General Election 2019: LRC appraisal

Statement by LRC 

This is a report of the discussions at an LRC meeting held in London on Saturday December 14th to assess the election result. Inevitably it is not comprehensive. Further contributions from comrades are very welcome. 

What we are faced with

The general election result was a serious blow to the Labour Party and to the cause of socialism in Britain. The Conservative Party under Boris Johnson now has an absolute majority of seats in the House of Commons - 365 out of 650. Labour has been reduced to 202 MPs. In terms of seats this is the worst result for Labour since 1935.  

Though devastating to Labour supporters, this is actually Labour’s second best result out of the last five general elections in terms of votes cast. Labour won 10.3 million votes, compared to 9.5 million in 2005, 8.6 million in 2010, 9.35 million in 2015 - but 12.9 million in 2017. The results deserve a more detailed analysis. 

Labour lost 42 seats, 37 of them in areas where a majority of people voted to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016. Johnson called the snap election in order to break the deadlock in Parliament about leaving the EU. He campaigned on the slogan ‘Get Brexit done’. In effect he wanted the election to be a referendum on this single issue. He now has his majority and Britain is to leave the EU on January 31st. 

That is not the whole story of the election. Since 2010 Britain has been ruled by Tory austerity. The result has been 120,000 excess deaths, 14 million in poverty including more than 4 million children and a country scarred by food banks and rough sleeping. Britain is now the most unequal country in Europe, with a huge gulf between rich and poor as a result of neoliberal policies. 

The General Election campaign

1.Brexit

Brexit has acted to cut across traditional working class allegiances since the referendum. Roughly two thirds of Tories voted to leave and one third of Labour voters in 2016. There have always been working class Tories - not just since Brexit became an issue. For over a hundred years between a quarter and a third of working class people have voted Conservative.  

The Labour ‘Leave’ voters were heavily concentrated in what were regarded as Labour’s heartlands - in Wales, the Midlands and the North. These were traditionally industrial areas with a strong working class in industries such as coal mining and steel. These industries are long gone. These areas have suffered deindustrialisation over recent decades. Well paid, permanent jobs with a union in the workplace have been destroyed, replaced by casual employment in warehouses, the care industry and the gig economy. Solid working class communities have been broken up and class consciousness inevitably set back. 

For now the Tories are triumphant. At last they can ‘get Brexit done’. Johnson argued that Parliament blocked Brexit, the ‘will of the people’ in 2016. This is yet another lie. The Tories have been in charge of negotiations with the EU since 2016. The deadlock is their mess. The House of Commons actually voted a second reading for Johnson’s deal in October. He then dissolved Parliament in order to get a Tory majority so as to push through his rotten deal and avoid scrutiny.  

Labour correctly voted against Theresa May’s deal and Johnson’s because both opposed access to the single market and customs union, and thus posed a threat to jobs. The LRC meeting was divided as to whether Labour’s offer of a second referendum in 2019 represented a climbdown from the pledge to respect the result of the original referendum in 2017, and how far this affected the election result. Labour’s 2019 position on Brexit was hammered out at the Party Conference. It has been rubbished by Jeremy’s usual critics. What is true is that it was difficult to put across on the doorstep compared with the punchy but simplistic Tory slogan of ‘getting Brexit done’. 

Millions were sick and tired of the inexplicable delays in negotiating Brexit, including some who voted to remain in 2016. Johnson was not going to explain to voters that the divorce settlement with the EU was only the first step in the process. Years of uncertainty and wrangling about trade deals lie ahead. ‘Getting Brexit done’ was the big lie on which the Tories won the election. They will come a cropper in the years ahead as a result. 

2.Mainstream media and social media

Smears and attacks on Corby and his supporters have been consolidated and escalating over the past four years, with an inevitable demoralising effect on some Party members.

The Party response to antisemitism accusations has been slow and indecisive. We also had a problem with the Party machine’s response to disciplinary cases involving antisemitism, particularly under Iain McNicol.

We agreed that social media can be an echo chamber, misleading Party members as to the extent of support we are getting.

The Tories have caught up since the 2017 GE, and spent most their social media efforts with a wave of propaganda in the last week of the campaign.

The LRC meeting discussed again the need for a media of the left and to protect the existing channels – for example, John Mann has already gone after the Canary

We need to continue building a more effective left media.  

3.2019 manifesto

Since Jeremy Corbyn’s election in 2015 the Labour Party has been rejuvenated. It has half a million members and launched a radical 2019 election manifesto, ‘It’s time for real change’. It proposed nationalisation of rail, mail, energy and water and an end to austerity. It outlined an audacious green new deal, which would have created a million jobs and tackle the climate emergency at the same time. 

The programme was greeted with enormous enthusiasm by millions. Four million young people registered to vote as the election was announced. At last they had something worth voting for. Pictures were posted on social media on the election day of people queuing up to vote. Many participated on canvassing sessions when more than a hundred people would mobilise to knock on doors and get the vote out for Labour. This was a vote for hope.  

Labour under Corbyn tried to treat the campaign as a way of raising all the Tory failures in the past ten years and the fears as to how they would further wreck social services if they regained power.

Alas, Labour hopes were dashed. While treating the election as a referendum on ‘getting Brexit done’ the Tory majority in Parliament means Johnson can now attack working class living standards still harder for the next five years – or however long this government lasts. 

4.Our messaging

Did Labour overpromise?  On top of its programme It’s time for real change’ the manifesto was fully costed in a supplementary 44 page document Funding Real Change. By contrast the Tory manifesto was vague and uncosted. Some of Labour’s proposals, like that for free broadband, were bold and eye-catching. But they appeared before the electorate like rabbits out of a hat. In a period where austerity has lowered expectations and hope for many has been extinguished, with a general lack of trust in the political process, Labour’s programme might have seemed to some to be utopian and lack credibility.  

This was not a programme for socialist revolution – it would just have reversed the devastation of neoliberalism and austerity, but policies have to be promoted and argued for extensively among the mass of the population in order to become the common sense of our time. A lesson learned is to simplify our messages and perhaps focus on a handful of key policies that are relevant to particular areas – and then work within local communities to campaign. 

5.Decisions of smaller parties

The Tories were given a big boost by the decision of Nigel Farage to withdraw Brexit Party candidates from standing in Tory seats while continuing to oppose Labour. The Brexit Party got more than 640,000 votes. It showed itself to be a lumpen Tory Party appendage. For its part the Conservatives, the most astute and successful right wing party in Europe for two centuries, has been captured by a Brexit-obsessed sect. 

The LibDems made no net gains in Parliamentary seats.  They were sometimes successful in splitting the anti-Tory vote. The worst case was Kensington, won by Emma Dent Coad in 2017 for Labour by just 20 votes. She was opposed by the LibDem Sam Gyimah, who had been a Tory MP 100 days before. His intervention gifted the seat back to the Tories. The independents were wiped out. The SNP increased its domination in Scotland. A return to Labour in Scotland depends on a successful socialist campaign catching fire in the rest of Britain. 

6.Jeremy Corbyn

Corbyn has been much criticised for the electoral defeat. He has undergone an unprecedented campaign of vilification over the past four years. The right wing of the Labour Party argues that he was toxic on the doorstep. So why was Jeremy inspirational in 2017 and ‘toxic’ in 2019? A combination of all the other factors discussed here were at play. But without doubt, the relentless – and escalating – media smears against him were a major factor. The meeting agreed that these attacks would have been launched against ANY socialist leader, driving a socialist agenda. Corbyn cannot be blamed for the defeat. And we should particularly remember the great job he did of holding off the 31st October hard Brexit. 

The meeting welcomed the fact that Corbyn didn’t announce his resignation on Thursday night – and has called for a period of reflection and analysis. The LRC has sent a message of solidarity, suggesting that he holds a final round of rallies in key locations and remains as leader through the leadership campaign. We will know the timetable for that following the NEC meeting this week. 

7.Activity during the campaign

How about the campaign itself? Nabila Ahmed, the Labour candidate for Hemel Hempstead, gave a graphic first hand case study of bureaucratic obstruction which held back Labour’s campaign. Other members saw similar obstruction and non-action from Regional offices and LINO (Labour In Name Only) right wing councillors. The bureaucracy still has a woeful impact, along with the half-heartedness of so many right wing Labour MPs. We need to continue pushing for reform of the party bureaucracy, party democracy and open selection. 

While Momentum’s intervention in the campaign was important in mobilising supporters to storm the marginals, we need quality as well as quantity. It was great to see so many old and new activists out on the streets campigning but it takes more than a 5-minute doorstep conversation to change someone’s mind. We must look at – and look after - our Labour heartlands …. 

8. Working class heartlands

With the disappearance of trade union traditions the labour movement including local Labour Parties often became moribund. As one Labour county councillor in Derbyshire said in 2019, “They barely bothered to campaign.” Local councils took the working class vote for granted and didn’t feel the need to fight to defend their communities. Local MPs were often middle class people parachuted in by Tony Blair and his gang of political fixers. 

A recent article has pointed out that "Even as the working class were marginalised politically and destroyed economically, New Labour patronised them into apathy. As the Oxford political scientists James Tilley and Geoffrey Evans argue, the “decline of class-based voting was driven by Labour’s shift to the political centre ground”. The uphill struggle to reverse this by a socialist leadership and those like minded members in four short years - while under constant attack from the right of the party plus the establishment - was just too much.  

As a result working class people in these ‘left behind’ areas became completely disaffected with the political process - with the council, the local MP and the EU. The EU has always been a remote and bureaucratic institution. Working class people voted to leave in these areas in 2016 in big numbers. But the EU did not close the pits. The Tories did.  The irony is that people in working class communities that were destroyed by the Tories have voted out of anger and resentment for Boris Johnson, an upper class Conservative, on the grounds that he will ‘get Brexit done’. 

The old - mainly white and male - working class, based on large scale manufacturing is in the process of disappearing. The working class is now multi-ethnic. A majority are female. They are based not only in London but also in cities like Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds where there are unionised jobs for working class people in the public sector, in transport and some service industries. The working class has not gone away – but it has evolved and the left must make a greater effort to connect with that new demographic. 

In conclusion

Why was the swing against Labour so different in the ‘left behind’ areas from the cities? There was no uniform national swing. The difference was Brexit. That is the basic reason why we lost. The losses were overwhelmingly in what was called the ‘red wall’ of formerly industrial areas, in the ‘left behind’ regions which voted for Brexit in 2016.  

The big question before Labour is whether the electors in these areas just lent their vote to Johnson in order to get Brexit out of the way, or whether their allegiances have permanently changed. Certainly Johnson has launched a charm offensive on the people in these new Tory seats, but we know his promises come cheap. Whether support will return rock solid to Labour in the future depends on the Party’s future actions. Certainly it must never take their support for granted ever again. 

Despite the present euphoria among the Tories, Britain remains in a state of political and social crisis. Economic growth has crawled ahead since the capitalist crisis of 2008. Working class living standards have still not recovered, and public services are in shreds after a decade of Tory austerity. The Conservative victory was based on fraud. What will the Tories do next? We’ll have a clearer idea after we hear the Queen’s speech when Parliament reconvenes on Thursday. 

The right wing wants to put the clock back to where it was before his election. Jeremy is to step down as leader. He was correct not just to resign immediately after the result. Gordon Brown did that in 2010 and Ed Miliband in 2015, leaving Labour leaderless for months. A leadership contest impends.  

But we must remember what a remarkable turnaround we’ve seen over the past four years. With Corbyn, the left has opened to door to discuss what we mean by socialism and socialist policies. The gains made in the last four years cannot be unmade. No doubt the right will put forward a candidate as leader. Some of the enthusiasm generated in the breasts of millions of mainly young will have been dashed by the dire election result. It may dissipate for now, but will not disappear altogether. 

The right wing has a problem. The vast majority of Labour members remain enthusiastic supporters of the agenda championed by Corbyn. The gains made by the left in the Party represent a permanent step forward for the cause of socialism in Britain and we must continue to build on them while learning the lessons from this election.