Analysis: Don’t call it a comeback. How Labour could win the next general election

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer pledged that Labour’s 2024 general election manifesto will “sound like the future arriving”, but will he be around as leader to witness it, let alone implement it?

Here I analyse some of roadblocks the Labour leader is facing, the need to promote more of a vision and why even a ‘good’ campaigning strategy won’t be enough.

Leader for just over a year, Starmer achieved some early successes in his efforts to differentiate himself from the toxicity that dogged his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. Sir Keir was quick to assert that Labour was ‘Under New Leadership’ and managed to put daylight between his leadership and that of his predecessor on the handling of antisemitism within party ranks.

As the Conservatives put time and energy into characterising Starmer in the terms of his predecessor – unpatriotic, far left, metropolitan liberal and attempting to undermine Brexit - Starmer was able to respond by questioning the PM’s own fitness for the job and reinforce his own patriotic credentials with the line:

“While Boris Johnson was writing flippant columns about bendy bananas, I was defending victims and prosecuting terrorists”

Delivered in his first Labour conference speech as leader, this is probably the closest you can get to distilling Labour’s communications strategy into a few spoken words – here you can see emphasis on fairness, the post-Corbyn re-emphasis on national security and the characterisation of the Prime Minister as sloppy and lightweight.

Yet despite the precision-engineered rhetoric and the failure of tabloid attacks to land – including the criticism that he bought land for his late disabled mother to house donkeys – the Labour Party has been struggling to make significant progress.

In the past few months we have seen that although the pandemic played directly into Boris Johnson’s pre-existing weaknesses - not least a lack of attention to detail and a poor handle on procurement issues - the vaccine roll-out and a sense that the worst is over has boosted the government’s fortunes.

But there is more to this boost than a simple ‘vaccine bounce’, and the roadblocks have come from Labour’s own territory as well as their parliamentary opposition’s campaigning.

Roadblocks to Success

Much of the internecine squabbling over Starmer’s leadership has been fostered by two camps. These are Pro-European campaigners unhappy at Starmer’s lack of desire to rejoin the EU and tribal far-left Corbyn supporters. One of the narrative strands repeated by these groupings is that the Conservative government has been doing so badly that Starmer’s Labour should be comfortably ahead in the polls.

This discontent stems partly from incorrect assumptions. Firstly, that the general population is aware of the comparative global responses to the pandemic which reflect badly on the UK, secondly that there is an understanding of the ins and outs of procurement-related corruption, and thirdly that the country disapproves of the way that the Conservatives have handled the UK leaving the EU. All three of these assumptions are flawed.

The ‘failure’ narrative also fails to account for the media landscape. The truth is that the Labour Party has a low level of reach within the UK mainstream media. Even those accusing the BBC of naivety and creeping bias within its political reporting must accept that the Corporation is obliged to report the news, of which the Conservative governance of the Great Britain is an unavoidably major part during the pandemic.

Whether you agree with how the ship is being steered, it makes sense to focus on what’s going on in the bridge. The Covid-19 pandemic may have showcased instances of government recklessness, but it has also amplified the government’s looming presence in our daily lives. This has been something the Conservative communications team has been keen to exploit through using the public announcements – some more useful than others - as a platform to increase government messaging and reach.

Press Ganged

The broader media picture is even less helpful for Labour. Of the UK publications considered ‘Newspapers of Record’, The Times - nominally right of centre - may be objective about Johnson but the other - The Telegraph - has essentially become a partisan political pamphlet cheerleading in support of the Conservative Party, running regular columns from ministers from behind its paywall and heavily promoting the government’s lines of discussion online and off, not least on ‘Culture War’ issues. It is a symbiotic relationship and with the paper’s anti-lockdown lobbying contributing to a disastrous delay of the September lockdown - presumably in order to sell more papers - you wonder whether the Telegraph is the House newspaper of the Conservative Party or whether the Conservatives are currently the House political party of the publication.

The Guardian and Huffington Post may be broadly dismissive of the Conservative government and the Prime Minister’s leadership, but they have also offered a platform for factional politics for naysayers across the progressive spectrum which have included the likes of Clive Lewis and Owen Jones. I don’t really need to explain the political leanings of the UK tabloid press, but downside of all this for Labour is that there are no avowedly pro-Starmer mainstream news outlets, with the partisan Daily Mirror the closest the Labour Party leadership has to active cheerleaders and under-pressure Channel 4 News perhaps the closest to fulfilling its obligations to offer an independent counterpoint to the current government.

Labour’s Vision Quest

If Starmerism is anything at the moment, it is a bind between doing the morally correct thing, and looser political pragmatism aimed at winning back voters. This has been manifested in an opposition to the raising the tax burden on families, a call for tighter border restrictions during the pandemic, and moves to court rural communities. It has also seen a renewed and controversial focus on the Union Flag in order to compensate for the Party being perceived as unpatriotic under Corbyn.

It is true that Keir Starmer’s vow to make Britain the “best place to grow up in and the best place to grow old in” needs fleshing out, with a need for credible yet punchy solutions on social care, inequality, housing and the environment – more on that later – yet to truly emerge.

But it pays to remember that calling out a ‘lack of vision’ is often a proxy for a more general disquiet and perhaps the problem here is with policy reach and campaigning more than an actual vision itself.

Sure enough, Labour’s policy interventions have been more impressive when viewed in isolation. Labour has criticised the provisions for employment and performing arts within the Brexit deal, in addition to tabling appropriate amendments. They have also successfully backed the campaign for free school meals and pushed for a furlough scheme extension. Most importantly the party lobbied early for both a circuit breaker lockdown and then a Christmas lockdown, both rebuffed by the Prime Minister at a cost of thousands of lives. The policy launches have gone reasonably well too. After announcing plans for a British Recovery Bond and 100,000 start-ups, Conservatives accused Labour of theft, usually a political admission that their party has been outflanked.

This is all well and good but the critical problem is that the Labour Party is not considered to be leading the national conversation on any of these areas, especially with the likes of SAGE, the Good Law Project, Piers Morgan and Marcus Rashford allowing a safe, apolitical reference point for a wary media.

New Methods of Attack

So, the major problem has been a failure to generate enough heat and light to cut through to the public. Even before the botched PR surrounding the ‘sacking’ of Party Chair Angela Rayner, there is no doubt that the Labour Party has failed to control the narratives online and off.

The Conservatives have deployed a number of tactics to gain further attention and shift the conversation. In the lead up to the May local elections we witnessed the Prime Minister using a public Covid-19 briefing to attack Labour’s London Mayor Sadiq Khan and earlier saw the publication of a supposedly objective report on racism which was seemingly re-edited to endorse the government’s ‘culture war’ narratives. Then on election day itself we saw the farcical sight of UK Navy vessels being sent to Jersey after French fishing boats staged a six-hour demonstration over post-Brexit fishing rules.

Parliamentary votes have always provided an opportunity for political grandstanding but now seem to be a vital cog in an orchestrated government PR campaign.

Even before the controversy over the recent Policing Bill, the vote on the Brexit and Internal Market Bill sparked a parallel Conservative campaign of localised adverts and e-mails sent out accusing Labour of frustrating Brexit and opposing the people.

The suspiciously timed Overseas Operations Bill, which created a presumption against prosecution of torture and other grave crimes after five years, was another case in point. The votes provided launchpad for an e-mail and social media campaign that carried the message that Labour held disdain for Britain’s armed force personnel – an attack strategy which had borne fruit against Jeremy Corbyn - and also gave a platform for the Defence Secretary to decry the ‘illegal wars’ of Tony Blair’s government.

One of the hallmarks of recent Conservative campaigning has been to manufacture a contrived ‘Culture War’ as a recruitment tool. Starmer has proven canny in negotiating the individual challenges - endorsing the ‘Black Lives Matter’ sentiment but condoning the lawbreakers – however Party communications have often failed to challenge the broader government-indulged narratives in a meaningful way.

This is crucial when attacking measures such as the Policing Bill which affect the public’s right to protest about almost everything including fracking, football club takeovers, factory closures or new nuclear power plants. This should be an open goal for Starmer and Labour but the narrow focus within the media – on both the left and right - associates the Bill almost exclusively with the more divisive likes of Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion.

A Rosetta Stone for Electoral Success

The local and mayoral elections in May presented a great opportunity for all parties to correct their course and test their messaging on local and national issues.

"Becoming mayor of Manchester also enabled Burnham to reinvent himself as a plucky insurgent, rather than a New Labour clone"

~ Diane Abbott MP

The narrative of failure may have been set by Labour’s Hartlepool by-election loss – naturally as it was the first result and only English parliamentary vote – but the party should avoid fighting the last war on Brexit and pay attention to the other election night subplots. There is probably just as much to learn about how the Metro Mayor elections were won and lost including how the likes of Labour’s Andy Burnham built a dynamic and recognisable image and how the Conservative Andy Street – lukewarm at best about Brexit - remodelled the divisive politics of his party into something more benign to win in the West Midlands.

Whatever the focus, seizing this opportunity is critical, with an election perhaps three years away. In 2019, Labour failed to take the lessons of the European Parliamentary elections seriously. Receiving just 13.6 percent of the vote, Jeremy Corbyn’s party continued on the same muddled track and failed to offer a credible vision for the country or any sort of clarity on Brexit. This disarray culminated in a disastrous party conference which set the stall out for a brutal electoral defeat.

The Conservatives received a disastrous 8.8 percent of the vote but soon altered their strategy, going in stronger on their unequivocal message to ‘Get Brexit Done’, changing their leader and setting out to ideologically absorb the Brexit Party which threatened the party vote.

Is there a vote for the Labour Party to absorb? Conservative and Labour voting intentions had been close until the vaccine rollout, but polling and local elections have both confirmed a surge in support for the Green Party with up to 15% of the vote being spread between the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. In a first-past-the-post system with no progressive alliance, this would mean millions of wasted votes and another large Conservative majority.

So is the ‘Big Answer’ for Labour increasingly clear?

Parishes, Parks and Ports

Should the party be investing in engaging campaigns to further a green agenda and foster an inclusive, progressive and bold vision for the UK’s parishes, parks and ports?

This is a huge opportunity given the government vulnerabilities on environmental issues and the strategic need to dampen pre-COP26 government greenwash. It is also a chance to outflank the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party and truly set the agenda.

More than just an issue for ‘progressive’ or 'liberal' voters, significant majorities of voters across the political divide wanted EU environmental regulations to be maintained or even strengthened in the wake of Brexit - something which doesn't appear to be happening. With global warming becoming an issue that even the more enviro-sceptic tabloids now cover, campaigning in these areas is the type of thing that wins over the ‘considerers’.

There is huge scope for mobilisation on linked issues such as animal welfare, local planning, plastic waste, air pollution and food standards, something that the Leave Campaign realised before the EU referendum and Conservative campaigning also addresses.

But can Labour make it work for them? That would be dependent on three factors - the political willingness to campaign, the scope to differentiate themselves from government and the ability to communicate in an engaging way. The first two should be easy to address.

1. Labour’s 2019 manifesto received plaudits from campaigners including Friends Of The Earth on its policies to protect nature and combat climate change. Ranked ahead of the Lib Dems and the Green Party by ENGOs, the policies contrasted with the lack of urgency, ambition or consistency that the Conservative Party offered.
2. The Conservatives have previously invested political capital in ‘green’ issues – think of Green Deal Home Improvement Fund - but have been hamstrung by the inflexibility of their own market-based approach. Campaigners have recently drawn attention to some regressive government policies such as bringing back Neocotinids, supporting coal power projects, sending plastic waste material to be dumped in Turkey and pulling funding for the latest home insulation scheme. So it shouldn’t be too difficult for Labour to differentiate themselves from Conservative policy which is, broadly speaking, a combination of dates without plans and a reliance on measures that have taken place in spite of centralised government policy rather than because of it.
3. The third factor could be problematic. Labour’s current offering on the environment is polished but uninspiring and even the 2019 manifesto policies were rushed out with no persuasive lead-ins.

The Conservatives know how to publicise green policies, and although they may not always be sincere in their commitment to this green and pleasant land, they are certainly better at getting that impression across. Environmental leadership is not something that the Labour Party has ever engaged with particularly well, perhaps due to the party’s urban or industrial heritage. High water marks such as Hilary Benn’s work to control illegal logging or Gordon Brown’s decision to set up a Department for Climate Change went mostly under the public radar.

Even if you account for the extra resources and media uplift, the Conservative Party has been consistently better at PR and visual campaigning, at least since Tony Blair left power. Their messages are simply stronger and better presented even if in the case of the ‘stay home, save lives’ messaging, they get undermined by muddled policy.

Think of Ed Miliband’s cumbersome two-tonne slab of limestone from 2015 – dubbed the ‘Edstone’ – and compare it to David Cameron’s slick yet welcoming ‘Invitation to Join the Government of Britain’ manifesto five years earlier. Perhaps the one recent triumph for Labour’s communications team was when Theresa May’s stiff election messaging came up against Jeremy Corbyn’s energised Momentum-backed campaigning.

Last year’s Conservative Party Conference is a good example of a party hitting their political marks. Promotion of Priti Patel as a no-nonsense Home Secretary dovetailed with Boris Johnson’s pledge for a green revolution – co-opting the ‘Build Back Better’ slogan which had been trending and had previously been adopted by then US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden.

Labour will need to act soon to address this, as the UK will host the COP26 in Glasgow in November and government will no doubt want to show climate leadership. Campaigning now could inform the public view on who could be considered the UK’s environmental custodians by the next general election.

I get by with a little help from my friends...

For Labour to make this work, they need a better, multi-layered communication strategy. But they also need to build a broader network equivalent to what political commentator Adam McNicholas calls ‘outriders’.

In his article for the Times, McNicholas noted the need for progressive politics in the UK to have an equivalent to the Political Action Committee, or Pacs, which have helped shape election results, particularly in key states. Non-party campaigners have existed in the UK on both the left and the right through the likes of the Taxpayers Alliance, Vote Leave or Best for Britain.

It’s true that on the left, these tend to run parallel to, rather than with the parties and this has been to Labour’s detriment. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party failed to capitalise on persuasive anti-government campaigning from the likes of 'Led By Donkeys' and 'Best For Britain' on account of uncertainty over its Brexit policy.

The Conservatives have boxed clever here in recent months. In running the country, they have a natural advantage and can use apolitical actors to enhance perception of their reach, brand and values as in the case of appointing Love Island’s Dr Alex George as ambassador for mental health.

Despite asking questions of government on areas of home turf such as Free School Meals and corruption in procurement, Labour haven’t been able to headline any campaign that has broken through. This isn’t to say they haven’t been making some headway as recent attacks on Conservative sleaze have brought an edge back to party politics together with initiatives to halt the cladding scandal and to end violence against women and girls earning some much-needed attention.

Starmer’s efforts to detoxify Labour post-Corbyn could lead to endorsements and help define his political brand. Whereas it is unlikely - and perhaps counterproductive - for Labour to snare celebrities such as Marcus Rashford, Jamie Oliver or Joe Wicks to join their campaigning, there seems to be a relative abundance of successful progressive politicians to stand with. Of course, Labour have their own Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan and their comms team could learn from the successful, inclusive online campaigning from the likes of Jacinda Arden and Joe Biden.

There is an elephant in the room here and that elephant is Momentum, the grass-roots political organisation linked to Labour and known for virally spread but low budget e-comms, such as those used in the 2017 general election campaign.

Centrists within Labour won’t claim to miss the support of Momentum and its eager supporters, especially with Momentum branches becoming a burden to party unity and taking potshots at its leadership. It’s also true that Momentum have been mostly effective in firing up its left-wing base, as opposed to targeting tested messages at what McNicholas refers to as ‘the considerers’.

But there is a gap in terms of the imaginative campaigning that Momentum was providing that could help fire up a largely apathetic public. The party would certainly benefit from a similar style of direct and youth-orientated campaigning that would prove useful against the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.

Re-energise the NHS > Build Back Greener > End Inequality for Good

The task ahead for the UK's Labour Party is huge but not insurmountable. It will depend on much stronger communications and an ability to build a community, something the Conservatives have tried with some success to do through targeted correspondences, surveys and mailshots, occasionally finding themselves on the wrong side of the law.

With the successful NHS vaccination programme remorselessly trumpeted by government and used to support the PM’s narrative on Brexit, chances have now been missed to cut through those worst affected by the pandemic, not least the two thirds of voters aged 70 or over who voted Conservative in 2019. The disastrous extension to lockdown and postponement of 'freedom day' may sway some of the public but Labour must also find something to negate the pork barrel politics underpinning government’s ‘levelling up’ policy and Conservative messaging on housing which has been effective in continually securing the votes of millions of retired homeowners.

There are some sources of hope for the party including the growing possibility of a progressive alliance and opportunities to work with and showcase the performance of their many Regional Mayors. They have also been gifted a veritable rogues gallery of new Conservative MPs and a government vulnerability on rural decline which might cut through to rural villages. With UK farming community likely to suffer from the weak Brexit Deal negotiated by government - to the extent that farmers could be retired out of the rural economy with payments of up to ￡100,000 - there may be opportunities there too.

But unless Labour can set about their task with urgency – and no little swagger - the bright future pledged will never arrive for them.