Groucho Marxism

In 2019, the Labour party suffered a humiliating defeat in the UK general election, losing 59 seats, the second-highest loss by any opposition for a century. Many explanations have been put forward for this collapse, but the three most commonly touted are: 1) unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn and, by extension, the party leadership; 2) the party’s overly ambitious manifesto; and 3) confusion over the party’s Brexit strategy. In this blog post, I will go through each of these reasons in turn and see which, if any, hold water. But before getting into the details, it’s worth pointing out that one of the reasons the defeat seemed so catastrophic is that it was compared to the 2017 election, where Labour performed above expectations. Therefore the question we need to ask is: what changed between 2017 and 2019?

Let’s start with the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn. There is no doubt that on the face of it at least, Corbyn was hugely unpopular with the British electorate. According to Ipsos Mori, Corbyn went into the campaign with the lowest net satisfaction ratings of any opposition leader since the late 1970s. There are reasons to be circumspect about statistics such as these though – the main one being that they don’t tell us anything about why Corbyn was so unpopular, and therefore only provide a partial explanation at best. It seems that for many people, antisemitism and the perceived absence of an apology was the key issue. If so, this largely exonerates Corbyn, as the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’ has now been completely debunked.

This suggests that it is not actually Jeremy Corbyn himself who was unpopular but the fabricated version of him that people came to know through the mainstream media. This fabricated person was either an antisemite himself, or on a slightly more sympathetic reading, was not necessarily an antisemite but was more than happy to lead a party full of antisemites into a general election. Of course, anyone who knows anything about Jeremy Corbyn knows that neither of these things is even remotely true, but that didn’t matter: what mattered was that enough people believed them. Clearly, though, it doesn’t make any sense to blame the election defeat on the personal characteristics of Jeremy Corbyn if the vast majority of the electorate didn’t know the first thing about these characteristics.

So let’s move on to explanation number two: the party’s overly ambitious manifesto. We can dispense with this one pretty quickly. It’s true that there was a lot on offer in Labour’s 2019 manifesto: 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. Apparently, this put people off voting for them. There are two things to say in response to this. First, nobody reads party manifestos. And second, it doesn’t make any sense to say that a party manifesto that appealed to all sectors of society would put people off voting for that party. In fact, the idea is plainly absurd. I honestly can’t understand how anyone can hold this up as a reason for Labour’s defeat and keep a straight face.

Which brings us to explanation number three: confusion over the party’s Brexit strategy. It’s true that Corbyn and the party leadership equivocated over Brexit for a long time. However this explanation as it stands doesn’t make a lot of sense as by the time of the 2019 election, Labour’s Brexit strategy was clear: the party backed a second referendum. But perhaps it wasn’t confusion over the party’s Brexit strategy that was the issue; perhaps it was the Brexit strategy itself? This explanation is not popular with the liberal commentariat, most of whom voted remain, supported a second referendum, and agitated for the Labour party to do the same. Unfortunately for the liberal commentariat, however, this explanation is the one backed up by the most evidence.

Labour announced it would back a second referendum in February 2019, as a last resort to stop a Tory no-deal Brexit. At that point, Labour were and the Tories were neck-and-neck on around 40% in the polls, as they had been since the 2017 election. From that point onwards, Labour’s vote share declined precipitously, reaching a low of around 20% in July 2019; and although it rallied slightly after that, it never fully recovered to it’s pre-February 2019 level. If that wasn’t incriminating enough, there is the fact that of the 54 seats Labour lost to the Tories, 52 were in leave-voting constituencies. Finally, there is the fact that between the 2017 and 2019 general elections, Labour lost around 3 million votes, whereas the number of people voting Tory remained roughly the same.

Returning to the question posed earlier, we may therefore ask again: what changed between 2017 and 2019? The Labour party leadership and policy platform remained broadly the same during this period; the one thing that changed significantly was the party’s stance on Brexit. All the evidence points to this being the key reason for Labour’s catastrophic defeat. In fact, I don’t think the 2019 election would have happened at all had the Labour party not backed a second referendum. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why the Tories decided to hold an election when Labour was languishing at around 20% in the polls. The Tories understood what the liberal commentariat apparently didn’t, or at least pretended not to: in backing a second referendum, Labour had effectively committed electoral suicide.