Absolutely bang on the money from Janice Turner (a Labour voter herself)
For Labour, purity matters more than votes
Janice Turner
to the electorate,” says poor, honourable Sir Keir Starmer, an uneasy campaign show-pony, whose eyes filled last week saying he’d fight for every vote. But Labour won’t listen. Or it will take notes and nod along, then do what it always does: think it knows better. Why else pick a Remain zealot as your candidate in a seat like Hartlepool that voted 70-30 for Brexit? “Oh, they’re too thick to notice.”
The trouble for Labour is that the Conservative Party does listen. Not greatly attached to any version of itself, it shape-shifts to keep power. Is Thatcherism leaving a nasty-party taste? Try some liberal-consensus Cameron balm. Its most audacious trick is to present itself as the solution to the very problems it caused. For austerity-ravaged Tees Valley it offered Ben Houchen. A decade ago, George Osborne sought to privatise national forests and the blood bank but Houchen got the local airport back into public hands.
Yet he also champions a free port. Because Tories are pragmatic: state and private, pick and mix. Defending Corbyn’s legacy, John McDonnell noted that Boris Johnson had pinched his green energy deal and was quietly renationalising the railways. Of course! If it polls well, if it might actually work, Tories will steal it. The left, in its rigid ideological thinking, cannot grasp this magpie mindset. Instead, it believes “public sector good, private bad” while the vaccine programme’s success came from an alchemy between venture capital and the NHS.
Those saying red wall Tories are turkeys voting for Christmas should remember the same voters put up with decades of smooth, seat-seeking Labour special advisers who loved the fat Labour majorities of the north but couldn’t stand the locals. They were loyal dogs, to be thrown the odd investment bone. Brexit exposed Labour’s distaste for its own people and, long after Britain’s EU departure, it hangs like a smell.
No one votes for a party that hates you. Who does Labour love-bomb? The unemployed, the young, gig workers, the struggling, the poor. But in Hartlepool, houses are cheap: a couple with two average salaries can own a home and car. They want holidays, a new kitchen, a bottle of wine with dinner. They are “working class, middle class”: their lives aren’t comfortable but nor are they hell and, while they hope their kids go to university, they retain unfashionable values of patriotism, self-reliance, material aspiration.
Yet all they hear from Labour is chiding and judgment: they are not good enough, pure enough. Their cars cause the “environmental emergency”, their unfamiliarity with arcane language makes them bigots, their Brexit vote renders them deplorable ever more. So if a Tory candidate comes along, not only eager to be liked but able to secure Westminster cash for real stuff like factories or business parks, rather than just hashtags and rainbow flags, they’d be dumb not to listen. A red wall Tory must stay on his toes, might try harder to deliver, since he can’t take votes for granted — for now — or he’s out.
What was Labour for at these elections? It was against dodgy government procurement and Carrie’s wallpaper. Yet even in London, loyalists sighed as we set off to re-elect Mayor Khan. Normally sensible friends put Count Binface first, Labour second. A senior local government figure notes of the count’s vow to cap the price of croissants at a quid: “He has a better retail offer than Sadiq’s 100 pages of waffle.” Working with Khan “it was hard to know his passions, what he wanted to achieve”. Mutual hatred with Tory central government didn’t help, but “he never tried to reach out beyond party lines, which a mayor must do”. Such tribalism plays well in a Labour Party proud never to have kissed a Tory. Where are the woke points in co-operating with leaders of Conservative boroughs? Despite his lamentable record on knife crime and the Hammersmith Bridge chaos, Khan will win in young, diverse, graduate-heavy London.
To voters beyond, the ones Labour must convince, pragmatism is not only effective but hugely attractive. Yet it requires Labour Remainers to embrace Britain’s future rather than to harp on about the halcyon EU, like colonialists nostalgic for the Raj. Even more impossible it needs a warmer, less ideological message from its activist base. A common Twitter phrase is “get in the bin”. That’s where you belong if your views on immigration, gender or a myriad issues deviate from the line. Pretty soon, every voter will be in the bin.
The saddest thing is that out there somewhere is a young, brilliant, optimistic, inspiring, persuasive person, progressive but inclusive, warm but tough, who could lead Labour to victory. (A northerner would help.) But the very factors that make them electable to the country make them unselectable to the party. Sir Keir, who outwitted the hard left by keeping his moderate cards close, could yet be the best hope. To see another Labour victory, I might need, like my father, to live a long life.