So why did Labour lose the last four elections?

Anatomy of decline: as the next general election approaches, with Labour heading the polls, curious – and frustrated – souls are wondering why the party has spent the last 13 years in opposition. Chris Connelley reviews a new book by a promising young researcher seeking to uncover the reasons why Labour has lost the last four general elections.

August used to be a politician free month, and as recently as the noughties, Prime Minister Tony Blair happily hopped off to spend quality private beach and luxury villa time with VIP buddies like Cliff Richard and Silvio Berlasconi without apparent concern. A few years on, with a 24/7 news cycle now firmly established, social media is awash with images of dressed-down politicians spending their summer on community call-up getting up-close and local in their constituencies. Only Nadine Dorries seems to have gone AWOL and, as the dog days of summer make way for September’s darker nights, even she’s thrown in the towel.

It’s certainly business as usual for the politicians here in Hastings, a classic marginal constituency that generally goes the way of the winning party, as the parties gear up for a general election that has to happen by January 2025 at the very latest. The Greens are in the process of selecting their first parliamentary candidate for this seat since 2015, Labour’s candidate, Helena Dollimore, has apparently set her team an ambitious target for voter contacts every week, and is out on the doorstep every weekend, whilst Conservative incumbent Sally-Ann Hart has just issued a four-page pamphlet styled as a community newspaper.

There’s a real sense that politics is hotting up, and, for those on the left, a real sense that they might be in with a chance for the first time in years after the nightmarish 2019 Brexit election defeat, which saw Labour lose a large number of traditional, heartland ‘red wall’ constituencies in the Midlands and north, capping a dismal decade for the party. Indeed, when the history books are written, the period from 2010 will go down as pretty consistently dark days for Labour, in stark contrast to the preceding golden age of New Labour, which saw the party secure three consecutive election wins.

So what went wrong?

It’s a question that has exercised many commentators over many years, and one that so preoccupied St Leonards-based political polling expert James Prentice that he went on to research the topic for a PhD. He’s just published a book about it too. Appropriately titled Labour’s Lost Decade, it is a seriously compelling read.

The author tracks Labour’s slow decline over the course of the noughties, from seemingly unassailable permanent-government-in-residence to fractured Iraq war-conflicted party and, following Blair’s handover to Gordon Brown, banking-crisis-and-global-recession-buffeted opposition-in-waiting.

Making extensive use of polling data, Prentice identifies the set of overarching themes that dominated public opinion throughout the period, tracking the decline in public confidence in the party, and charting the rise of an issue like immigration from a highly marginal concern to one dominating the political mainstream and feeding into the Brexit referendum and its gory aftermath.

Leadership changes

He also explores responses to changes in leadership following the 2010 defeat, noting the difficulties experienced by Ed Miliband in appealing to swing voters, and, from 2015, under Jeremy Corbyn, even holding on to its older, traditional working class support, the effect of which was to see Labour contract to an urban, educated core piling on massive majorities in London and big cities whilst being unable to break through in smaller towns, rural seats and coastal communities like ours.

Overall, the book makes bleak reading, but with a late positive twist, namely Labour’s remarkable recovery following Liz Truss’s election and brief tenure as prime minister last summer, a 49-day period that saw the markets plummet and a half century established Conservative reputation for economic competence royally trashed.

Crucially for Labour, under new leader Keir Starmer and fixated on purging the party of its Corbyn-era toxicity, it re-established public interest in its offer as the only credible alternative government in our first-past-the-post electoral system, opening up a formidable poll lead that still persists a year on. At its peak, Labour led by 33 points, with 54% against just 21% for the Tories; as I write this, the latest Ipsos polling puts Labour on a more modest but still robust 45% against 28% for the Conservatives under their replacement leader Rishi Sunak.

Prentice’s book takes a chronological approach, covering each of the four elections since 2010 in separate chapters, a slow-burn storytelling structure that allows an interweaving of themes across time whilst providing a degree of detail and specificity that captures each major electoral moment and the uneven texture of Labour’s decline. His text is clearly written, with a generous dose of charts and tables to illustrate the polling data, and delivers a serious and distinctive contribution to domestic political analysis.

Own manifesto

Interestingly, in his final chapter, he goes beyond reportage to ponder what Labour might do to become electable again, effectively offering his own manifesto for growth and advantage and conferring his work with a strong personality. His suggested interventions, and willingness to take on areas like crime, are designed to appeal to traditional Labour audiences, and position him clearly in the reformist wing of the party intent on recovering broad, mainstream appeal after the activistic focus of the Corbyn years.

Put simply, he understands that in order to win, Labour has to recover its broad church appeal and re-engage with voters and topics that might sit outside the party’s recent comfort zone. As such, he is very on-message with the direction of travel from the party’s high command.

This is a timely book for turbulent times, in which James Prentice has established his credentials as a serious commentator and a name to watch going forward.

 

Labour’s Lost Decade: Why Labour Loses And How It Can Win, by James Prentice. Available from The Hastings Bookshop, 5 Trinity Street, Hastings TN34 1HG and from Amazon.

 

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