Labour campaigned for 14 years to get rid of the Tories, and emerged from the general election with the biggest majority in recent history. So why, after only six months, do so many Labour supporters feel anxious? The persistently depressing polling figures and Labour’s vote dropping like a stone in many council byelections don’t help.
The harsh reality is that Labour was not elected on a wave of popularity. The first-past-the-post vote system masked Labour’s low vote share, which was just 34%. The first six months in office have also been marred by a list of policies that have unnecessarily alienated section after section of Labour support: cutting the winter fuel allowance, refusing to scrap the two-child benefit limit, denying Waspi (Women Against State Pension Inequality) women a semblance of justice and increasing tuition fees for young people. Meanwhile, the party has been largely mute on Gaza, and has given the appearance of having to be dragged to say or do anything meaningful to stop the genocide.
The standard response from the leadership is “don’t panic”. It’s four years to the next election and by then the government will have turned around the economy, securing the growth needed to generate the taxes that will fund dramatic improvements in our public services. Don’t worry: the electoral genius Morgan McSweeney is already working up the plan for 2029.
True, four years can seem like an eternity in politics. But people generally have a view on a government by the midterm, and staking your future on achieving remarkable growth in 18 months’ time is what Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister would describe as “courageous”. The electoral plan also appears to be based on tackling the threat to Labour from the right. In statement after statement, ministers have spoken about immigration, sometimes coming dangerously close to echoing the “stop the boats” line beloved by the Conservatives.
What if the threat to Labour’s future is not solely from the right – but from the left? The party was founded and carefully built over generations on the principle that it was a broad church, capable of bringing together a breadth of progressive ideas and objectives and harnessing the commitment and talents of a wide variety of individuals from the left, right and centre. Its current decision-makers have dismissed this tradition, focusing instead on breaking up the broad church by eliminating the people and policies of the traditional Labour left. Many staunch Labour supporters feel as though they are no longer wanted.
If the strategy has a basis, it is perhaps Peter Mandelson’s old argument that in a first-past-the-post electoral system there is nowhere realistically for progressive and left voters to go other than to Labour. At the moment, that is largely true. But there are warning signs of pending problems. Since the 2017 election, when Labour gained an additional 3.5m votes, increased its share of the national vote to 40%, and won previously “blue wall” Conservative seats such as Canterbury and Kensington, some progressive and leftwing voters have shifted to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. Many who are concerned about Gaza voted for independents.
So far none of this has occurred on a decisive scale. Labour council byelection defeats seem to be caused more by the disillusionment of stay-at-home Labour voters than by those voters actively switching their allegiances to other parties. But in many of the parliamentary seats that it won in 2024, Labour’s majority is very narrow. The primary danger in any future election is that existing, disillusioned Labour supporters stay at home, but there is a broader, secondary risk that the first-past-the-post system no longer provides the protection to the larger parties that it has in the past.
Single-issue parties such as Reform are already posing serious electoral challenges to incumbent parties. True, new parties on the left have often floundered under the first-past-the-post system. Historically, they have lacked credibility, or degenerated into sectarian infighting. Despite this, Labour strategists need to take care. Even if a leftwing challenger party only took a limited number of votes, this could still cost Labour dearly in many of the seats where its MPs have razor-thin majorities.
Labour staffers and politicians ought to think carefully before they continue breaking up their party’s broad church. Otherwise, they could be jeopardising Labour’s chances not just in 2029, but long into the future. As Nigel Farage and the Conservative party shift even further to the right, emboldened by interventions from figures such as Elon Musk, the need for a strong and united progressive left is greater than ever.
John McDonnell is the independent MP for Hayes and Harlington. He was shadow chancellor for Labour from 2015 to 2020
