An unexpected victory sometimes unites a divided opposition, but there’s been little sign of that for the United Kingdom’s Labour Party after it unexpectedly won Thursday’s by-election in the parliamentary constituency of Batley and Spen. Despite a cynical spoiler campaign by George Galloway, Labour remains deeply torn between supporters of fallen leader Jeremy Corbyn and current party chief Keir Starmer. Discourse around Labour’s poor results have centered around differences between Corbyn’s hard-left ideology (which delivered the party’s disastrous 2019 election results) and Starmer’s relative moderation (which has so far fared no better). Such discussions, however, miss the larger, more structural obstacles facing Labour, which together are making the question of the party’s future increasingly existential.
The most conspicuous threat, and the one that it was feared might cost the party the Batley and Spen seat, is the fall of the much-talked-up “red wall,” a swath of post-industrial Britain that stretches across Northern England and into North Wales. Although the term was only popularized in 2019, it has become an obsessive focus of British political commentary (even though it crumbled almost as soon as the term was coined). Conservatives breached the red wall in 2019, winning seats like Bishop Auckland and Blyth Valley that had been held by Labour since their creation.
