Most reviews of Get In, the recently published history of Keir Starmer’s Labour by the Times journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, focused on its exposure of the prime minister’s unease with the rough and tumble of politics, and his consequent reliance on Morgan McSweeney, now his chief of staff. A spectacular what-might-have-been moment in the book concerns another Downing Street svengali figure, however; one rumoured to be plotting Nigel Farage’s path to power at the next election.
At the beginning of 2019, it turns out, Dominic Cummings attempted to convince aides to Jeremy Corbyn that Labour should vote for Theresa May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement, thereby prompting a split in the Conservative party and a swift election. Labour could then fight and win that contest on its own natural territory of funding the NHS and public services. As Cummings put it in a text to Corbyn’s spokesperson: “You get Brexit through, [People’s Vote] fucked … high chance of Govt collapse … Tory civil war guaranteed for years in any scenario.”
Plausible? Corbyn’s sharpest political ally, John McDonnell, was among those who didn’t buy it, fearing that Labour would be deserted by millions of middle-class remainers crying betrayal. Instead, under Starmer’s direction as shadow Brexit secretary, the other fork in the road was chosen. The party backed a second referendum, and was subsequently routed in the “get Brexit done” election at the end of the year.
Viewed in hindsight, the politics of that moment look just as invidious as they did then. But as May’s local elections approach, and Farage promises to park Reform UK’s tanks “on the lawns of the red wall”, the anecdote is of far more than historical interest. Cummings – in bracingly ecumenical fashion – understood the social democratic potential in the disruptions of the 2010s, as the blue-collar vote asserted itself in unpredictable ways. Does Labour, even now?
As a now familiar pattern of extreme political turbulence continues domestically and abroad, Labour’s massive but shallow victory last July seems almost a trick of the electoral light. Polls indicate that support is being lost to the right, the left and the centre. Front and centre in the north of England and Midlands, though, is the gathering momentum of Farageism. The Runcorn and Helsby byelection on 1 May will be a knife-edge affair – one that many Labour loyalists believe Reform will win.
A Farage triumph, in the first Westminster contest since the heady days of last summer, would underline that the resentments and aspirations for which Brexit was a vehicle have not gone away. As the government continues to box itself in by sticking to self-defeating fiscal rules, it may already be too late to avoid a Runcorn outcome that will trigger painful memories of December 2019. But between now and the next election, if Labour is to avoid the strategic mistakes of the recent past it will need to think in more imaginative, ambitious and generous terms about who the Reform-facing or Reform-curious actually are, and what they are trying to say.
A report in March by the polling group More in Common delivered one suggestive nugget that might help. Collating responses according to its own range of voter types across the political spectrum, the report’s authors noted an unusual overlap. “Loyal nationals” and “progressive activists” were both more likely than other groups to think “the government should act to limit the damage done by business”.
Interesting. According to More in Common’s typology, progressive activists will have gone deep into further education, live in cities, support Labour or the Greens, care about inequality and like the Guardian. Loyal nationals often read the Mail or the Sun, feel looked down upon by the certificated, are anxious about external threats and believe the nation should come together in defence of the collective self-interest.
Is this a partial snapshot, then, of Labour’s old, fractured voting coalition finally in agreement? In a subsequent dispatch published in the Guardian, More in Common’s director, Luke Tryl, recorded similar sentiments in the towns of Merthyr Tydfil and Dudley, where Reform has been on the march for months. Alongside the now familiar distrust, bordering on contempt, for politicians, Tryl noted that “big business was seen as just as bad. Energy companies and supermarkets profiteering from the cost of living crisis, Amazon not paying its fair share of tax, tech companies damaging young minds, were all raised across the two days as examples of rampant corporate greed.”
Though it talks a good game in the regions, and sees the potential in some judicious “old Labour”-style positioning, Reform generally aspires to satisfy corporate greed rather than challenge it. Its general election manifesto pledged to slash corporation tax as well as inheritance tax rates, and drastically raise the threshold for paying the higher rate of income tax. Loyal national types are wooed by mining of the darker seams of communitarian angst: “small boats” rhetoric, the promise to take Britain out of the European court of human rights and boilerplate attacks on “diversity”.
Depressingly, it appears that Starmer and McSweeney’s Labour continues to view blue-collar voters primarily the same way – to be courted through crackdowns on immigration and a high-profile focus on crime and policing. It is fatuous politics to play down the importance of either issue in Reform-friendly constituencies and beyond. But this remains a desperately narrow, limited interpretation of working-class values and preoccupations.
Cummings’ insight throughout the Brexit period was that in regions such as South Yorkshire and Tyne and Wear, there is a hankering for – and a memory of – a more collectivist politics than the exploitative rentier capitalism presided over by both the main parties for decades. The notorious £350m NHS pledge on the side of the Brexit bus worked for a reason. However cynically it was conceived, it stood for a reassertion of popular priorities and control over everyday lives, and the classical blue-collar (and Labour) values of mutuality and solidarity.
As Labour has belatedly begun to realise in relation to the potential demise of the British steel industry, standing up for the public good against powerful but remote interests can be popular with “progressives” and “patriots”. This principle, rather than a technocratic obsession with growth, can be the cornerstone of a future Labour voting coalition that calls Reform’s bluff and injects some much-needed idealism into the nation’s politics.
Such an approach would mean prosecuting a critique of the way contemporary capitalism works far more radical than the government has dared or wished to contemplate. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump is undertaking his own quixotic version of this. Is it too much to hope that modern Labour, eventually, can respond with resources already present within its own traditions?
Julian Coman is a Guardian associate editor
