The accepted wisdom is that Labour fishing in the same pond as the Tories and Reform for voters since April 2020 will not lose heroic voters to Reform.
Perhaps not between now and polling day, but as Labour can never satisfy this group, a subset of the white working class, to which party will Sir Keir Starmer KC’s heroes go next?
“There are notionally scores of seats in play at the next election, presaging a potentially seismic shift in the political landscape. But both of the main English parties have their sights set on a narrow slice of the population. Deborah Mattinson, Starmer’s director of strategy, calls them “hero voters” – the ones who swing directly from Tory to Labour, effectively having double the impact of anyone who moves from a third party. The profile of these voters is Brexit-supporting, older (but not retired), economically precarious, socially conservative, white, not in big cities and without higher education.
The anxieties and prejudices of those people exert a magnetic pull on national debate to the exclusion of other voters.”
“So British politics must be bent out of shape to make some opinions prominent and fold others out of sight: the idea that leaving the EU was a mistake, for example, or that migration is good for the economy, or that mass indefinite detention of asylum seekers is not a practice for civilised democracies. Those views are widely held, but they will not be visible on a campaign trail mapped by Labour and Tory strategists. Anyone who believes such heresies must simply wait and see what kind of coalition we get next.”
Red wall Brexiters will be the ‘hero voters’ of the next election
I would not go so far as to say the heroes are my people, but we are on more than nodding terms and of roughly the same age.
They will never get the ‘good’ jobs of which Labour speaks, because they have not, most of them, ever taken the help made available to them over decades.
There are unlucky people amongst them whom fate has dealt a poor hand of cards, but most are self made victims of a world that was already changing when they were born because they declined to adapt to changing times.
They are of a generation who were told they did not need to do well at school, because your Da, another relative or a friend would get you a job where they worked, maybe as an apprentice toolmaker.
The highest aspiration of the working class is a job mekkin’ things.
Sir Keir went into the Law.
I think it is rather instructive to note that the graduate middle class who came up with the hero stereotype particularly singled out not having a degree as a defining factor.
I imagine they rarely come across people who are not only suspicious of formal education and training, but in some cases hostile towards it.
I would guess, based on the experience of myself and Civil Service colleagues over the years most of the heroes left school at 16 and have avoided the chance of post 16 education or training ever since.
I did two spells of duty in an inner city Jobcentre in Washwood Heath, Birmingham and was born into the aspirational working class, but unlike Hugh Muir in this article about the heroes he experienced growing up, I am white.
Were Labour ever able to persuade a business to build a steelworks at Saltley Gate, the hallowed ground of Miners’ Strikes past in East Birmingham then the heroes would be the last people they would want to employ.
Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves are arguably the most right wing Labour leadership since 1931.
I think Tories will be able to take a great deal of consolation from the very fact that the last time a Labour Party as right wing as that of 2024 took office Labour needed World War Two for it to again look credible as a party of government.
Ramsay MacDonald’s right of centre Labour Party with its unemployment benefit cutting agenda and Philip Snowden’s policy of neither a borrower nor a lender be, was so successful in Government, that it entered the 1931 General Election with 288 seats and left it with 52.
Ramsay MacDonald who had split the Labour Party just before the 1931 General Election was not numbered amongst the 52, but was leader of 13 National Labour MPs.
Sir Oswald Mosley, an up market Nigel Farage with brains had resigned from the Labour Party before the General Election to found the New Party, taking with him five other Labour MPs in February 1931.
In December of the previous year, 15 Labour MPs had signed the Mosley Memorandum.
Prominent amongst them was Aneurin Bevan.
The New Party initially enjoyed wide support across the political spectrum partly because of its advocacy of Keynesian economic policy
Rachel Reeves is most definitely not a Keynesian and neither were most elected British politicians before World War Two.
In fact, Reeves is orthodox.
Her analysis is subjective.
Her economic policies, heavily mercantilist with a side order of autarky.
Her attitude towards the poor, in and out of work, severely lacking in empathy.
Mosley went on to create the British Union of Fascists in 1932.
Jon “Cruddas concludes by warning that without more connections to the party’s traditions and values, and a clearer offer to the electorate, an election win could bring real dangers and even existential risk. “Without such reconciliation, a party of labour could be destroyed by victory.” “
The current Labour leadership prefers to have Angela Rayner of all people talk up trickle down in preference to each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.
Ange has chosen to be a working class Judas Goat, but not everyone is a sheep.
A recently vox popped Brummie Muslim working class woman in Alum Rock, East Birmingham, where Sir Keir’s Gaza stance is a live issue, put her finger on the fact that Labour leaving the Tory Two Child Benefits Cap in place, indefinitely, will make her and millions of others like her steadily poorer under a Labour Government.
A Labour Government for which, Robert Peston says she should vote.
Rachel Reeves is hostile towards the very concept of income redistribution.
But how are the poorest people in our society, like that woman, to share in the fruits of Reeves’s sustained, world beating, patriotic, sovereign economic growth, to feel the benefit in their pockets, wallets and bank accounts, if not through income redistribution?
Of course, that may prove to be, likely as not, an academic question.
The Abbott and Elphicke Affairs produced a letter from leading Black British stars, writers and executives that contained this paragraph:
“It is all the more upsetting given that Black communities have been among Labour’s most loyal supporters. But that loyalty has never been unconditional.”
The moment dry as a Bone, Hard Right Tory, religious fundamentalist pro lifer, Natalie Elphicke became a “good, natural fit” with Sir Keir’s Labour Party, Labour ceased to be a party that is a good, natural fit with my decades old Labour supporting family.
“In their 17-minute meeting last month Duffield told Starmer how angry she was about Natalie Elphicke, a former Tory MP, being admitted into the party, and how she had not received an apology over how she had been treated.
“He told me Natalie had signed up to Labour values, so I just laughed. He seemed surprised at how angry I was. But he’s not in touch with Labour women.” “
Rosie Duffield: Labour ignores women’s rights at its peril
There is a belief on the other side of Sir Keir’s GTTO coalition from the heroes that Labour will be different if it wins which seems unlikely so perhaps no one who voted Labour in 2024 will be particularly satisfied with the party by 2029.
History does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.
There is a certain irony in that Ramsay MacDonald, the Sir Keir of his day, paved the way for George Lansbury, the Jeremy Corbyn of his day.
It took Clement Attlee and the experience of Coalition Government during World War Two to reunite the Labour Party across the political spectrum, making the party in the process a credible party of Government that went on to win the 1945 General Election on a broadly Socialist programme.
The ramblings of a former DWP Civil Servant ... 