In the wake of Labour’s third-place showing at last Thursday’s Gorton and Denton byelection, Keir Starmer could have responded with a mixture of magnanimity, grit, and a clear appreciation of what had just happened.
He might have congratulated the Green party’s new MP Hannah Spencer, and insisted that the themes of inequality and everyday struggle she had so loudly emphasised throughout the campaign were at the top of his government’s priorities. He could also have combined that message with a show of determination to learn from the defeat and win back the voters his party lost, and an acknowledgment that Labour’s recent calamities and internal bickering had sent those people completely the wrong signals.
Unfortunately, in a display of the awful, contorted political instincts that will surely lead to his eventual downfall, Starmer did something very different. The tone of a letter he wrote to Labour parliamentarians was self-righteous, arrogant, and deluded. No matter that Spencer’s brilliant victory speech lucidly reminded anyone listening of the everyday struggles that now tie together a huge swathe of voters: she was, he said, “more interested in dividing people than uniting them”. In deliberately targeting Muslim voters, in fact, she and her party had engaged in “divisive, sectarian politics”, an allegation with discomfiting echoes of the post-byelection poison being spread around by Nigel Farage and his allies.
Far from being “harmless environmentalists”, Starmer went on, the Gorton and Denton victors are the merchants of “extreme policies like legalising all drugs and pulling out of Nato”. Worse still, the people who voted for them had foolishly spurned the offer of “a local champion delivering for Gorton and Denton alongside a Labour Government and a Labour mayor”.
Implicitly, what he said stood in sharp contrast to how his party has reacted to the rise of Reform UK. Whereas so-called “red wall” residents who have moved to the right have been lionised by Labour insiders as “hero voters” to be chased and never criticised, Labour-Green switchers must apparently be scolded for being seduced by indulgent and reckless gesture politics. From some Labour quarters, recent messaging has been even more stubborn: over the weekend, government sources quoted in the Times suggested that sticking with the government’s Farage-aping immigration policy – cited as a factor in the Gorton and Denton result – might entail “deliberately sacrificing some bourgeois support”, whatever that means.
The peevish tone of this stuff is all too familiar. It surfaces whenever Labour loses to other progressive parties, and insists that all its opponents on the left and centre-left are charlatans, impostors and merchants of the exact opposite of what they claim to stand for. Labour high-ups habitually voice the ludicrous notion that Plaid Cymru and the SNP purvey the same inward-looking nationalism as Reform (“different poison, same bottle”, as Welsh first minister Eluned Morgan recently put it). Another version means that even the most progressive Liberal Democrats must be maligned as Tories in unconvincing disguise. And now we have the anti-Green iteration, which chimes with all the nonsense now booming from the rightwing press – “The Greens’ extremist victory pushes Britain one step closer to the abyss”, says one Telegraph contributor – and hands Zack Polanski and his people a PR gift.
Labour is spooked and irate for one obvious reason. As with the Conservatives, somewhere in its collective soul it knows we have reached the belated end of the political 20th century, which means our two traditional “main” parties may well be fated to form a much smaller part of the political conversation. The Greens’ and Reform UK’s joint share of the vote in Gorton and Denton was just under 70%. When I spent three days there at the end of January, pretty much everyone I met expressed either biting cynicism about the very idea of politics, or a keen belief that we need something radically different, intensified not just by our domestic situation, but an increasingly chaotic and terrifying world. I heard that sentiment over and over again, but it was most pithily summed up by a thirtysomething Gorton resident I chatted to in the city centre: “Politics needs to change in some huge way, doesn’t it?”
It looks as if that is exactly what is happening, and the tension between Westminster business-as-usual and what is going on in the real world cannot be sustained for much longer. At May’s contests in England, Wales and Scotland, and come the next general election, it seems likely that the signs of a new politics will be just as clear, with dramatic consequences for Labour. On Friday, Starmer warned of “the risk of splitting the progressive vote so that Reform come through the middle”, and insisted that a contest that might arrive much sooner than he thinks would “be too important to let that happen”. The essential battle, he said, “was a fight we can win, and we’re going to win it”. Who does he think he is fooling?
There is no great mystery about what all this is fundamentally about, and it goes much deeper than Starmer’s failures. By dint of its relationship with the trade unions alone, Labour still plays a vital role in our democracy – but it also looks dangerously like an archaic legacy party. Its old majoritarian dreams are over: its “landslide” win in 2024 came with the support of not much more than one in five of the total electorate, and it currently stands much the same level in the opinion polls – something even the most talented new leader might struggle to turn around.
The party’s bond with the old industrial areas it once considered its heartlands has been fraying for years, and the Gorton and Denton result highlights the latest chapter of its worsening predicament: a weakening of its support among the kind of city-dwellers who are seen as crucial parts of Labour’s new electoral base. In that sense, most of the party’s electoral coalition now seems to be in a state of flux, which reflects a simple fact: that we are an infinitely more complex society than we were when Labour believed it could speak for a majority of the public.
If it is going to survive into the new era all this points to, Labour could start by staking out common ground with the parties Starmer affects to despise on changing our systems and institutions so that they fit this new reality. On that score, I automatically think of a Labour politician who believes not only in proportional representation, but that embracing it “paves the way for agreement with other parties on wider reforms: an elected senate of the nations and regions to replace the Lords and maximum devolution of power out of Westminster”. With that will come “a more honest and collaborative way of doing politics”, which sounds like something very different from Labour’s current monopolistic, arrogant mindset and methods.
Andy Burnham said all that, in the summer of 2022. Even if it will probably be another Labour politician who sooner or later becomes their party’s next leader, doing what he suggested might be a first sign that it is finally starting to understand the 21st century, and the huge changes it demands.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
