It is inevitable that Labour in opposition will not be a champion of social liberalism

 

Trump has been defeated, but only just. Trump, that most ludicrous and destructive of US presidents, still won 46.8% of the vote. More importantly, the number of votes between Biden and Trump in the Electoral College was very small. Voters still turned out for a Repubican party that backed Trump all the way. Perhaps worst of all, the aftermath of the election showed that the Republican party backed Trump’s attempts to overturn democracy. What Republicans do on a smaller scale with gerrymandering they are happy to do at a national level. The future of the US is still very uncertain when one of the two main parties does not respect democracy.

The Conservative party in the UK is only beginning down that particular route, with its plans for voter ID. Yet do they need to rig elections, having ruled for more than twice as many years as Labour since 1979? (To put it very simply, while in the UK the opposition to the right had just one election winner in Blair, in the US they had Clinton and Obama and now Biden.) More particularly, UK Conservatives by following the US strategy of right wing populism based on social conservatism seem to have a winning formula under the FPTP system.

Labour has two structural disadvantages in General Elections. First, it is one of three socially liberal UK wide parties and two socially liberal parties in Wales and Scotland. Second, social conservatives benefit significantly from the FPTP system, because social liberals are concentrated in the cities. The 2019 election was a clear demonstration of that structural disadvantage: when an election is fought on social issues Labour loses badly.

Many on the left dismiss this social conservatism, reflected particularly in dislike of immigration, as reflecting racism or xenophobia. However social conservatism is more general than that. It is in large part a reaction to the tremendous success social liberalism has enjoyed since the 1960s. I discussed this at length in this post from a year ago, and a recent tweet from @cakeylaura gives a personal illustration of what I mean. But my post had a title that was weakly justified by its contents. Is it really true that in all cases Labour should argue for social liberalism?

Socially conservative views reflect the left behind in the sense that they are out of tune with both the law and the broadcast media. Conservative MPs are far more socially liberal than their supporters, which is why we have socially liberal laws. The media is populated by younger university educated people who reflect today’s social liberal attitudes. This combination, over the last 60 years or so, has meant that social conservatives have been overwhelmed. As that earlier post pointed out aggregate attitudes have become more liberal. (Demographics help as well, of course.)

If that was the end of the story, then the resistance to socially liberal views expressed at the ballot box would be weak. However most of our newspapers reflect a different world, geared to the more socially conservative views of most of their readership. This socially conservative media both reinforces and organises social conservatives. Brexit is the exemplar of this, and is why views on Brexit were impervious to economic realities.

The left talked a lot about the left behind after the Brexit vote, but typically they meant the economically left behind. While undoubtedly there was an element of that, research suggests the left behind were more those who hadn’t kept pace with society’s social liberalism. Outside the cities, the south voted for Brexit as much as the North.

The key role played by the Brexit press in reinforcing and organising social conservatism makes it very hard for Labour to change minds. Perhaps for this reason the strategy that Labour has followed since Blair has involved appeasement rather than persuasion. The way to win elections, so this argument goes, is to make any election about economic (or more recently competence) issues, rather than social issues. The best thing Labour can therefore do is dodge alienating the Red Wall voter, and that seems to be Starmer’s strategy. On its own that is not enough, as Miliband’s defeat showed, so you need something positive to put to the electorate. Corbyn did that in 2017, but still lost. Can Starmer do better?

The alternative suggested by the title of my earlier post is for Labour to argue for social liberalism. The point I made in that post is that attitudes have changed over time, so it is possible to persuade on social liberal issues, particularly where they intersect with economics. More favourable public attitudes to immigration in the last few years is a clear example. Obviously social liberals would like to believe the main social liberal party can stand up for their beliefs, but how much of that is wishful thinking?

Again the role of the right wing press is crucial. The recent trend to more positive views on immigration will reflect in part the absence since 2016 of negative stories about immigrants in the press. The power of the right wing press to mobilise on particular issues when their government is in power should never be underestimated. Compared to articles in newspapers that are read every day, how can Labour politicians persuade on social issues when they get at best a soundbite on the main news?

I think it is important to distinguish between Labour in government and Labour in opposition. Governments get considerable exposure in the broadcast media, and so it is possible to believe that they can provide a counter-argument to the right wing press on social issues. In opposition it is much harder. While Labour should argue for social liberalism while in government, to do so in opposition would seem to be a recipe for worthy failure.

There is a third argument, in between persuasion and appeasement, which has been recently put by Timothy Garton Ash in a recent Prospect article. He writes

“What follows from this analysis is that, where possible, we need to slow down the rate of change to one that most human natures can bear, while preserving the overall liberal direction of travel…..This means, for example, limiting immigration, securing frontiers, and strengthening a sense of community, trust and reciprocity inside them.”

I have strong doubts about this. It might make sense with immigration, but is it tolerable when it comes to enforcing rights and tackling discrimination? Even with immigration, I continue to argue it was newspaper coverage of immigration rather than its scale that raised concerns about immigration.

So it seems inevitable that without a progressive alliance and with a FPTP system biased towards social conservatism, it is bound to be the case that Labour will be forced to appease the Red Wall voter. That is why the leadership will vote for the Brexit deal, and why it will dodge all the socially conservative traps that the Conservative government puts in its path. When the marginal voter is socially conservative, that is what you have to do.

While this strategy avoids an almost certain loss at the next election, it is fraught with danger. If Labour seems to be adopting Blue Labour ideas, that risks alienating its own supporters sufficiently for them to abstain or vote for other social liberal parties. Even if the leadership manages this difficult balancing act, the right wing press can still suggest that at its heart Labour is now the party of social liberals, which of course is true. Labour’s positive message on competence or the economy may fail to attract voters sufficiently to counteract voters socially conservative inclinations.

Just because the path is fraught with danger does not mean a better one exists. It may be the case that, with FPTP biased towards social conservative voters and competition for the social liberal vote, it is just highly unlikely that over the next decade or more that the Conservatives can be defeated. In the long run demographics are on Labour’s side, but that is not going to ride to the rescue anytime soon.

How the electoral system in the US, and to a lesser extent the UK, is biased towards social conservatism.

 

The UK is often torn between following the US or following Europe. We share a language with the US, and a lot of popular culture. But we also share a voting system that ensures the political right has a heavy built in advantage. The United States may be too far down that road to change, but in the UK there is still hope if only the current opposition leadership see sense.

Once we get over the relief that Donald Trump is no longer President, comes the realisation of just how bad the US election results really were for Democrats. Trump was a Republican, and the Republican party backed him almost without exception. Even in the current ludicrous situation where Trump is refusing to concede, many senior Republican politicians continue to back him.

It should come as no surprise that Republicans have an ambiguous relationship to democracy. Republicans see nothing wrong in distorting district borders to give themselves better election results in terms of seats than their polling numbers deserve. Gerrymandering is endemic, and it gives the Republicans an inbuilt advantage in one half of Congress, the House of Representatives. They also habitually make it hard for democrat voters (particularly black voters) to vote: the long lines we see during US elections are there for a reason.

Recently Republican senator Mike Lee said “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” This view is not unusual among Republican politicians, it is just that most are not so foolish as to say it out loud.

But Trump’s attempt to cling to power is not the problem. The problem is that the Republican party won seats in the House, and is likely to retain its majority in the Senate. Why the Democrats did so badly in both of these contests is something that will be analysed by others at length later. But I suspect what few outside the US understand is just how difficult it is for the Democrats to win big in the Senate.

As Shaun Lawson explains in an excellent piece, the Senate is constructed such that each state has two senators, whatever its population. To take the most extreme example, Wyoming with a population of 563,626 gets the same representation in the Senate as California with a population of 37,253,956. Now if political support was evenly distributed among big and small states alike this would not be an issue . However it is not: Wyoming has two Republican senators and California has two Democratic senators. The Senate structure influences the Electoral College used to choose a President.

The basic problem with the Senate is that it gives rural and small town states much more political clout than their population warrants. With political polarisation increasingly between liberals and social conservatives (the culture war), and with liberals concentrated in the big dynamic cities and conservatives in the rest of the country, anything that gives the latter an advantage relative to their number is a political problem.

The example of the US senate is far more extreme than anything in the UK, but that does not mean that the problem does not exist here. We saw that very clearly with Brexit, which is essentially a culture war issue. The referendum of course involved the whole population, and we all know the result of that. But if a general election had been held on just that issue, it is estimated that Leave would have won a landslide: 406 Leave | 242 Remain.

We can do a similar calculation for the 2019 election. If you add up the vote totals of parties supporting a second referendum, it was just more than 50%, but of course the Conservatives won a landslide and Brexit went ahead. That partly reflects the fact that the second referendum vote was more divided among different parties than the Brexit vote, but it also reflects the way the social liberal/conservative divide is split among parliamentary seats.

Socially liberal votes are concentrated in the cities. Seats outside the cities have many social liberals as well, but they are typically outnumbered by social conservatives. However you will find very few social conservatives in big city seats. That means that even if social liberals are in a small majority in the population as a whole, they are outnumbered in terms of seats. When it comes to culture war issues, the First Past The Post (FPTP) UK constituency system for general elections represents accidental gerrymandering favouring social conservatives.

An illustration of this is to compare the 2017 and 2019 elections. In 2017 both main parties backed Brexit and the Remain movement hardly existed, so Labour could focus on a relatively popular economic programme and do relatively well. In contrast, the 2019 election was mainly about Brexit, and the seat totals (once you allow for other parties) was not very different from those implied by the 2016 referendum result. 2019 also reflects the difficulty Labour had in focusing on economic issues given a slanted media.

If you think this is just about Brexit, or that Cummings’ departure means that Johnson will reveal his true social liberal self, think again. The Conservatives were using immigration as a weapon against Blair under William “foreign land” Hague, and will continue to try and capture socially conservative voters after Cummings' exit, because it works at winning elections.

One solution is for Labour to try and do what it did in 2017, and effectively match the Conservatives on the key culture war issues. However, that creates two related problems. The first is that Labour’s current base is very socially liberal. The second is that other socially liberal parties exist. The danger is that we see a repeat of what happened in the period before the 2019 election, where voters defecting over Labour’s socially conservative stance leads to lost votes whatever choice it makes. I'm not saying that Labour cannot succeed doing this, but it is hard and divisive. 

Both this problem, and the problem of the socially liberal vote being split among parties, can be overcome by elections determined by some form of proportional representation (PR).

A traditional argument for the UK’s existing first past the post system, and the constitutional system in the US, is that it keeps out political extremes as both major parties strive to capture the centre ground. This has been completely refuted by events over the last decade. It appears, in fact, that both systems allow governments that are politically extreme to capture power.

While there seems little chance that the US will change its system, there is more hope in the UK. It requires a Labour government to be elected that is committed to some form of PR. It has to be a commitment before they gain power, because once elected every Labour government believes it can now become the natural party of government. One advantage of a prior commitment to PR is that it makes cooperation between Labour and other socially liberal parties easier during the election.

There is considerable support for electoral reform within the Labour party. Unfortunately any Labour leadership that thinks it can win power is also a leadership that prefers to remain in power rather than becoming part of a coalition that any subsequent PR election is more likely to bring. While we can appeal to statistics to show the dominance of Conservative governments, political leadership is naturally focused on its own short term.