The Conservative Party’s election victory is a personal tragedy for Jeremy Corbyn, whose quest to lead a transformative Labour government has ended in failure. 

It is also a tragedy for Britain, which has lost the opportunity offered by a transformative Corbyn-led Labour government.

It may also become a tragedy for the Labour Party, but only if it takes away the wrong lessons from its defeat.

The last point needs to be emphasized, all the more so since some of the reporting shows that there is quite clearly an agenda to overstate the extent of Labour’s defeat.

Most of the commentary speaks of Labour achieving “its worst result since 1935.”  This is a serious misrepresentation of the facts.

Labour’s vote share in the election was 32.2 percent. That compares with the 30.4 percent it achieved in the general election of 2015, just before Corbyn became leader, when the Labour Party was led by Ed Miliband. 

It is also higher than the 29 percent vote share the Labour Party achieved in the general election of 2010, when it was led by the then incumbent Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown.

Going back further, Labour’s vote share in earlier general elections was 27.6  percent in 1983; and 30.8  percent in 1987.

Absolute Numbers of Votes 

In terms of absolute numbers of votes, Labour in 2019 gained more votes than it did in the general election of 2005 (10,269,076 versus 9,552,436), which Labour won under the leadership of the then incumbent Labour prime minister, Tony Blair.

The claim that Labour achieved “its worst result since 1935” is based solely on the number of members of parliament (MPs) it returned to the House of Commons following the election that stands at 202. 

This is indeed a historically low figure. However, saying that ignores the fact that Labour had already lost — in the general election of 2015 — 40 of its seats in Scotland, which it could formerly rely upon to reliably return a Labour MP.  These 40 seats were lost to the left wing pro-independence Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), not to the Conservatives.  The SNP has held on to them ever since. 

Labour has never been able to regain these lost 40 seats, and given the rise of pro-independence sentiment in Scotland it seems increasingly unlikely that it will ever do so. 

Suffice to say that if Labour had retained these 40 seats in 2015, and had it held on to them in the latest general election, its cohort of MPs would now be 242 and not 202.   That is significantly more than the 209 MPs it had after the election of 1983.

Ignorance, or in some cases willful disregard, of the extraordinary political transformation that took place in Scotland in 2015, and which has ever since affected Britain’s electoral and parliamentary arithmetic, seriously distorts discussion of British politics. 

Like Labour, the SNP is a left-wing social democratic party.   The political swing in Scotland — which took place in the election of 2015, not in the election that just took place — has not been from left to right or from Conservative to Labour.  It has been from the unionist social democratic left (Labour) to the nationalist social democratic left (the SNP). 

The SNP has just won 45 percent of the vote in Scotland, as compared to 25.6 percent for the Conservatives and 18.1 percent for Labour.  The Conservatives have, moreover, just lost seven of their 13 seats.  In Scotland there is a strong anti-Conservative sentiment, and in the event of a hung parliament the SNP made clear that it would have backed Labour.

On a related point, if the swing to the SNP had not taken place, and if the vote in Scotland had continued in line with previous pre-2015 elections, Labour’s total share of the vote in the current election would not have been 32.2  percent. It would have been roughly 34 percent. 

That is close to the 35 percent Tony Blair achieved in the election of 2005, which Labour won, and is the same as the 34 percent Labour achieved in the election of 1992, when it was led by Neil Kinnock, which prepared the ground for the landslide of 1997.

In summary, Corbyn in 2019 won more votes and a bigger percentage of the vote than his two immediate predecessors, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband.  The Labour Party under his leadership also did significantly better than it did in the two elections held during the period of Margaret Thatcher’s ascendancy in the 1980s.  Corbyn did slightly less well than did Kinnock in 1992, but only because of an earlier collapse in Scotland for which he is not responsible. Corbyn did only slightly less well in percentage term —but significantly better in numbers of actual votes cast — than did Tony Blair in 2005. 

All this can be compared with the apocalyptic predictions which were made about his leadership before the election of 2017. Corbyn’s leadership was then said to be so incompetent and so disastrous that it would destroy the Labour Party as an electoral force. 

Obviously and in reality, Corbyn has done much better than that.  In fact, in terms of Labour’s recent electoral history, the vote share he won for Labour was creditable, and he has left the Labour Party with a bigger share of the vote and a much larger and more active membership than when he found it.

Labour Didn’t Lose Because It’s ‘Too Left Wing’

All this should make one skeptical about claims that Labour lost the election because of Corbyn’s “excessive radicalism” or because Labour under his leadership became “too left wing.”

As it happens the radicalism of the manifesto on which Labour fought the election has been overstated. 

Its three main standouts — the ending of student fees and the increase in welfare and National Health Service spending; the re-nationalization of the railways and of certain public utilities; and the plans for greater infrastructure spending and for an increase in public housing construction with a specific proposal to provide all British households with free broadband — would not have been considered radical in Labour’s social democratic heyday between 1945 and 1980. 

Nor would the scale of the spending that Labour proposed have been excessive for a rich country like Britain, or have caused its bankruptcy.  Again, the spending program that was announced would have been considered unexceptional during Labour’s social democratic heyday from 1945 to 1980.

Labour Party canvassers in fact found that the pledges in the manifesto were popular overall.  The problem was not hostility to the manifesto as such, or concern about that it was “excessively radical” or “too left wing.”  It was skepticism that a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn could make such a program work.

There is a further reason to doubt that Labour’s failure in the election was due to its being perceived as “too left wing.” This is the utter failure of the supposedly more “moderate” left-centrist alternative to the right of it. 

None of the “moderate” Labour MPs who defected from the Labour Party in 2019 complaining about Labour’s “excessive radicalism” and anti-Semitism has won re-election to the House of Commons.  Change UK, the party some of them set up, has failed to win a single seat, and looks certain to be wound up. 

As for those “moderate” Labour MPs who chose to join the Liberal Democrats, they too have failed to win any seats. 

Luciana Berger — a former member of the shadow cabinet of the previous Labour leader Ed Miliband — who left the Labour Party specifically highlighting its alleged problem of anti-Semitism, and who was much fancied to win election in Finchley and Golders Green, a parliamentary constituency with a large Jewish population — in the end failed to do so.  The seat was retained by the Conservatives.

As for the Liberal Democrats — the traditional party of Britain’s “moderate” center left —  expectations before the election that they would win as many as 100 seats and would overtake the Labour Party in share of the vote have been crushingly disappointed. 

The Liberal Democrats’ share of the vote share did increase, but only slightly, from a derisory 7.4 percent in 2017 to just 11.6 percent.  Compare that with the share of the vote of Jeremy Corbyn’s supposedly “extremist” Labour Party, which is three times greater at 32.2 percent. 

In addition the Liberal Democrats suffered the humiliation of seeing their number of MPs actually fall by comparison with 2017 from 12 to 11, whilst their leader, Jo Swinson, actually lost her seat in Scotland to Labour’s putative ally, the left wing social democratic SNP. 

Compare these dismal results with what the Liberal Democrats achieved as recently as the 2005 general election, when the “Labour moderate” Tony Blair was in power as prime minister.  In that election the Liberal Democrats’ share of the vote was 22 percent, and their number of MPs was 62.

The Liberal Democrats’ strategy during the election was in fact to position the party as the “sensible” “middle of the road” alternative both to the Conservatives and to Jeremy Corbyn’s supposedly “extremist” Labour Party.   Accordingly, the Liberal Democrats fought the election promising to cancel Brexit whilst saying they would never agree to enter into a coalition with the “left wing extremist” Jeremy Corbyn.

In the event most “moderate” anti-Brexit Conservative voters chose to stick with their party, whilst the trend amongst supposedly “moderate” left of center voters was for them to switch during the election from the supposedly more “moderate” Liberal Democrats to the supposedly more “extreme” Labour Party.

Compare this with what happened in the general election of 1983, when the British electorate really did think that the Labour Party had become too left wing and too extreme. 

Over the course of that election the share of the vote of what was then the Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance (the ancestor of today’s Liberal Democrats) increased steadily, so that at the end of the election they won 25.4 percent of the vote compared with the 13.8 percent the Liberals had won in the previous election of 1979.  Overwhelmingly this was at the expense of Labour, whose share of the vote crashed from 36.9 percent in 1979 to 27.6 percent in 1983.

Labour did not lose the election because the electorate saw it as too left wing.  The facts show otherwise.  Like the claim that Labour achieved its “worst result since 1935” this claim is a piece of misrepresentation peddled by those who want Labour to return to the status quo policies and triangulation of the Blair era.

Why Then Did Labour Lose?

The short and unavoidable answer — and one which is gradually gaining acceptance, despite continued denials from some quarters — is because of Labour’s stance on Brexit.

A survey of Labour losses makes this fact overwhelmingly clear.  Though there was a swing from Labour to Conservative across the whole of England and Wales (Scotland, as discussed above, now has a wholly different politics) the swing was not uniform, and was biggest, and Labour’s losses were far and away greatest, in northern England and in the English Midlands. 

It is not a coincidence that these regions voted heavily for Brexit in the 2016 referendum. 

By contrast in those areas which voted against Brexit in the 2016 referendum the Labour vote held up better, and Labour losses were relatively few. 

By way of example, in London, which in the 2016 referendum voted overwhelmingly against Brexit (by a margin of 60 to 40) Labour narrowly lost Kensington & Chelsea (by just 150 votes) but won Putney from the Conservatives. In total Labour holds as many seats in London after the election as it did before. 

The same pattern repeated itself in other areas that voted against Brexit in the 2016 referendum. 

In Canterbury, which also voted in the 2016 referendum against Brexit, and Labour won from the Conservatives for the first time in the election of 2017, Labour won again with a bigger majority and an increase in its share of the vote. 

The same is true in other anti-Brexit urban areas such as Manchester, Bristol and Cardiff.  Labour won in all three, achieving a clean sweep of all the seats fought there.

Overall, as surveys of the voting across England and Wales make clear, Labour held on to the great majority of its voters who voted against Brexit in the 2016 referendum, but lost roughly half of its voters who in the 2016 referendum voted for Brexit.  It was this which caused Labour’s defeat and the Conservatives’ victory.

In raw terms of parliamentary arithmetic, this meant that the Labour Party lost a swathe of seats across its former heartland in northern England and in the English Midlands, which had voted for Brexit in the referendum of 2016, giving the Conservatives the clear election victory and the large parliamentary majority they now have.

This points to the underlying explanation for Labour’s debacle, which was Labour’s impossibly over-complicated Brexit policy.

Where Boris Johnson and the Conservatives had a simple and clear message — “Get Brexit Done” — the Labour Party fought the election on a policy of negotiating an entirely new Brexit deal different from Boris Johnson’s, which it said it would then put to a vote in a second referendum, with the option of remaining in the European Union offered as the alternative.

This proposal, committing Labour to a second referendum on an issue which most British voters had been told had been decided by the 2016 referendum, was bound to be unpopular with voters who in the 2016 referendum had voted for Brexit.  What however made this proposal utterly toxic was the stance towards the proposed referendum which was taken by almost the entirety of Labour leadership.

Read more:

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/17/letter-from-britain-why-labour-lost/