If you win by saying almost nothing, what happens when you take power? Welcome to the Starmer paradox
On the assumption that the Conservative party soon suffers a rout and Labour at last takes power, one place will be seen as the battleground where the Tory malaise finally became terminal: Wellingborough.
Last Thursday also saw a byelection in the Bristol suburb of Kingswood, where the Tories’ vote share came down by about 20 percentage points, and Labour easily triumphed. But in Northamptonshire, the figure was a jaw-dropping 38 percentage points: the worst slump the Conservatives have ever suffered in such a contest. The local campaign was defined by the sleazy fall of the Tory MP Peter Bone, and the surreally stupid decision to make his girlfriend the prospective Conservative replacement, both of which spoke of a party in a state of awful decay; nationally, the sense of a government gripped by failure and infighting completed the picture. Were the local swing from Tory to Labour to be replicated nationally, political pundits gasped, the Tories would be left with only four seats.
I went to Wellingborough just over a fortnight ago, and beyond the story of Bone’s fall, what really hit me was the sheer volume of symbolic local stories about the state of the country, and why the government seems to be nearing its end. The town, population 54,000, is just under an hour by train from London. Its history of offering a new start to people from the capital goes back to rehousing schemes in the 1960s and 70s, but the latest blow-ins are people who have bought a new generation of private flats and houses, marketed to those priced out of metropolitan living. Many of them have recently suffered the worst effects of rocketing mortgage rates; plenty of local people, meanwhile, complain that these new homes are impossibly expensive.
The forlorn town centre is peppered with vacant shops, and dominated by a huge Edwardian building that used to be the post office: it now lies empty. In 2018, the financial collapse of Northamptonshire county council – since replaced by two new unitary authorities – heralded the current wave of municipal bankruptcies, and marked another chapter of a tragic saga of cuts and social damage: people in the know say that Wellingborough’s problems with knife crime and the county lines drug trade have been made worse by the closure of local youth centres. Signs of what has gone wrong are everywhere: on the outside walls of some buildings, for example, defibrillators now sit next to “bleed boxes” containing first aid kits for people who have been stabbed.
In 2005, Wellingborough switched from Labour to the Conservatives. Eleven years later, 62% of voters in the wider local area voted to leave the EU. In 2019, Bone’s majority climbed
to 18,500. But having backed Brexit so enthusiastically, and after delivering to the Conservatives such huge support, what has Wellingborough got to show for it? Not much: with Westminster consumed by the Tories’ constant fallouts and plots, it is one of a seemingly endless array of English towns that have a profound sense of stagnation and neglect.
The day I was there, a van emblazoned with the logo of the far-right organisation Britain First – which, as it turned out, got 477 votes – was doing slow laps of Wellingborough’s shopping streets, and endlessly blasting out that party’s latest mantra: “Stop the boats … Deport illegal immigrants … Reject career politicians.”
As I walked around, I met Debbie and Sarah, a mother and daughter who moved to Northamptonshire from east London about 12 years ago. Sarah told me she had four kids: she and her mum then spent five minutes bemoaning the lack of things for children to do, rising crime, a slow decline of neighbourliness and community spirit, and the dearth of local opportunity. Sarah’s 16-year-old daughter, she said, had worked doggedly hard at school and was trying to get a childcare apprenticeship, but had so far been unsuccessful.
What, I wondered, did they make of the contest between the Tories and Labour, and the two parties’ leaders? “Sunak ain’t got a hope in hell,” said Debbie. “He comes from money. He doesn’t know our side of the story, cos he’s never lived it.”
And Starmer? She grimaced. “Maybe,” she said, very slowly. “He says a lot, but I don’t know if he can do the walk. Is it for real? Hopefully, he can pull things back. But who knows?”
No one should imagine that people tend to vote for a new government in a spirit of huge excitement and deep belief: “Time for a change” is usually as good as it gets. But in my recent experience, the public mood is in much the same state as it has been since the crash of 2008, if not before: sceptical and cynical, and often bitterly dismissive of politics and politicians. After crisis upon crisis, moreover, these feelings are now combined with sheer exhaustion, and a sense that the trials of getting through each week leave no room for the noise and pantomime of politics.
The conclusion Starmer apparently draws from all this, hardened by Labour’s traditional fear of the rightwing press, is that now is not the time for any high-flown rhetoric or ambitious plans. “Voters hate all of us,” one Wellingborough Labour activist recently told the Guardian: in that kind of political atmosphere, the key to winning is to neurotically “bomb-proof” any promises, stick within Jeremy Hunt’s specious fiscal rules and keep people’s attention on the government’s failings.
But that takes us to a familiar question that last week’s Labour successes render even more glaring: what will happen if – when – the party takes power? As well as Wellingborough and Kingswood, the past 10 days has seen two other big Labour stories, which can easily be combined into a worrying look ahead. The final, woeful binning of the so-called green prosperity plan represented the demise of what was once the anchor of Starmer’s entire pitch for government. Labour’s travails in Rochdale, meanwhile, further undermine the leader’s one enduring selling point: simple competence. This side of the general election, voters are a lot less interested in these stories than political journalists, but if the mixture of policy flimsiness and shambling management persists into government, it will clearly spell trouble.
The modern British electorate can be fascinatingly mercurial: despite their weary disconnection from politics, voters are also capable of responding to events with sudden changes of mind. It is only four years, let us not forget, since Boris Johnson was in his pomp, and the Tories won 62% of the vote in Wellingborough, landing a Commons majority of 80. And now look what has happened: serial bungling, chaos at the top and our deep economic problems may have brought them to the brink of an existential crisis.
This highlights what we might think of as the Starmer paradox. Even if Labour’s belief that it can only win by staying quiet is correct, arriving in government – and remaining there – will surely demand something very different: efficiently starting to fix the problems that define so much of the country, lifting people’s mood, and giving them at least a few reasons to believe. The byelection results, the Labour leader says, “show people want change”. But what exactly is it, and when will it come? Wellingborough, like so many other places, will soon demand an answer.