Labour should be wary of early triumphalism

Amid all the chatter about polls in the run-up to this year’s local elections, one finding got much less attention than it should have. A JL Partners survey of viewers of the GB News TV channel found Labour was on 39 per cent, the Tories 29 per cent and Reform on 20 per cent.

Yes, even among fans of the most vociferously anti-establishment, “anti-woke”, pro-Brexit television station, Sir Keir Starmer’s party was significantly ahead of Rishi Sunak and Nigel Farage (whose show boasts the channel’s highest ratings).

And when GB News does its own polling of the general public, rather than just its viewers, its “People Polling” survey has even bigger leads. Last month, it gave Labour a 26-point lead, which if repeated at the next election would have Sunak buried under a landslide.

While it may be satisfying for some in Labour to witness GB News presenters like Farage, Jacob ReesMogg and Lee Anderson having to air such findings, they should be wary of any triumphalism.

One week on from the 2 May elections of councils, mayors and police commissioners, some seized on the fact that the Tory-to-Labour swing was largest in those areas

Nigel Farage of GB News; Labour is popular among the channel’s viewers

that voted most heavily to Leave the EU in 2016.

Many Brexit voters now put the cost of living and the dire state of our public services at the top of their list of concerns, and Labour has persuaded them it will do a better job.

Yet some even went so far as to claim that the local election results showed that the much-vaunted “realignment” of the 2019 election – with working-class voters in the North and Midlands ditching decades of affiliation with Labour and backing a Tory party they previously viewed as toxic – had been comprehensively unravelled. That risks misinterpreting what’s going on under the surface. As Oxford University’s Professor Jane Green has argued, there is a difference between the changing “tide” of voting patterns and the new “tribes” of identity that were amplified by the Brexit referendum. The tide has decisively shifted away from the Tories and towards Labour. But tribal identities remain strong (often stronger than party loyalties). People are still strongly Leave or rejoin the EU, strongly sceptical about or supportive of migration (legal and illegal), strongly anti- or pro-net zero. Loyalty to Labour was fraying long before Brexit, thanks to years of regional inequality, a drift away from perceptions that Labour was for the working class and the financial crisis that appeared to leave the better-off untouched but ordinary folk facing austerity to pay for it.

Boris Johnson’s insight in 2019 was to see that Labour supporters voting first Ukip then Brexit was a gateway drug to getting them to vote Tory. Crucially, Johnson acknowledged that these voters

were “lending” their votes to him. Of course, his own incompetence and lies caught up with him in the end, and that loan has been comprehensively reclaimed.

For Labour, perhaps the biggest lesson from 2005 to 2019 was that the “de-alignment” from its own party was more important than the “re-alignment” to other parties. If Starmer wants to not just regain but hold on to the “Red Wall”, he has to treat those seats – like all seats in the UK – not as “safe” but as closely fought marginals.

Our political system has long meant that a party can only win power if it forms a workable coalition of voters of different classes and geographies. While the loosening of party ties makes it easier to build such coalitions, it makes it much harder to sustain them.

Voter volatility has proved just as capable of delivering Starmer a landslide just five years after a dire defeat, as it delivered Johnson the first big Tory majority in a generation. A majority can melt as quickly as it formed.

Starmer is shrewdly building a coalition on migration, with an alternative that appeals to voters variously upset by the incompetence, financial waste and immorality of the Rwanda plan. In office, he will need similar coalitions on other policy areas, not least housing.

In the US, Joe Biden shows an incumbent government can struggle to sell a message of economic recovery, especially if its working-class voters have de-aligned and gone to Donald Trump once before.

That’s why Starmer has to respect and engage all parts of his coalition, from viewers of GB News to listeners of Radio 4. Thanks to tactical voting, those who want stronger policies on the environment, on foreign policy (like Gaza), on the EU, on migration, all now know they have the electoral clout that comes from “lending” their votes to Labour.

Listening to such concerns, not dismissing them, is key. If the wider tide of popularity were to go out under a Labour government, the rocks of discontent will become more visible, and more dangerous. Working hard for every vote, after an election as much as before it, will become a necessity.

Paul Waugh resigned as i’s chief political commentator in January to stand as the Labour candidate for Rochdale, a contest won by Azhar Ali

Loyalty to Labour was fraying long before Brexit, thanks to regional inequality