Can we think about politics from Blair onwards in one chart? and what it means for Blue Labour

This is an experiment. You can judge how successful it is. I am trying it because with this election there has been a lot of talk about a revival in Blue Labour to recapture the Red Wall. The Conservatives have been playing to socially conservative voters since at least William (‘a foreign land’) Hague. So why has the strategy succeeded so well in 2019 when it has had at best modest success before now?

We can represent all this in a simple diagram that is now widely used

The precise positions of the party leaders could be the topic of endless discussion, but for this post I just need them to be roughly right, and for the directions of travel to be right. Blair was fairly liberal but moderately left wing. The Tories since Thatcher have always been pretty right wing in economic terms, and where we have seen movement has been mainly on how socially conservative they are.

If people are uniformly distributed around this map, then the centre is the place to be in a two party, FPTP system. Parties do not go there because their ideology/principles, maintained mainly by their members, stops them.

Blair won because in economic terms he was closer to the economic centre ground than the Tories. After 18 years of Tory rule voters wanted better public services. Yet after the Thatcher revolution in the Conservative party the Tories were stuck with taking a right wing stance, so they tried to shift the debate on to social issues where either side was some way from the centre. A focus on immigration was a way of doing that, with the added advantage of being perceived to be pro-worker and pro-public services (the lie that immigration significantly reduced wages and put pressure on public services).

This move had some effect, reducing Labour’s vote. Yet under good economic times (and economic times were good under Labour for ten years) the immigration issue was not enough to defeat Blair. Public services were getting better. As Theresa May put it, the Tories were still known as the nasty party. This is why Cameron tried to portray himself as a liberal conservative. In opposition he tried to move closer to the centre in both economic terms (accepting Labour’s levels of government spending) and social terms.

But everything changed after the Global Financial Crisis. Regrettably, social conservatism has more appeal when times are bad, at least in part because the (incorrect) real wage/public service argument gains traction. Yet at first sight that should have been counteracted by Osborne moving sharply right with anti-Keynesian austerity (spending cuts in a recession). So although Cameron had tried to move nearer the centre on social issues, in economic terms by 2010 he moved further away.

Here is where we have to make an important modification to this apparatus. In a country where one party has a media that is very sympathetic to the right, it can change how its policies are perceived. Cameron dressed austerity in socially conservative terms (the government is like a household). For various reasons that I and others have documented at length, a policy that was sharply contrary to basic economic theory was adopted by most of the media as a necessity, and the media therefore turned it into a sign of good government.

So austerity was not perceived by most people as a right wing shrinking of the state at great social cost (higher unemployment and lower real wages), but as a neutral policy signifying economic competence. Once we allow for this it is clear that for many Cameron was now closer to the centre is perceived economic terms, and so became the government in 2010.

Austerity was so successful that Labour eventually concluded they would have to accept it to some extent. Miliband not only moved nearer the centre in economic terms by accomodating austerity, he also did so by trying to appear more hawkish on immigration (remember the mugs). But Labour do not have a means of influencing perceptions, so their perceived position was their actual position. In addition Miliband was tainted with the perceived incompetence of the Labour government and was not closer to the centre compared to Cameron’s perceived position, so he lost.

Ed Miliband’s defeat in 2015 was narrow but hard for Labour to take. Most of the political commentators (as they always do) said Labour should move to the right, and after the 2015 defeat they began to before the leadership elections. Recall that parties find it hard to move to the centre because their members will not allow it. That post 2015 rightward drift and the apparent acceptance of austerity was too much for the membership, and they voted for Corbyn.

There are more than two parties in the UK. So far we have been able to do the analysis without mentioning them but now they become crucial. Cameron by becoming more socially liberal allowed UKIP to gain votes. His response was to offer a referendum on the EU. Brexit, particularly a hard Brexit, should be an easy fail according to this diagram. It is socially conservative and right wing: trade restrictions are created so that labour and environmental regulations can be scrapped and not to preserve workers jobs. Its true position is close to Johnson’s in this diagram, while staying in the EU is a pretty centrist idea.

Brexit shows more than anything how we have to think about perceptions. What made Brexit a narrow winner when its true position suggested an easy loss? In short a brilliant if totally dishonest campaign that painted it as something it is not. Project Fear, with the help of the media, completely nullified the right wing economic dimension of Brexit, and turned it into a plus by talking about more money for the NHS. Staying in the EU was successfully painted as ultra liberal (letting the whole of Turkey come to the UK). As with austerity, the perceived position of parties and policies is what matters when it comes to winning elections and a referendum.

Now you could say that by allowing perceptions I can put party’s positions wherever I need to get the result I need. But just as we have good empirical evidence that austerity was perceived as economically neutral by much of the population, we also have good evidence that those who voted for Brexit thought it would have no negative impact on the economy or their personal incomes.

That Corbyn came close to defeating May was not a surprise if you look at his position on this diagram, once we recognise that what Corbyn managed to do in 2017 was neutralise Brexit as an issue. Because he remained as close to the centre as May, he gained votes once his policies became clear as a result of his manifesto. Without his portrayal in the right wing press he might have won.

So what changed by 2019? He was not able to neutralise Brexit, because parliament had agreed a deal. He had to choose, and whatever choice he made would lose votes. For that (not good) reason he delayed choosing, which allowed the resurgence of the Liberal Democrats (and Greens) who portrayed themselves as the true Remain party.

Yet Corbyn is still closer to the centre than Johnson. He lost badly partly because Brexit is perceived as neutral in economic terms by many, so Johnson’s perceived economic position has become synonymous with Brexit. However crucially he also lost because the UK is not a two party system. The Liberal Democrats, the SNP and the Greens are all perceived to be in liberal/left space, and together with Labour they won more votes than Johnson and the Brexit party put together.

The lesson of all this is twofold. First, this two-dimensional diagram can explain a lot, once you replace the parties’ actual position against their perceived position generated with a right wing media. Of course it leaves out a lot (the popularity of leaders, which is related to their charisma, the effectiveness of campaigns etc), but it seems like a good place to start. Second, as long as the Conservative party has the monopoly of the right wing/socially conservative vote, left social liberals cannot afford to split their vote among several parties. If Labour ever made a significant move in a socially conservative position, as Blue Labour wants, it would be defeated by yet more votes going to the other left/liberal parties.

Postscript. For an excellent discussion of some of the points made here, see this post by Marios Richards

Labour’s position on Brexit is not a compromise, but is taking the wrong side

The elections for the European parliament showed us the implications of a basic imbalance in politics today. Brexit is the dominant issue, yet both of the major parties support one side, the Brexit side. The Labour leadership tells itself that it is trying to bring the two sides together. It tells itself, by aiming for a softer Brexit than May wanted, it is trying to compromise. But as someone once said, Brexit is Brexit, and those voting in the European elections agreed.

To see why Labour’s position will not bring people together, just look at what happened to the Conservative vote. May was trying to achieve a very hard Brexit, where we were neither a member of the Single Market or Customs Union. She failed mainly because the Brexit extremists in her own party did not support her. European election voters punished the Conservatives and sided with the Conservative extremists. They didn’t want compromise.

Suppose Labour, after winning a future general election, enacted their softer Brexit. Would voters come together recognising Labour had attempted to unite both sides? Those voting for the Brexit party of Nigel Farage certainly would not. That slightly more Labour voters from 2017 voted fot the explicit Remain parties combined than Labour in the European elections suggests no appetite for compromise on that side either. Labour would instead suffer the fate of Theresa May and be hated by Remainers and Brexiters alike.

It is for that reason that this discussion is purely academic. Not because Labour would not win an election advocating a softer Brexit: there is a non-zero probability they would. Instead it is because Labour would end up being like Theresa May in failing to achieve their desired Brexit. As I argue here, the Conservatives would say Labour’s Brexit was a betrayal. Labour would only stand a chance of getting it through parliament if they agreed to have a second referendum with Remain on the ballot, and they would lose that referendum badly because Remainers and Brexiters would vote against them.

This dislike of a compromise is not irrational. Brexiters have ending up with No Deal because anything else fails to get complete independence from the EU. They are quite right to say that a softer Brexit would be worse for sovereignty than Remaining, because it amounts to pay, obey but no say. Equally for most Remainers a soft Brexit is qualitatively worse than staying in the EU. Look at the way the EU has supported Ireland in these negotiations, they would say. The moment you leave the club, you lose the backing of one of the most powerful political and economic organisations in the world. They are quite right to point to the many flaws in believing that the 2016 referendum is a mandate for any particular type of Brexit.

Why therefore are Labour antagonising their 2017 voters and their members by having a Brexit position that will be very unpopular and impossible to achieve? The answer normally given is that this is the only way to win a general election. Anything else risks losing ‘heartland seats’ because Labour voters will vote for a Brexit party. While this idea might have had some validity in 2017, it has since become an article of faith rather than an evidence based argument.

The basic problem with this argument is that there are many Remain voters in the constituencies that voted Leave in 2016. Polls throughout 2019 suggest a 3 to 1 ratio: by supporting Brexit Labour are losing three times as many Remain voters as any Leave voters they would lose by supporting Remain. The European elections backed part of that finding up with actual votes, and also suggested Labour are in danger of losing Leave voters anyway with their current stance. If anything like that ratio persists, they will lose their traditional heartland seats because Remain voters will not vote Labour.

The table below is from the Ashcroft exit poll for the European election. It compares the percentage of voters who voted for Labour or explicit Remain parties, and also the Leave/Remain balance, by region. The most Leave orientated regions are to the left. Overall this sample is almost certainly biased to Leave voters, because only a tiny number of young people (18-24) voted, and polls regularly show a small lead for Remain over Leave.

%	EM	NE	York	WM	East	SE	Wales	NW	SW	Lon	Scot
Leave	59	55	54	54	54	52	51	50	50	39	37
Remain	38	38	43	42	42	45	45	45	46	57	59
Lab	11	21	17	17	9	9	12	23	11	17	10
LD,G+	33	28	35	31	40	40	43	34	43	46	62
Lab L	4	7	6	6	3	3	4	8	4	6	3

The first point to make is that the outliers here are London and Scotland. Elsewhere, the Leave vote varies from 59% to 50%, and the Remain vote from 38% to 46%. The idea that leave voters are predominantly in the ‘North’ is nonsense. (If anything, the English divide is East versus West outside London, but it is still a small tendency rather than a real divide.) A key consequence of this observation is that areas like the East Midlands and the North East still contain many Remain voters.

These voters made their choice on the basis of the current policy stance of their parties. Nationally about a third of Labour voters in the European election want some kind of Brexit (Ashcroft does not give a regional breakdown), and two thirds want to Remain. The final row applies that percentage to the Labour vote in each region to get the percentage of Labour leavers. These are the maximum number of voters that Labour could lose from its European election result if it became a Remain party. Compare that to the total number of Remain voters, nearly all of whom could vote Labour if it became a Remain party.

The article of faith that those who justify Labour’s current stance cling to is that Remain voters will return to Labour in any general election, while if Labour became a Remain party any Leave voters would be lost. Examples in the past of protest votes that have all but disappeared are given to justify that faith. But it is never explained why Remain voters will come back to Labour even though it supports Brexit, but Leave voters will not come back in a general election if Labour supports Remain. In addition Brexit is not like anything in the past. It has divided the country like no issue before it. As I showed above, you really need pretty well all Labour Remainers to return to the fold to get a number smaller than the number of likely Leave losses.

The idea that Remain voters, and not the Leave vote, will return en masse to Labour in a general election relies in part on a universal use of tactical voting that is simply unrealistic. A good example will be the forthcoming Peterborough by-electon, which is a classic example of a Leave marginal that we are told Labour has to keep its current Brexit policy to win. If the European elections are anything to go by, Brexit will win. In 2017, when Labour just won, the LibDem and Green vote was small. Let’s see if Labour voters from 2017 will unite to keep the Brexit party out.

Some say it worked in 2017, so why will it not work in the future? Many things have changed since 2017 (when Labour still lost). The stance of the EU is now clear, and therefore so is the range of deals the UK could possibly get. The Remain movement is much stronger. But the Labour party has also changed. The 2017 election was the era of Starmer’s 6 tests, which included the ‘exact same benefits’. Today those tests are gone, and instead we have prolonged negotiations between the government and Labour over a possible Brexit deal. Too many Remainers who voted for Labour in 2017 feel they can no longer trust Corbyn on Brexit.

The weakness of the argument to keep current policy and ignore the European elections and the polling evidence has lead some to resort to nostalgia. The argument goes that the working class support for Leave is above the national average, and Labour should be a party of the working class. Labour is becoming less and less a working class party. Supporting Remain would be to “abandon much of the working class – and with it any prospect of a Labour government” according to Lisa Nandy.

There are three main holes in this argument. First there are plenty of working class voters that support Remain. Adopting a Brexit policy, even if it is milder than Theresa May’s hard Brexit, is in danger of alienating those voters. Second, Labour stopped being the party of the working class some time ago. Its heartlands today are in large cities and university towns, and supporting Brexit betrays its new heartlands. It betrays the young who overwhelmingly support Remain and overwhelmingly support Labour.

Third, the way you get the working class vote back is by promising or enacting economic measures that help the working class, and not by offering a weaker form (in their view) of Brexit to socially conservative working class voters. If Brexit, then why not immigration? If you think about it, Labour have been trying to appease exactly the same group of voters who voted Brexit for at least a decade, and they have failed miserably for one simple reason. Anyone who wants Brexit enough not to vote Labour is not going to be convinced by a party that is Remain at heart and which is offering them a half baked version of what they want. It was true for immigration under Blair/Brown and Miliband, and it remains true for Brexit.

I said there was still a chance that Labour with its current Brexit policy could win the next election. However the probability that it could win an election with a new policy that fully supports Remain is much higher, and certainly over 50%. The Leave voted could be divided, but the Remain vote if Labour supports Remain much less so. The key to any change in policy is to recognise that, thanks to the Brexiters, a ‘middle way’ (Labour’s current policy) is no longer possible. It will always be opposed by a blocking coalition of No Deal Brexiters and Remainers. The choice is now No Deal, a hard Brexit under the Tories or Remain. Of those three Labour have to support Remain.

What about a small shift in Labour policy, supporting an unconditional People’s Vote where Remain is always a choice on the ballot? The trouble with that policy is it traps Labour with endless questions of under what circumstances Labour would support Remain. Instead of the campaigning party Labour should be on Brexit, it becomes in most voters eyes the party of convoluted explanations. The next Brexit battle is to stop No Deal, and Labour can only do that effectively if it stops pretending it can achieve a softer Brexit.

The response to the European elections will define politics for some time

When I woke up on Monday morning and saw the European election results, I wrote this tweet

“Woke up to a triumph for Remain. On latest vote count from BBC, UK clear Remain 40.3%, clear No Deal 34.9%, Lab 14.1% Con 9,1%. Clear Remain even just beat No Deal Brexit in England. If that is not the headline you are seeing, it is another example of Brexit bias I'm afraid.”

For the next two days I got hundreds of messages telling me I was delusional (or worse), and often including a funny picture rather than any kind of argument.

Here is Farage doing exactly the same thing to exactly the same point on television. It is what people like him do when they have no answer. Here is the BBC making the same point, but badly because they mislabel No Deal parties as just pro-Brexit. Both Labour and the Conservatives are pro-Brexit.

Of the responses to my tweet that contained more than half a dozen words, the desire seemed to be to argue that Remain had not beaten abstract Leave. Indeed they had not. According to Ashcroft’s exit poll, 50% of voters backed Leave and 46% backed Remain. The reason why Leave won is obvious if you look at the age breakdown of who voted. In these kind of low turnout elections the old are more likely to turn up than the young, and this was no exception: only 3% of those who voted were between 18 and 24.

Why did I call the Remain vote a triumph? The Brexit party vote was neither unexpected or remarkable. It was clear from the start Farage would get nearly all the UKIP vote, and that he would also capture voters who want Brexit and were fed up that the Tories had not achieved it. He also got a few Labour votes. What was unexpected and I think remarkable that the Remain parties won so many votes. Previously I had hoped that the combined Remain parties vote might equal the combined Brexit party and UKIP vote, so I thought the actual performance was tremendous.

Did it matter that more Leave than Remain voters turned up? I cannot see why. What will shape politics in the months to come is the Tories reaction to Farage’s success, Labour’s reaction to Remain’s success, and whether this victory leads the Remain parties to cooperate in the next general election. The other important point is that abstract Leave totals mean less and less, given the chances of a Brexit deal passing parliament any time soon are zero. Their main relevance right now is whether those voters when faced with a No Deal Brexit back it or prefer Remain.

I have written recently about how the Tories are likely to respond to these results. Labour have already responded by making their support for a referendum unconditional, but they have not said that any referendum would contain a Remain option and they have certainly not said they would always support Remain. Corbyn’s dream of a Labour deal remains alive and party policy, and he seems not to have realised that he could never implement it. Whether what they have already done is enough to win back enough Remain voters in any general election seems 50/50 at best, so their current stance certainly puts an election victory at risk.

Before anyone mentions seats in the North East, according to Ashcroft 15% of European election voters who voted for Labour in the 2017 election voted for the Brexit party. An amazing 45% of Labour voters in 2017 voted for combined Remain parties. That 3 to 1 ratio matches what opinion polls have been saying, but it is one thing to say it to a pollster and quite another to break in many cases a habit of a lifetime and actually vote against Labour. And to those who say Labour cannot desert its heartlands, what about those in the North East that want to Remain? Ashcroft suggests that 42% of voters in the North East think they voted Labour in 2017, and 38% of voters in the North East want to remain in the EU. See this post on how attempts to attract Brexit voters in Brexit constituencies are more likely to push away the considerable number of Remain voters in those constituencies.

Labour’ choice is do they keep being a Brexit party and stay an opposition party with a romantic dream of becoming once again being a party of the working class, or do they follow their voters and members and become a Remain party that can win an election and actually do something for the working class. The European elections showed up a fundamental imbalance. Brexit is the policy of both major parties, so no major party supports Remain, and that is a vacuum that will be filled. (The Tories got punished because they failed to deliver Brexit.) Hence Labour should support Remain.

Right now we want a Labour leadership that is actively campaigning against a No Deal Brexit, telling people how a No Deal Brexit Britain would become an impoverished and powerless satellite of the USA like Puerto Rico but with a tax haven status for the rich. We do not want a Labour leadership who spend whatever air time they get explaining what their Brexit policy actually is.

If Labour think things can only get better, they may have already inspired what could be a sea change in any general election. The lesson for the Greens and the Lib Dems is that if they cooperate they could do remarkably well in a future general election, particularly if the Conservatives go for No Deal and Labour stay a Brexit party. Cooperation would involve the LibDems giving way in some seats where both they and the Greens are strong, but in exchange being the only party of Remain in most other seats.

If that happened, it would be a disaster for Labour. I have made it no secret that I believe the next government must be a radical party that can challenge neoliberal hegemony and also do something about the sorry state of our media, and I do not think the LibDems are there yet, although they are moving back to their traditional left of centre position. I therefore view anything that could stop the next government being Labour as a disaster. It would be tragic if that was to happen as a result of Brexit.

How the media can frame our understanding of elections

What will the European elections mean for the future of Brexit? We know that Remain is clearly ahead in polls and has been for some time, but an actual election has additional validity. What better to focus on the EU issue than elections to the European parliament. So quite rightly everyone will be looking to the result to gauge popular opinion.

There is only one problem. The obvious thing to look at is votes cast, because these are unaffected by a voting system that penalises small parties. There are three main pro-Brexit, anti-People’s Vote parties (Con, Brexit and UKIP), five anti-Brexit, pro-PV parties (Green, LibDem, CHUK, SNP and Plaid) and Labour. Although Labour is officially a pro-Brexit party, it is likely something in excess of three quarters of those who vote for Labour are anti-Brexit.

But as I have written before, the media will focus on Nigel Farage. What is also almost certain is that they will focus on seats won rather than votes. As Ian Dunt writes

“Sure, Remain might end up doing as well as Brexit parties in the popular vote, but it won't matter. That's not how journalists think and it's not how Westminster thinks. They care about who wins: how many MEPs are returned and from which party.”

I can confirm, based on a twitter conversation with a journalist for a major broadcaster, that this is exactly how they will behave. They will focus on the large number of seats Farage wins compared to the small number of seats that the anti-Brexit parties win in England and declare a victory for Brexit. This journalist even said it would mean the death of a People’s Vote.

Now if this was all about the UK’s representatives to the European Parliament, then of course it would be right to focus on seats. It seems likely that had the Greens, LibDems and CHUK cooperated they would win more seats each than if they fight each other. But if you are trying to assess what the vote means for popular sentiment on Brexit you should look at the vote. Ask any pollster. But the media will to a large extent ignore this.

The only defence for the media’s approach is that politicians will also focus on seats. But will they? I think the truth is that the political parties that do well in terms of seats will do so. Those that do well in terms of votes will focus on votes. In particular the winner in terms of seats will make a great deal of fuss about that fact. The media loves to focus on winners for understandable reasons. The problem comes in letting this focus spill over into statements about issues where its votes not seats that matter.

Suppose the result in terms of votes and seats (excl Northern Ireland) is something like this (not a forecast, but just reasonable numbers to illustrate my point):

Labour 27% Seats 23

Pro-No Deal parties 28% Seats 25

Conservative 14% Seats 10

Anti-Brexit 31% Seats 12

Suppose Farage gets all of those 25 seats. He will be the winner, and we will see celebrations by him everywhere. But does that imply that a People’s Vote is dead? Of course not, as PV parties will have won 58% of the vote. Does it imply we should leave with No Deal. Of course not: no deal parties have only 28% of the vote, which is less than the anti-Brexit parties. Can we trust the media to make these points? I suspect not.

It is depressing how people internalise media behaviour. I have read countless tweets, articles and podcasts saying that the failure of the three anti-Brexit parties to cooperate is a huge mistake, because it will damage Remain’s cause. This is from Remainers themselves, not their opponents, and Remainers who know how the media behaves.

Why is it so difficult for the media to focus on reality, rather than make up a false truth that is sympathetic to certain politicians and newspapers. Maybe the reason is just bias - a bias imposed by the partisan press that too often sets the agenda. Maybe it reflects the media’s obsession with parliament and MPs, where MPs from Remain parties are few in number. Maybe it reflects how the media sees elections as horse races were only the winner matters. None of these reasons are good, so it is a shame that so many people internalise the media's framing rather than challenging it.