Five
reasons why Labour lost the election
Corbyn’s
unpopularity, a muddled manifesto and its Brexit stance cost the party dear
Five
reasons the Tories won the election
Kate
Proctor political correspondent
Fri 13 Dec
2019 07.10 GMTFirst published on Fri 13 Dec 2019 06.00 GMT
Labour has
suffered one of its worst general election results in living memory with dozens
of seats that the party had held on to for decades falling to the
Conservatives. On Friday morning the party will begin its analysis of why this
happened, with the debate likely to affect how Labour bounces back on the road
to the next national vote. Below we look at five reasons why the Labour defeat
happened.
Jeremy
Corbyn
Shadow
cabinet figures such as Richard Burgon were quick to praise the Labour leader’s
decency and integrity in broadcast interviews overnight – but after the exit
poll came in many candidates said that on the doorstep it was his lack of
popularity that cost them. Corbyn went into the campaign with the lowest net
satisfaction ratings of any opposition leader since the late 1970s (Ipsos
Mori). Among older voters, Labour campaigners said his past support for the
Irish republican movement came up repeatedly on the doorsteps. In London,
antisemitism and what people perceived as the absence of an apology appeared to
be a key issue. Ruth Smeeth, a longstanding Corbyn critic who expected to lose
her Stoke North seat, told Sky News the blame for the predicted result lay with
the leader. She said: “His personal actions have delivered this result for my
constituents and for swathes of the country overnight.” Toby Perkins, standing
in Chesterfield, said the election was tough and in part due to the “monumental
unpopularity” of Corbyn.
Manifesto
There was
an incredible amount on offer in Labour’s 2019 manifesto It’s Time for Real
Change. From free care for the elderly, free university tuition fees, reducing
the voting age to 16 and payouts for Waspi women, the party attempted to speak
to every sector of society. Some candidates reported that they had so much to
rattle through on the doorstep that when new policy ideas dropped halfway
through the campaign – such as slashed rail fares – they shied away from
discussing them so as not to overload people with commitments. A Labour source
said: “It wasn’t that people didn’t like the policies, people thought there was
too many of them. The free broadband was really unpopular. We hadn’t spent two
years making the case for it and we just dumped it on them … so people thought
‘this is a weird luxury, why on earth are we being offered this?” Jon Lansman,
leader of the Corbyn campaign group, Momentum, said: “The manifesto was too
detailed and too long. It was a programme for 10 years, not for government.”
Brexit
strategy
The Labour
leadership quickly blamed Brexit for overshadowing their radical domestic agenda,
but others within the shadow cabinet believe their own approach to the EU was
extremely unclear. The party’s chair, Ian Lavery’s frank assessment was telling
of the rift that has existed within the shadow cabinet over its policy to
renegotiate a Brexit deal with the EU within three months and put it to a
public vote within six months should Labour have won a majority. Lavery told
the BBC: “What we are seeing in the Labour heartlands is people very aggrieved
at the fact the party basically has taken a stance on Brexit the way they
have.” He said ignoring the wishes of 17.4 million voters was “not a good
recipe”. “Ignore democracy and to be quite honest the consequences will come
back and bite you up the backside,” he said. Caroline Flint, who lost her seat
in Don Valley, said the party had not taken the right approach considering the
number of leave-voting seats it represented in the country.
The
collapse of the ‘red wall’
A regular
line trotted out by opposition parties, particularly by the Conservatives and
the Brexit party during the election was that Labour had taken its traditional
working-class support base for granted. Despite promises to tax billionaires to
fund investment in public services that would have helped those on lower
incomes, Labour’s offer failed to convince voters in old coal, steel and
manufacturing towns. The so-called “red wall”, made up of seats such as
Bolsover, Rother Valley, Blyth Valley, Darlington and Redcar turning Tory
indicated a severing of Labour allegiances that in some cases span back 100
years. There has been criticism that Corbyn, as a middle-class north Londoner,
was unable to appeal to working-class communities personally despite his
policies, and many of his shadow cabinet colleagues, including the shadow
foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, the shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer
and the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, were drawn from neighbouring
constituencies.
Election
strategy
In the
postmortem of the election strategy, the allocation of supporters and
campaigners to parts of the UK will be scrutinised in detail. Labour was aiming
for a majority and spread its base wide, perhaps making its mission too expansive.
Rallies were held in safe Birmingham and Bristol but also marginals such as
Telford and Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. Some activists complained
that Momentum, which was a powerful campaigning force in 2017, focused its
efforts only on the ultra-marginal seats and those that had a candidate aligned
to its politics. This may have left some seats at risk with majorities of
between 3,000 to 5,000, because the group did not always have a strong
on-the-ground presence. Significant effort and manpower went into the trophy
seats of Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat and Iain
Duncan-Smith’s Chingford and Woodford Green, both of which the Tories held.
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