06 Mar “Vote Labour, Win a Microwave” is no substitute for direction and vision
“Policies are just promises to be broken.”
Last week was not the first time Keir Starmer has suffered a crushing by-election defeat. At the depth of his Hartlepool loss in 2021 we undertook a research project to find out how Labour could get voters to listen again, and, in time, trust the party.
The most striking finding was that policies alone do not convince voters. A policy in isolation, however popular per se, was not credible when associated with a political party, least of all one stuttering in the polls.
The only way to get support for a policy was to root it in a story (or vision) about the direction the party would take Britain – a future that voters wanted to be part of. There was no substitute for story-telling amongst the scores of ex-Labour voters who told us they felt abandoned by the party.
Now here we are again. A heavy by-election defeat – this time to the Greens – and some serious Labour soul-searching; a debate largely reduced to “shall we move left or right?” or “one more heave.”
This time, the ‘policy megaphone’ is likely to have even less success. This is because the unparalleled public anger and resentment towards Number 10 is aimed primarily at a perceived lack of principles and direction that should underpin policymaking, even more so than the policies themselves.
The Left, and indeed many moderate voters, have been appalled by initial comments about Gaza and the Treasury’s attitude to welfare. The Right wins over swing voters by pointing to hesitancy on grooming gangs and high asylum costs. Everybody deplores the winter fuel fiasco. Ask any doorknocker; u-turns and inconsistency are interpreted as an absence of core values.
But the answer cannot be to ‘lurch Left’, nor imitate the Right. Far from it. This is about Labour being confident in setting its own Centre-Left communitarian agenda, and boldly exerting its own identity and direction; presenting the party’s own values as Britain’s values; For instance, setting out why helping people off welfare into work is important for the individual’s self-esteem, good for society, and ‘true’ Labour. Or making the (now more measured) argument Shabana Mahmood has set out in the Guardian on asylum.
None of this is to say Labour should neglect bread-and-butter policy; of course Starmer should seek to ease cost-of-living pressures on households – no easy feat in this era of global uncertainty. But we are also in an era of populist communication, and – ultimately – unless Number 10 can convince the public it is driven by values it will run the risk of replicating the ‘Vote Labour, Win a Microwave’ retail politics which did for Ed Miliband in 2015.
Joe Jervis
Renaissance Director