How tacking centre left will help Labour win the next election |
Led by a probably doomed prime minister, presiding over a struggling economy, exposed by an ongoing scandal, besieged by populist insurgents to its right and left, ambushed by a war that will bring higher inflation and public debt, and predicted to win just 75 seats at the next general election, according to the website Electoral Calculus, Labour is in an unprecedented crisis. The party will have to do unprecedented things to get out of it.
One could be making its political approach both narrower and more expansive. This would require Labour to drop habits and orthodoxies which have become ingrained since the 1980s.
By narrower, I mean abandoning the failed attempt of Keir Starmer’s government to simultaneously appeal to voters on the authoritarian right and the liberal left: for example, by launching ever harsher immigration policies while also standing up for a multicultural society.
Back when most voters always chose between Labour and the Tories, parties often had to be politically ambiguous – “tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime” was New Labour’s canny example – because winning a general election required a broad coalition of voters. Yet nowadays, with the electorate much more fragmented, and the divides much clearer and more acrimonious than in the relatively placid 1990s and 2000s, ambiguous political messages often come across as incoherent and inauthentic – common criticisms of the Starmer government.
Broad........