipton, 2014 (Tim Green/Wikimedia Commons) |
The second elephant in the room was political morality. I was frustrated by both authors’ tendency to quote interviewees as saying “Labour ignored its voters over Brexit” and present this as a failing, at least by inference. Are they saying that Labour MPs should have got wholeheartedly behind Brexit? Some did, but others (and some Tory MPs) made a moral decision that a “hard Brexit’” was bad for the country and they could not vote for it. Are Mattinson and Payne saying those MPs should have voted for something they knew was wrong? What are the moral implications of that?
Mary Creagh, the prominent Labour MP who lost Wakefield in 2019, tells Payne: “I can’t bring myself to do something that I know will cause hardship to people who are already struggling. I can’t pretend that something bad is somehow going to be good.” In Grimsby, former MP Melanie Onn also tells Payne of the anguish she felt deciding whether or not to vote for a withdrawal deal that she really did not believe in (she eventually did). This is a tricky moral area for MPs; if your constituents want something bad, should you vote for it anyway? If you push that to its ultimate conclusion, Hitler could have said he was simply following the will of the people. I didn’t feel Payne confonted this question – and Mattinson doesn’t either; given that she’s now Starmer’s Director of Strategy, that worries me.
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Mattinson’s fieldwork was nearly two years ago, Payne’s 18 months. Mattinson admits that there is never a good time to end a book like this because things can change so quickly – especially now. “In years of monitoring public opinion, I have never known it to be so volatile,” she says. Moreover the autumn of 2021, after both she and Payne had gone to press, saw a series of missteps and outright blunders by the Johnson government, starting with the release of sewage into British waterways and followed by empty shelves and dry petrol stations because of the driver shortage. Then came the botched attempt to shield Owen Paterson, a Tory MP and former minister facing corruption allegations. Finally it transpired that Johnson had permitted wholesale breaches of lockdown in No 10 itself, with multiple parties and gatherings in the garden, the Cabinet Room and even in the PM’s flat. On January 19 2022 a poll by J.L. Partners for Channel 4 News suggested that, if an election were held then, the Tories would lose all but three of their Red Wall seats.
This should not make Labour too optimistic about the next election. It could be nearly another three years before it comes around, and once again, a week is a long time in politics. Moreover, as Mattinson warned, Labour will need a gain of 124 seats to secure a majority of just one. Even if the Tories are wiped out in the Red Wall and its seats there all revert to Labour, it’ll need big wins elsewhere as well; it must remember that as well as a Leaver north of England, there is a Remainer south, where much of its support now lies. It needs to retain it, and so far liberal Remain voters I know are not very impressed with Starmer’s leadership. There is a risk that the party could lose the support it still has without really regaining its traditional voters.
Labour should also remember that it must believe in something if it is to govern, rather than cut its cloth to focus groups. For all their importance, these books are not instruction manuals.
Sebastian Payne, Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour's Lost England (Macmillan, September 2021)
Deborah Mattinson, Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next? (Biteback, September 2020)
I would like to thank Kevin Wilson for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this piece.
Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or Amazon and other online retailers as paperbacks or e-books. Follow Mike on Twitter and Facebook.
