Those of my many readers (not only in this country but around the world) who are Labour Party members will be aware that we’ve just been offered a new loyalty oath to sign. Well, not an ‘oath’ as such but a “newly enhanced Code of Conduct – Member’s pledge”:
We have updated the Member’s Pledge to remind all our members that the values of honesty and decency, and maintaining high standards in public life, must be fundamental to everything we do in the Labour Party.
Who exactly ‘we’ is isn’t clear, although Anneliese Dodds assures us that “[t]he new Member’s Pledge is endorsed at the highest levels of the party … [by] Keir Starmer, Leader of the Party, David Evans, General Secretary and Johanna Baxter, Chair of the NEC”. Nor are we individual members being invited to sign it as such, just to “read and embrace” it. That said, if (having read it) we don’t feel moved to clasp it to our collective bosom, we may be out of luck with regard to continued membership of this great party of ours:
By following this Code, I will help to ensure an inclusive, safe and constructive environment within the Labour Party.
I understand that if found to be in breach of the Labour Party’s codes of conduct, guidelines, policies and procedures on online and offline abuse, and if I fail to treat those I encounter with respect and courtesy, I will be subject to, and may be sanctioned in accordance with, the rules and procedures of the Labour Party.
It’s messily worded, but I think what that’s saying is that Labour members may be sanctioned if they fail to treat people respectfully and courteously or they are found to be in breach of the party’s codes of conduct – including the Pledge.
So what’s in the pledge – what are we going to get booted for not doing? Here’s how the Pledge opens:
I pledge to act within the spirit and rules of the Labour Party in my conduct both on and offline, with members and non-members and I stand against all forms of abuse.
I commit to treating all those I encounter with respect and courtesy whether or not they are in the Labour Party or a member of the public.
Seems fair enough, really. And specifically?
Whilst I am at Labour Party meetings, on the doorstep, in a campaigning environment, on social media or in any Labour Party gathering, I will:
Listen to others’ viewpoints, participate inclusively, challenge appropriately.
Conduct reasoned arguments and not talk over others.
Use constructive criticism consistent with Labour’s values.
Always act in an appropriate and respectful manner to others.
Take care to use appropriate, non-offensive language.
The devil’s in the detail – these formulations about ‘appropriate’ language and acting in an ‘appropriate’ manner are particularly broad – but, again, this doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable. I think my only question would be whether talking over others, criticising destructively, acting inappropriately etc are enough of a problem in the Labour Party to need dealing with in this way. The inclusion of social media in the list of settings where members need to behave themselves is also rather odd, particularly given that there’s no stipulation that members need to behave themselves online when they’re representing the party. This raises the spectre of the dreaded disciplinary social media trawl, and of members being expelled on the grounds that they called their local councillor a c**t on Twitter in 2004. But trawling Twitter won’t be possible once Musk has got it locked up, and in any case fewer people calling other people c**ts on social media would be all to the good.
So it’s hard to object too strongly to the main body of the Pledge. But then we come to the final commitment:
Finally, I will not organise to drown out the views of others recognising the unfairness this creates.
There are two ways of looking at this. One is to read it literally and conclude that the Labour Party has gone to the trouble of banning the practice of organising people to heckle and shout down their opponents within the party – to which the only possible response would be Really? That’s our problem?
A less literal – perhaps less naïve – reading would be that the key word here isn’t ‘drown’ but ‘organise’. Any time a group of people arrive at a Labour Party meeting already intending to vote a certain way, and knowing that they all intend to vote that way, it could be argued that they’re aiming to “drown out the views of others”. Think of the individual members who have come along to hear the speakers and make up their minds on the night! How are they going to feel if, when they’ve said their piece about a proposal they’ve only just heard about, somebody gets up and attacks the proposal knowledgeably and in detail, and in the same terms as the person who spoke before them? They’re certainly going to feel that their views aren’t being heard. And how did the members of that group get to be so knowledgeable – indeed, how did they know that they were all going to vote against the proposal? They organised, that’s what they did – they organised, outside the meeting, with the intention of winning the vote by making ordinary members of the party listen to them. In short: they organised to drown out the views of others (presumably not recognising the unfairness this creates).
If I’m right about this it’s something of a cynical master-stroke: no more messing about identifying which organisations are incompatible with the aims of the Labour Party and who’s involved in them, just ban the lot of them; ban them for organising. Nor will this only apply to Momentum, or to the (numerically tiny) left entryist organisations of the old school; scraping together contact details for left-leaning members in a party branch, then inviting those people to meet in a pub, will be grounds enough for ‘sanctioning’ everyone involved.
If I’m right about this it’s going to ramp up the exodus of the Left, which had slowed to a trickle recently; indeed, it’s going to become impossible to remain in the Labour Party while taking part in any kind of factional activity, unless it’s a faction that supports the leadership. (Which, ironically, were just the factions that were having a hard time of it, only a few years ago.)
In short, if I’m right about this Anneliese Dodds – together with KeirStarmer, David Evans and that arch-opponent of factionalism Johanna Baxter – have just proscribed the Labour Party opposition. Any Labour Party opposition.
Much as I dislike giving any publicity to “newsletters” (or any other way of monetising the blogosphere), this piece by Jonn Elledge has been nagging at me since I first read it a week or so ago. Elledge opens by asking:
what do you imagine my politics are? Where do I fit? … The reason I ask is I have absolutely no idea. I mean, I can list policy preferences … but what name to give the resulting package I don’t know. Maybe this is just because I’ve never been an activist, and thus have never got into the sort of factional battles that result in you defining or being defined as one thing or the other.
Elledge goes on to argue that “the boxes don’t actually fit”, and that the box that fits him best is “soft Left”; he squares this circle by suggesting that the label of “soft Left” – as well as applying to people who are firmly convinced that they are in fact “soft Left” – may also designate a whole range of people who have left-wing commitments but hold them with a sceptical, loosely-bundled, engaged-but-not-committed attitude. (And that this is a good way to be, of course.)
Well, maybe – but let’s go back a bit. I’m sceptical about this idea of not ‘fitting’. Not feeling as if you fit is one thing – a very common thing – but actually fitting (or not) is another. As I wrote in this piece from the period of the first Corbyn leadership election, nobody who wants to achieve anything in politics acts entirely alone, or speaks solely for him- or herself, for the simple reason that acting alone achieves nothing. (It may get you re-elected, it may even get you into the papers, but it won’t achieve anything – not unless what you’re saying or doing gets taken up by your party, by the government or by some other group of people who are acting collectively.) So politics is about having allies – indeed, it’s about assembling allies, and achieving a rough match between the group of things you want to achieve and the different things your allies value most highly.
In this perspective, though, the question of where I “fit” – or where any political actor (including political commentators like Jonn Elledge) “fits” – is trivial, because “fit” is an active verb. Where you fit is where you want to fit and try to fit: you fit in with A rather than B by making an effort to go to A’s meetings and push A’s arguments rather than B’s. You may claim that this isn’t really you – you never got into factional battles, you aren’t strongly committed either way – but that only gets you so far, because what you actually do is verifiable: you fit where other people can see you fitting. You may claim that you’re equally interested in traditional songs and traditional music, but if you go to song sessions once a week and you haven’t been to a tunes session since before lockdown, people may reasonably conclude otherwise. Equally, anything you believe that you don’t act on, with other people, is only of interest to you; you can’t really claim you’re a staunch republican if you never talk about the royal family outside your own home. What you do, not what you think, is where you fit: no one who writes for the New Statesman and not Tribune is neutral between those two publications’ political positions, even if they’ve been thinking for a while that they’d rather like to write for Tribune.
All this suggests that Elledge is entitled to claim “soft Left” as the label of his preferred group, but not to claim that it means something along the lines of “holding left-wing positions in a judicious and detached way” – not least because such an attitude would be basically pointless and of no interest to anyone else. Even those who claim to have this kind of attitude are in practice working with other people, making it possible to see where they ‘fit’ – those who anyone’s heard of, anyway. (And yes, I have heard of George Orwell; he wrote for Tribune, he fought with POUM, he collaborated with the CCF and IRD.)
Can we define ‘soft Left’ any more precisely? In that piece from 2015 I said quite a lot about the “soft Left” label, and about my own journey in the early 00s from (vaguely) soft Left to (reluctantly) hard Left. I argued then that the division between “soft” and “hard” Left was “at once very deep and very impermanent, like a crevasse in sand” and that there was “something cultural – almost temperamental” about it. I related my own changing position to Kosovo and Iraq: “the old soft Left has ended up positively committed to supporting aggressive wars conducted by imperialist powers”. This, I suggested, brought an opposition into play that was different from, and bigger than, the differences of priorities and emphasis that had fuelled past divisions between soft and hard Left:
If Jeremy Corbyn wins this election, he’ll be the first genuinely anti-imperialist leader of the Labour Party for a long time – possibly the first ever. Many people, unfortunately, will oppose him for that reason. I just wish they’d acknowledge that they do oppose him for that reason .. Maybe … this isn’t just another case of rivalry within the Left. Maybe we’re not actually on the same side here.
If you want to fund large-print purchases for the library and I want to fund food banks, we’re rivals. If you want to bring freedom to Afghanistan (or anywhere else) on the point of a bayonet and I want to bring the troops home, we’re not actually rivals – we’re opponents.
All of this suggests three different ways of looking at the “soft Left”/”hard Left” division, to which my experience since 2015 as a Labour Party member adds a fourth:
Ideological: revolution, yea or nay? Which side are you on when it comes to the big stuff?
Political: what do you want the next Labour government to do? How far and how fast should they go?
Cultural: do you identify with the “hard Left” (i.e. Corbyn) or the “soft Left” (i.e. not Corbyn)?
Organisational: are you a Trot (actual or suspected) or someone who will fight the Trots?
These aren’t hard-and-fast categories so much as a blurry spectrum; both 1. & 2. and 3. and 4. have a lot in common with each other. (Arguably so do 2. and 3., but let’s not over-complicate things.)
The distinction between 1. and 2. – “are you an anti-imperialist or are you committed to Britain’s existing alliances?” versus “would you bring in a 50% tax on high earners or leave it at 45%?” – seems clear enough, but applying it in practice is far from being an exact science. A mistake people often make – and which my argument in that 2015 piece fell into to some extent – is assuming that there’s a bright line to be drawn between issues of principle, which are broad, distinct, stable and generally visible from space (“Capitalism (with reforms) or socialism (via revolution)?”), and political issues, which are made up of insignificant minutiae. The reality is that defining the scope and content of those issues of principle is itself a deeply political issue.
Ideological disagreements don’t come ready-labelled either as “good-faith divergence within a commitment to shared principles” or as “fundamental disagreement precluding one side ever working with the other again”; those labels have to be applied. Suppose I believe in principle {X} and key policy issues {a} and {b}, and your beliefs are different from mine. I don’t ask whether what you’re talking about is policy issue {c} (potentially compatible with {X}) or a completely distinct principle {Y}: the fact that the belief you’re professing relates to a policy issue, rather than constituting a principle in its own right, isn’t in dispute. The judgment I make is whether you believe in {c} as part of a version of {X}, or conversely whether believing in {c} shows that you can’t possibly believe in {X} even if you claim to. And that’s a question that can be answered different ways, even for the same {c} and the same {X}: whether disagreements are understood as good-faith divergences (etc) depends on… well, it depends on whether that’s how we understand them or not.
I think Elledge’s version of the ‘soft left’ grasps this to some extent – specifically, to the extent of approving of the first, inclusive alternative and disapproving of the second. The trouble is, drawing lines in this way isn’t necessarily the wrong thing to do: people do have red lines (even you; even Jonn Elledge), and sometimes people do in fact claim to be on the same side as you while also having beliefs that cross those lines. The judgment that anyone who believes {c} can’t possibly be a genuine believer in X (and hence isn’t one of us) is often made cynically, but it can be made with complete sincerity.
So there isn’t a hard-and-fast line between the principles ({X} and {Y}) of point 1. and the policies ({a}, {b} and {c}) of point 2. – or rather, there is in theory, but it’s not reliable in practice. (In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. Thanks, I’m here all week.) What we can say is that there are times of lower and higher polarisation within the Left – times when different factions on the Left are more, and less, willing to think in terms of lower-case policy differences within shared upper-case principles – and that we’re currently in a period of higher polarisation.
The questions in points 3. and 4 also look distinct, and also have a tendency to bleed into each other. At first blush “Soft Left” certainly seems like a real thing, with definite reference points – the current version of the New Statesman, the old version of Tribune, Andy Burnham, Compass, electoral reform, that kind of thing. That’s the soft Left, inasmuch as those are the kind of people who call themselves “soft Left” or don’t object to other people doing so; they’re good people, they do a lot of useful stuff. But that doesn’t answer the question of what makes them “soft Left” as distinct from the “hard Left”.
Park that for a moment while we look at point 4. When I joined the Labour Party in 2015 I understood that a lot of people had been members for some time, and that quite a lot of them weren’t as keen on Jeremy Corbyn as I was; he got the votes of 49.6% of existing party members in the first round, admittedly, but that is less than half. Still, if you put together 49.6% of existing members and all the people like me who had joined since the election, you’d surely have a faction substantial enough to dominate the party, or at the very least to take the lead on a ‘first among equals’ basis, graciously sharing power with pre-existing factions. The hard-core Blairites might be hard to win round, but the soft Left would be up for it, surely – we’d been their junior partners so many times, after all, it was only fair…
Laugh? I nearly cried. What actually happened was that the Corbynite Left dominated a few particularly moribund local parties by sheer weight of numbers – helped along in one or two cases by the organising ability of pre-existing Left factions – and got repulsed everywhere else, systematically, repeatedly, relentlessly, until-we-gave-up-and-went-away-ily. We never got much chance to work as “first among equals”, or as second or third among equals for that matter.
What happened? Speaking as a member of a local group of ‘Corbyn supporters’ (yes, an informal, under-the-radar group of supporters of the current manifesto and the elected leader, that was us), I think we didn’t reckon with two things, one organisational and one cultural. The organisational point was that, while there were large numbers of left-leaning people joining the party, nobody had any way of finding out who they were or how to contact them – nobody, that is, except existing office-holders, and they certainly weren’t sharing the information around. (If we’re ever in this position again we need to think hard, and quickly, about ways round this one.)
The cultural point is more relevant here: we simply didn’t know what we were up against. We thought – well, I thought – that the people in charge of local parties in the 2010s were, broadly, “soft Left”, municipal variety: people who shared our basic principles but were less likely to talk about issues like imperialism, and more willing to think in terms of “half a loaf”, “the art of the possible”, “getting things done for working people” and so forth. I also thought that existing office-holders would recognise the sheer weight of numbers of the pro-Corbyn faction – not to mention that it was our leader who was leading the party – and… well, let us have a go.
What only dawned on me much later was that there was a commitment much more important than those “soft Left” political positions, which took precedence over them and sometimes seemed to displace them completely: the commitment to keep things going pretty much as they were, with pretty much the same people in pretty much the same positions (or, ideally, progressing to more senior positions). The existing in-group’s self-perpetuation was the absolute, non-negotiable top priority; anyone who threatened to interrupt it was a Trot, and a menace. That’s not to say that everyone involved actually was a Trot in party-card terms – or that anyone was, necessarily. But then, on the other side there was only a minority who were positively committed to kicking the Trots (or the “Trots”), or saw it in political terms at all. What united everyone was seeing it as a necessity: if they were in, we were out, and we would need to stay that way. I eventually realised, in short, that for them we would never be part of the conversation – we were what they needed to scrape off their shoes before the conversation could start.
As for distinguishing between points 3. and 4. – “hard Left or soft Left?” vs “Trot or Trot-basher?” – this history shows why it’s hard to do; or rather, this history makes it hard to do. Within the party, it would be absurd to define the “hard Left” without any reference to Jeremy Corbyn – which is to say, to name the “hard Left” is to invoke the leader of an insurgency within the party which was beaten back and ultimately defeated, largely by dogged refusal to budge on the part of existing office-holders. That in turn means that any debate between “soft Left” and “hard Left” is over before it begins: if group A has power and group B doesn’t, and power is both the thing that A most cares about and the one thing that B absolutely can’t be allowed to have, what are A and B going to have to say to each other?
This is also the context within which the heightened levels of polarisation referred to above – which make it harder to accommodate policy differences on the basis of shared principles – play out. Spelt out like this, it seems like a glimpse of the blindingly obvious: there’s been a civil war inside the Labour Party, in which one faction is now massively dominating the other – how could that not lead to higher levels of polarisation? I think it’s worth overtly taking account of it, all the same. And – let’s be clear – I’m not just observing that heightened polarisation as a sociologist; I’m conscious that I am very much in it. My only consolation is that this also applies to everyone who cares in some way about the Labour Party, which surely accounts for almost everyone on the Left in Britain. What happened in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019, and between 2019 and the present, isn’t something anyone on the Left can be neutral about, it seems to me – and, a side once taken, it’s hard not to be a bit mistrustful and impatient with those on the other side. Shame, but until the war’s over it’s hard to know what else to expect. (It seems like a confession of weakness to say that my judgment is influenced by recent history, but I think it’s better seen as simple honesty. We can only do anything in the present moment, after all – and this present moment is, still, very much in the shadow of 2015-19.)
So I’m sceptical when Jonn Elledge claims to adopt the Mercutio position (“A plague on both your houses!”):
My politics has been almost entirely consistent. I want a Labour government; I just hate the Labour leadership.
Neat, but it won’t really do. As I said earlier on, where you fit in politics is “where you want to fit and try to fit” – and “what you actually do is verifiable: you fit where other people can see you fitting”. When the options are as limited as in this case – when it really is a case of being either for or against something – this is all the clearer. Where you fit on the Left – in a country where the Left is dominated by the Labour Party, in a period where the Labour Party has been split down the middle – is a matter of where you stood during that split: whether you were for or against the Corbynite attempt to transform the Labour movement and win power on a social democratic platform. And that’s verifiable, particularly if you’ve got any kind of public footprint: what did you say in 2015? 2017? 2019? What did you do? Who did you do it with?
There were only two sides – still are, when you look at it. “Soft Left” isn’t one of them. The label of “soft Left” is pretty meaningless at the best of times – which is to say, it’s defined primarily as “on the Left but not actually hard Left” and secondarily by the combination of issues that people who identify with it bring along. It only makes any sense at all when Left politics is relatively unpolarised, making it possible for there to be productive traffic between “hard Left” and “Left but not hard Left”. At a time of heightened polarisation – when the options are “pro-Corbyn” and “anti-Corbyn”, “is hard Left” and “hates the hard Left’s guts” – there’s really no room for “soft Left”.
I think his attachment to the idea of a “soft Left” helps explain Elledge’s recent New Statesman piece where he sets out all the great things the Starmer leadership would be able to do in government, before conceding that it might not do any of them. At least, it helps explain why that piece was so irritating. A “soft Left” government, if we define “soft Left” in policy terms – a government with portraits of Robin Cook and Jon Cruddas on its wall – would certainly do the things Elledge talks about: planning reform, rapprochement with Europe, revised fiscal rules, bring it on. But… well, so what? It wasn’t the “soft Left” that won the 2020 leadership election; come to that, it wasn’t the “soft Left” that Corbynites to a small extent tried (and to a large extent failed) to oust from their positions in the party.
Even when Elledge is conceding that he might be wrong, he shows no awareness of why he’s wrong:
it must be at least possible that the cynics are right, this isn’t an electoral strategy and Starmer’s Labour is exactly as gutless and unambitious as it seems.
Lurking here is the conviction that the Starmer leadership is itself “soft left”; that, at worst, we’re facing the prospect of principled – albeit “soft” – left-wing government whose key personnel are unfortunately lacking in courage and ambition. Actually, the Starmer leadership has made it very clear where it stands on a whole range of issues, and in the process has made some breaks with Labour orthodoxy that I’d certainly characterise as ambitious, even brave.
Once again: the soft Left isn’t here. If it’s the soft Left you want to support, think again – or at the very least, take a hard look at the people you currently are supporting. Labour has been split down the middle since 2015; there are and were only two sides in that split, and one of them was and is victorious – and those are the people who are going to be running the government. The fact that the next Labour government is in the future doesn’t mean we can treat it as a complete fantasy.
There’s an odd sort of family resemblance between prejudice, bullying and gaslighting. Sandi Toksvig summed it up once, talking about sexist expectations around having children – if you don’t have children you’re not fulfilling your biological destiny, but if you do have kids you should give up your job or else you’re a heartless career woman, but if you do stay at home you’re making yourself dependent on a man so you’re betraying generations of feminists…
There’s no right answer – it’s all double standards and double-binds. The point of going down one of these lines of questioning isn’t to find anything out but to be the one asking the questions and judging the acceptability of the answers. Bullying works the same way: bullies don’t want answers, they want to ask questions that victims can’t answer (or not without making matters worse for themselves). This is the case up and down the scale of sophistication – whether the question ostensibly being asked is “Why are you hitting yourself?” or “The following social media posts have been flagged as problematic. Do you have any comment?”.
Prejudice against outgroups, is, among other things, a form of bullying: one way you know you’re being treated differently is when the questions you’re being asked have no right answer – because the underlying question is: “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”. And there’s no answer to that. What makes it particularly difficult to deal with is that, as well as being expressed through the medium of bullying and gaslighting, prejudice itself is very often gaslit. In a society where everyone’s, formally, equal, it clearly isn’t OK to put members of outgroups on the spot and ask whether they’re “one of them”, so it’s generally seen as something that doesn’t happen… until it does. After which, it’s seen as something that doesn’t happen, again… until it does, again.
Now: what happens when you become aware of this enormous, society-scale double standard – as some people, for obvious reasons, will do sooner than others? It’s a realisation you can’t go back from. From that point on, you’ve got to assume that prejudice (against your group or others) is a factor, even when everyone’s denying it; even when it looks as if they’re right to deny it. When you start to think about it, denying racism or sexism is just the kind of thing a racist or sexist would do – and a setting with no apparent racism or sexism is just one where nobody’s openly exhibited racism or sexism… yet.
There’s no way to deny the logic of this position – on the contrary, there’s plenty of evidence that society at all levels is saturated with a whole variety of prejudices, and less than keen on acknowledging them. It’s not a comfortable outlook, though. Just to get through the day, you need to be able to put this awareness to one side and assume good faith and neutrality from the people you actually deal with, even when you know that sooner or later the neutrality they’re professing will be disproved by their actions – sooner or later you’ll be gaslit. Until that moment comes (again), you need to remain innocent in the teeth of experience, if only for your own peace of mind. This means parking your righteous anger at the state of things pretty much indefinitely – or else calling people out more or less at random, which wouldn’t be great for your social life – but that’s not the worst thing in the world; you can live without righteous anger.
The only other possibility, and one that lets you hold on the righteous anger, is to treat the ubiquity of prejudice as the big deal it indubitably is, but do so selectively: assume good faith, give people a pass (and yourself a break) apart from the people who have aroused your suspicions in some other way, and unload your anger on them. This is certainly more comfortable than the state of generalised paranoia you’d end up with if you assumed prejudice from everybody you encounter, but it isn’t any more rational; if anything, it risks using the reality of prejudice to validate – and intensify – your personal dislikes. It also, ironically, reproduces the self-contradictory, gaslighting quality of prejudice itself. You only have suspicion to go on, so – unless you’ve picked your audience very carefully – you’ll have to talk about your targets as if they deserve as much good faith and interpretive charity as anyone else, while letting it be known that they do in fact represent the distilled essence of prejudice in human form.
2. …and everybody hates Tottenham
And so to Daniel Harris’s Graunarticle last Thursday on antisemitism and football. Caveat: I don’t really follow football, or know very much about it – think John Thomson’s Fast Show middle-class football supporter. But we’ll see how we go.
Harris makes a number of points, some of which I even agreed with. I certainly agree that football fans calling each other “Yids” (and worse) is Not OK. However, Harris overcomplicates this issue (in my view) by treating it as a problem of fans’ attitudes and beliefs, which leads him to insist on differentiating (racist) language from those attitudes and beliefs, rather than treating the language as the problem. (This in turn leads him to propose a wholesale re-education effort, with fans having to read literature on different varieties of prejudice and answer questions before they can buy a season ticket. It’s one way to sort out the problem of overcrowding at the home end, I guess.)
Thus:
while as fans our antipathy to everyone who is not “us” mainly constitutes harmless fun … sometimes it doesn’t.
I’m not convinced by the ‘harmless fun’ argument – the argument that football hatred is a special, harmless kind of hatred. On a podcast I heard recently, Simon Mayo said that he’d brought up his kids to follow Spurs, but also to stay seated when someone shouted “Stand up if you hate the Arsenal!”. Maybe you deeply, sincerely want the team to lose, but does that have to go with hating the people who support them?
Tottenham … [are] labelled a Jewish club by rival fans and targeted with antisemitism. As such, hatred for “the Yids” proves loyalty in an environment which fosters competitiveness in that aspect. Unwittingly, Tottenham fans then became part of the problem by “reclaiming” the “Yids” moniker and applying it to themselves
First Spurs are (collectively) labelled as “Yids” because of the club’s historic association with the Jewish community; then the collective ingenuity of rival fans – taking advantage of the assumption that football hatred is a special, harmless kind of hatred – mines the aggressive possibilities of that nickname, not hesitating to go there (for every tasteless and offensive value of ‘there’); then Spurs fans endorse the nickname by claiming to own the identity and be proud of it, no doubt reasoning that it’s all right when REDACTED REDACTED THIS POST IS BORDERLINE ALREADY HAVE YOU GOT A DEATH WISH OR SOMETHING (internal ed.) Ahem. It’s all fun and games; it’s all banter! And, following this logic, Harris stresses that it is – in fact – not just banter:
Jews are asked to believe that no one lustily shouting an antisemitic insult enjoys it on that basis – itself insulting
According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2.4% of British people – about one in 40 – profess multiple antisemitic beliefs, which seems like a decent proxy for being the kind of person who would enjoy shouting antisemitic insults. On that basis, what Jews (and the rest of us) are being “asked to believe” is that the rival fans mouthing off about ‘Yids’ are thinking about Tottenham Hotspur FC and its fans – and not about Jews in general – in about 39 cases out of 40. Even if you double that 2.4% figure, on the assumption that the prospect of supporting Spurs attracts a really disproportionate number of antisemites, the language would be being used ‘innocently’ 19 times out of 20. Statistically this seems fairly believable to me, and I can’t see how asking anyone to believe it would be ‘insulting’.
But this all misses a larger point. The really important thing that Jews are being asked to believe, in this case, is that an antisemitic insult is OK if it is just bants – that hatred is OK for as long is it’s just football hatred. (Hence Harris’s rather unconvincing attempt to demonstrate that it’s more than banter.) This, to me, puts an unacceptable burden on the people hearing the racist insults. The point is about the prevalence (and acceptance) of antisemitic language, not the prevalence of individual antisemites. There’s no need to prove, or even to raise the suspicion, that the people using antisemitic language really are antisemites; if antisemitic language is a problem, it’s a problem whether it’s being used by Nigel Farage or the Archbishop of Canterbury. And if somebody shouts something that uses racist language and sounds insulting, it doesn’t really matter whether they think it’s a racist insult or not.
3. Hate is all around
Harris would argue that I’m underestimating those “individual antisemites” and the threat they pose:
Antisemitism … is present and rising. Communal institutions are protected by professional and lay security, while in Jewish schools kids practise hiding in case they’re attacked by armed invaders seeking their murder.
But here again I’m not sure Harris’s approach is correct. I know that far-Right vandalism of Jewish religious and community institutions is a reality, but “armed invaders seeking their murder”? I remember a Jewish friend telling a group of us that his kids’ school had stepped up security after 9/11, and that there was a sense of waiting “for the other shoe to drop”; I don’t think it ever did. Googling “jewish school” “attack” site:uk brought back news stories on a number of Jewish schools – in Auckland, in Baku, in Toulouse – but none in Britain. Are kids really doing safety drills for something that’s never happened in this country (and hopefully never will)? The question isn’t whether people are scared but whether they have reasons to be scared – which is to say, reasons over and above a background assumption of the ubiquity of antisemitism.
The WhatsApp conversations of the Ashburton Army, a prominent Arsenal supporter group, were riddled with antisemitism … Though I wasn’t surprised when I heard about them because to a Jew, antisemitism is never surprising, when I saw them I was staggered by their harrowing specificity, blasé ferocity and mind-boggling abundance
Staggered but not surprised, because “to a Jew, antisemitism is never surprising” – it’s always there, even when it’s not there. Unlike Jews at football matches, who are never (visibly) there, even when they are there:
because, for reasons of community, most of the UK’s 270,000 Jewish population tend to live in or near big cities, most clubs have few, if any, Jewish supporters, while at the game Jews tend to go incognito, often for reasons of safety.
Incognito? How many Jews are Orthodox enough in their observances to be visibly Jewish, while also being relaxed enough to go to football matches on a Saturday? Unless he means something else by ‘go[ing] incognito’ – ‘not displaying flags or banners bearing the Star of David’, perhaps (I’m guessing here). But if that’s the case, you really do have to take into account the fact that that emblem is generally seen as the emblem of the State of Israel.
4. Another country
Which brings us neatly to what Harris describes as “Israel-related antisemitism”.
it’s worth acknowledging a view curiously absent from the discourse whenever non-Jews debate the existential legitimacy of the world’s lone Jewish state: Israel exists because the Holocaust forced the world to accept finally the centuries’ worth of evidence proving it could not be trusted to refrain from annihilating its Jews. Whether these debates are antisemitic per se can be argued, but their deployment in the service of antisemitism cannot. Broadly speaking, they are found on the political left wing
For Harris the Holocaust proved that, whatever the appearances, in the long run the rulers of the Gentile world are so many Hamans, simply waiting for the right moment to annihilate their Jewish populations – and in agreeing to the creation of the state of Israel, those rulers accepted the charge. This in turn makes “the existential legitimacy of the world’s lone Jewish state” a live and personal issue, for Harris and by extension for any Jew: if its existential legitimacy was brought into question, what would stand in the way of challenging the existence of the world’s lone Jewish state, and Jews’ only permanent security with it? Any threat to the continuing viability of the state of Israel, on this basis, is an indirect threat to all Jews – and is inherently antisemitic. Which is probably the way to understand that odd conclusion, that debates about Israel – debates that go beyond its current political situation to question the basis on which it was founded – might be legitimate in the abstract, but that they are being deployed in the service of antisemitism, on the Left.
In the Ashburton Army group, Holocaust-related antisemitism was directly linked to Israel-related antisemitism, but the latter trope also stands alone and in my view clearly exists in football. It happened in Qatar during the World Cup, has been an issue at Celtic and with the Scotland national team, frequently follows when a club communicates with its Jewish fans, and there are players and nations who refuse to play against or shake hands with Israelis – but no one else.
What’s at stake in the first linked example is political opposition to Israel, possibly rising to anti-Zionism: not antisemitism, unless (like Harris, apparently) you define the existence of Israel in its current form as essential to the survival of Jews worldwide. What’s interesting here is that the example behind the second link – a Tweet about Passover being answered with messages about Palestine – similarly derives from anti-Zionism, but clearly is antisemitic, in its disrespect for Judaism and its use of ordinary Jews as a proxy target for Israel. It would be far more constructive for Harris to distinguish these two things from each other than to lump them together. (As for that last minatory gesture at people who protest in actions against Israel but no one else, leave it out. Campaigning against the state of Israel is either within the legitimate range of politics or it isn’t, and if it is – as currently it is – then you can’t draw any adverse inferences from somebody engaging in it.)
A survey of British Jews carried out by Survation in December 2017 found that 62% of them intended to vote for the Conservatives and 15% for Labour; the national polling averages at the time were 40% and 42% respectively. In March 2018 Luciana Berger (a Labour MP) publicly questioned Jeremy Corbyn’s endorsement of the Freedom for Humanity mural; in July 2018, Margaret Hodge (a Labour MP), with the protection of parliamentary privilege, called Corbyn an antisemite to his face. In September 2018, Survation polled the Jewish members of their survey panel and found that 85% of them thought that Jeremy Corbyn was an antisemite. (I wrote about that poll here.)
The idea that ‘antisemite’ was a label that could reasonably be applied to Corbyn was very much in the air in September 2018 (and later); given that a large majority of British Jews weren’t intending to vote for Labour, it’s not surprising that a large majority of British Jews were willing to endorse it. (Nor was Jewish disaffection from Labour the product of Corbyn’s leadership; the paper linked above makes clear that it predated Corbyn by several years.) What is surprising is that widespread belief itself – or, if not an outright ‘belief’, that widespread acceptance that there was no smoke without fire, so it wasn’t exactly that Corbyn was an antisemite but that he might be, or could reasonably be suspected of being, or needed to reassure people that he wasn’t an antisemite. It’s a decidedly odd charge to lay against a politician with Jewish allies and supporters, who campaigned against a local council’s attempt to bulldoze a Jewish cemetery and was an invited guest (also in 2018) at a Passover seder. But it’s not so odd if you’re using ‘antisemitism’ to mean ‘anti-Zionism’ – or if you’re identifying Corbyn and Corbyn supporters as your political opponent and loading them up with all the guilt of societal antisemitism. While also giving them the benefit of the doubt, of course:
In 2017, a Corbyn banner was displayed at Anfield and the Oh Jeremy Corbyn song … was aired by Liverpool fans during a football match in December 2019. I’m confident those involved did not intend to make Jews feel uncomfortable and were instead supporting Corbyn for his anti-establishment defiance in a city eager for a left-wing government. But given the confrontational nature of football crowds and the community’s well-publicised fear at the time – Luciana Berger, the former MP for Liverpool Wavertree, left Labour because of antisemitism at both national and local level – these were disquieting developments for me and other Jewish matchgoers.
Good old Liverpool fans with their left-wing anti-establishment loyalties, nothing dodgy going on there – it’s just that they were also ‘confrontational’ and didn’t care how they might exacerbate ‘the [Jewish] community’s well-publicised fear’, making it all a bit ‘disquieting’. At least, it would be if we weren’t confident that Liverpool fans aren’t antisemitic – which we are, so there’s nothing to worry about. Although, then again… football crowd, Luciana Berger, it makes you think… I’ll just exit from this infinite loop by noting that the only time I’ve heard “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” sung at a sports ground it was at a Radiohead concert at the Old Trafford cricket ground, with Thom Yorke – whose view on the BDS movement is not positive – playing along on guitar. I wonder if Daniel Harris would have found that disquieting, too.
This ‘not saying, just saying‘ routine is wearily familiar when it comes to allegations of left-wing antisemitism. Here’s James Bloodworth from back in 2015:
While I genuinely believe that Corbyn does not have an antisemitic bone in his body, he does have a proclivity for sharing platforms with individuals who do; and his excuses for doing so do not stand up.
Say what? If you’re absolving him of antisemitism, what does he then need to find excuses for?
I’ve never heard a coherent explanation of this argument (and I’ve seen it advanced many times). English libel law is a scary thing, but I don’t think everyone arguing like this was, or is, just covering their own back; I genuinely believe (if he’ll pardon the expression) that James Bloodworth genuinely believed the first half of his sentence. Unfortunately, he also genuinely believed the second half, which flatly contradicts the first half. Similarly, Harris seems simultaneously to believe that those Liverpool fans were motivated purely by their positive enthusiasm for Corbyn, and that they have questions to answer about their possible antisemitic motives – which he doesn’t believe they had, but worries that they might have had, although he’s confident [continues ad infinitum]. Ultimately, the trouble with this mindset is that you end up gaslighting yourself.
5. What to do about all this?
So, what to do about all this? Well, discrimination is defeated with clarity and policy
Let’s try for a bit of clarity first, and maybe build policy on that. We could start by defining antisemitism, following the OED, as “prejudice, hostility, or discrimination towards Jewish people on religious, cultural, or ethnic grounds”; or, following me, as “hostility towards Jews, considering Jews as fundamentally and inherently different from non-Jews”; or else, following Brian Klug, as “a form of hostility towards Jews as Jews, in which Jews are perceived as something other than what they are”.
The Klug definition seems hard to improve on – the word ‘grounds’ in the OED definition is unfortunate, suggesting that there might actually be a religious, cultural or ethnic basis for antisemitism, while my attempt at a definition doesn’t cover situations where Jews are seen as alien but otherwise normal (“got nothing against them, just think people should stick to their own kind”). If we ask whether it’s antisemitic for Arsenal supporters to sing about “gassing the Jews”, or for followers of Man U to respond to a “Happy Passover” tweet with “Free Palestine”, Klug’s definition clearly gives the right – affirmative – answer in both cases. (You don’t make a joke of the Holocaust unless you see its victims and their survivors and descendants as less than entirely human; you don’t conflate Judaism with Zionism unless you see every Jew as a Zionist.)
However, Klug’s definition would also give the right answer to the question of whether it’s antisemitic to regret the establishment of the State of Israel and seek justice for the victims of the Nakba and their survivors and descendants; or for a politician to endorse the cause of people who seek justice for Palestine; or for a group of football fans to sing a chant in support of a politician whose political positions include endorsing the cause of people who seek justice for Palestine, in a city one of whose MPs has publicly disagreed with that politician. The answer to that second group of questions would be No, of course – which is why that definition isn’t going to be adopted any time soon by people who see the state of Israel as the last line of defence for Jews globally, and use anti-Zionists as a lightning-rod for their anger at all the antisemitism in the world. The rest of us may find it useful, though.
I’m glad you asked. This. This is happening with the polls:
That’s a bit of a ski-slope on the right, wouldn’t you say? Mind you, it started high. Only a couple of months ago it was up in the… low 20s? Can that be right?
OK, back up a bit. This chart covers the period from the beginning of December 2021 to the 20th of April 2023. The red line, plotted against the left-hand axis, represents the Labour Party’s polling average, with each point calculated up to and including a poll taken on the date on the X axis (or in a period ending on that date). The red mountain, plotted against the right-hand axis, represents Labour’s lead over the Tories in each of those polls; if you squint you can see a submerged blue ice floe at the very start of the chart, representing a brief period when Labour’s average poll lead was negative (i.e. the Tories were ahead). Both of these series are averaged over 14 days – which is to say, the figure against any given date is the average of any and all polls taken on (or ending on) that day and the 13 previous days: the figures for the 17th of April, for example, are averages of all polls from the 4th to 17th. The left and right axes are scaled 1:1; 0% on the right axis is matched with 40% on the left axis, for no reason other than convenience.
So, what are we looking at? First of all, yes, that is a bit of a ski-slope on the right. But let’s do it in order. The first thing you see here, in the leftmost ‘peak’ (circa the end of January 2022), is the discrediting of Boris Johnson. As the ‘Partygate’ scandal unfolded, Labour’s support rose from the high 30%s to the very high 30%s or even 40% – an undramatic improvement which nevertheless resulted in 5-6% leads over the Tories. This is worth pausing over, as it’s the result of the current leadership’s determination to take votes directly from the Tories. In 2017, a campaigning approach focused on mobilising non-voters and hegemonising the centre-left meant that Labour’s share of the (intended) vote could rise from 25% to 40% without the Tory share going below 42%; the current approach doesn’t run that risk. It does, however, run the risk of amplifying the volatility of the system, with every 1% movement towards Labour improving Labour’s lead by 2%. (And poll leads, like share prices, can go down as well as up.)
Anyway, after that first peak things settled down a bit; Labour polled a bit below 40% or a bit above, with round about a 5% lead over the Tories, from February through to July. In July, Boris Johnson resigned, Labour’s polling moved decisively above 40% and the poll lead started hitting 10%. (I don’t know what was behind that dip at the beginning of August.)
Then Liz Truss was elected leader of the Conservative Party, and whoa, Nelly: Labour’s polling climbs to 53% (up 11%) and their lead over the Tories, following the same pattern as before, climbs to 31% (up 21% – which isn’t twice 11, but it’s close). But all good things must come to an end: by November 2022, Rishi Sunak is Prime Minister, and Labour’s polling average has settled back down to 47-8%, with a lead over the Tories of 20-22%.
Yes, we’re in the sunlit uplands of the Twenty Point Lead – and there we stay, give or take a point or two, from mid-November 2022 through to the end of February ’23. After that, though, comes another phase, and that phase we are still very much in: not to put too fine a point on it, it’s the ski-slope phase. In the month and a half since the end of February, Labour’s average support has fallen by 3% (from 48% to 45%), and their average poll lead has (predictably) fallen by 6%, from 22% to 16%. Update: on 20th April those two averages dipped below 45% and below 16% respectively, for the first time since Liz Truss was PM.
Like all the other movements on this chart, this drift back to the Tories can be explained fairly exhaustively by two factors. One is the public perception of the Prime Minister, which in Sunak’s case was initially fairly unfavourable – after the debacle of the Truss premiership and Sunak’s anointment by default – but has improved over time, and (at least for now) is continuing to improve. The other is electoral gravity, a.k.a. reversion to the mean: it’s not a frequent occurrence for Labour to be polling above 45% or the Tories below 30%, and when something like that does happen the smart money is on it not happening for much longer.
What the factors driving Labour’s polling don’t seem to include is anything contributed by Labour. The Labour leadership isn’t making the weather when it comes to the party’s popularity; moreover, they haven’t done so for some time. Quite some time…
[wobbly dissolve effect]
What’s this? It’s the same kind of chart, with the same kind of scale (1:1 between polling average and average lead, zero matched to 40%), for the period September 2015 to March 2018.
There are three main periods. In the first, Labour’s polling under new leader Jeremy Corbyn starts low, then gets lower – 32% in September 2015, touching 25% in April 2017. The Tories’ lead over Labour starts at 8% and grows at a bit less than the 2x rate we’d expect, peaking at 20%. (The area with the bite taken out of it represents the period of the Brexit referendum, when some Tory support went to UKIP, and the Tory lead over Labour fell without Labour doing any better.) In April 2017 Theresa May called an election; between then and the election itself, in an extraordinary and memorable short campaign, Labour’s support (as registered in opinion polls) grew from 25% to 36% – a remarkable gain in support, which actually understated Labour’s support in the ballot box. (While Labour’s polling rose by 11%, incidentally, the Tories’ lead over Labour shrank by… 12%: almost none of that gain in support corresponded directly to a loss of support by the Tories.)
After the election, of course, the polls turned round for Labour, although in retrospect low 40%s and a 5% lead don’t look like that much of a honeymoon. It also wasn’t that long a honeymoon. The attacks on the leadership from inside the party may have quietened down for a while after the 2017 election, but the people attacking from outside never stopped – and in the Skripal poisoning they finally found a way of making Corbyn look ridiculous (or dangerous) that actually stuck.
This chart takes us through to December 2019. Between March 2018 and March 2019, Labour’s polling slides from around 40% to 33%, and the Tory lead over Labour grows from 3% to 7%; so far from gaining 2% poll lead for every 1% of support lost, the Tories aren’t even gaining from Labour’s lost support at a rate of 1 for 1. (The Greens and Lib Dems between them put on about 5% in those twelve months, possibly because the Brexit storm clouds were already gathering.) The European elections of 2019 see polling briefly go completely crazy, with support for both major parties collapsing; the Tories’ support collapses further and faster than Labour’s, leading to the bizarre sight of Labour taking a lead over the Tories while polling in the low 20%s. Labour’s polling settles down around 25% and, following the defenestration of Theresa May in July, the Tories’ recovers, giving them a solid 10% lead. In November an election is called. Labour’s polling recovers during a slightly less extraordinary (and very cold) short campaign, but not by enough: up 8% instead of 11%, and without the eventual understatement of votes cast. Strikingly, even less of the support recovered is pulled back from the Tories than in 2017: Labour begins the campaign polling an average of 25% with a 12% Tory lead, and finishes it polling 33%… with a 10% Tory lead. (The Lib Dems and Greens began the campaign polling around 20% combined, and ended it on 10-15% (14% on the day).)
But what is this? The bad times ended in December 2019, surely? Well, not quite. Trivia question for future politics quizzes: under which Labour leader did the Tories poll a 23-point lead in April 2020? The answer is, of course, Keir Starmer. To be fair, from that moment on Labour’s support rises steadily from 28% to 38% (10%), and the Tories’ lead falls from 23% to 5% (18%, very nearly double). In other words, the very first thing Keir Starmer did as leader was pull back support from the Tories, in the way that Corbyn had never done even when Labour were polling in the 40%s. (Given the lack of any correlation under Corbyn between rises in Labour support and loss of support by the Tories, those 8-10% of voters who came back to Labour for Starmer are a bit of a puzzle. I mean, where had they been hiding? One can’t help wondering how many of them had been supporting the Tories in 2019 and even in 2017 – and how differently those elections might have gone if they’d been won over earlier.) After that, though, the chart shows Labour’s support bimbling around in the mid- to high 30%s with a Tory lead of 5-10%, barring a period of neck-and-neck polling in December 2020 (which you may remember as Disastrous Pandemic Mismanagement Month). The leadership seem unable to land a glove on Johnson’s Tory government – or even present themselves convincingly as a more desirable alternative – until November 2021. At which point Partygate erupts, the British press turn on the government, and shenanigans ensue.
And that’s where we came in.
What these charts tell us is that there have only been three periods in the last five and a half years when there’s been a sustained rise in Labour’s support both in absolute terms and relative to the Tories: the 2017 election, the election of Keir Starmer and the election of Liz Truss. (Borderline cases are the 2019 election (which improved Labour’s polling in absolute terms but not relative to the Tories) and the removal of Boris Johnson (which improved Labour’s polling by 7% and their relative position by 15%, but did so over a period of eight months); including them wouldn’t change the argument, though.) Simply listing these events demonstrates how little – under the current leadership – Labour’s popularity has depended on anything the party’s representatives have done: instead, events in the Tory Party and its associated media seem to exert a tidal pull on levels of support for the Tories, with Labour support following as the default alternative. The election of Keir Starmer as leader might seem like an exception, but it really isn’t: the event that made the difference there wasn’t anything Starmer did or said but how he was received by the political-media establishment, and in particular how he was hailed as a decisive break from Corbyn.
As for where we are now, the most recent of these vote shifts, after an unsustainable peak (and the removal of an unsustainable Liz Truss) took Labour from averaging 42% and a 10-point lead to averaging 47% and a 20-point lead. (47-42=5, 20-10=10 – same ratio as ever.) It’s that lead which is now unwinding, with the current averages standing at or slightly below 45% and 16% respectively.
Will the Labour vote share (and lead) go lower? Almost certainly. Will it go a lot lower? Depends what you mean by ‘a lot’, but I can’t see anything militating against Labour support falling back to somewhere around 40%. Which might be OK on the day of an election, but could be disastrous going into an election – particularly for a party which has limited capacity to build its own support and has pinned its hopes on the Tories self-destructing.
On that topic, here’s one final chart.
Crowded and unreadable, I admit, but it’s not as if you’re interested in individual data points. All you really need to know is that the dotted lines mark election campaigns in the course of which Labour’s polling was pretty much flat (up a bit in 2005, down a bit in 2015); the dashed lines are campaigns during which Labour’s polling either went down a little (3-4% in 2010) or went down a lot (8-10% in both 1997 and 2001); and the solid lines are the ones where I went out canvassing with some friends. (Hey, what can I tell you? We knocked on a lot of doors.) The serious points here are that Labour’s polling went up by 6-8% during the 2019 campaign and 8-10% in 2017; that this was very unusual, and can reasonably be related to other things that were unusual about the party in those campaigns; and that, if we’re not going there again, past form says that we’re very unlikely to put on support during the short campaign, and pretty likely to lose it.
Now, you might say that another unusual factor is that there was plenty of room for improvement in the polls on both those occasions, and that this could also be related to the then leadership; you might also say that, when it comes to winning elections, Labour is better off starting in the mid-50%s and losing 8% than starting below 30% and gaining the same amount. All I’d say to that is that polling in the mid-50%s isn’t to be had for the asking – and we don’t want to go into the next election campaign on 42% (say) and lose 8% out of that.
At the moment, glancing back at that asymmetrical red mountain, I’d say that when the music stops and the ski-slope levels out, Labour are likely to be polling in the 38-42% region, with at best a low-single-figure lead over the Tories. And if that’s how we go into the short campaign (whenever it is), I don’t hold out much hope of a Labour majority.
[Update: after this post was published Labour’s polling average and their average lead continued to fall, hitting a low of 43.5% and 14% respectively around the end of April. They then recovered steadily, and are currently (20th May) standing at 45% and 17%. Maybe 45% – and, say, a 15% lead over the Tories – is the new floor. We shall see.]
At a traditional singing event I attended recently, there was a discussion of how to “pass on the baton” – i.e. how to recruit enough younger people to keep what we do going beyond the next ten years or so. It’s a real issue, at least if the attendance at that event was anything to go by; there were people there without any grey in their hair, but not very many. At one point someone even addressed me as “young man”; I’m 62 (although, to be fair, I do have a full head of hair, and the light was quite bad).
But what is “what we do” – what is it that we want to keep going, and to share with younger people? A singaround I go to may provide some pointers. In a three-hour afternoon session, in a room above a pub, anywhere from 10 to 20 people sing at least two songs each (usually three), mostly unaccompanied but a few with guitar. Songs often have a chorus or a refrain – and people will join in anywhere that seems appropriate – but an unaccompanied solo will also be warmly received. Judging from the last couple of sessions, around half the songs are traditional, with most of the rest dating back to the Folk Revival of the 1960s and 70s, and between half and two-thirds are songs I know (which says a bit about how much of the repertoire is shared with other singarounds), although often in an unfamiliar version (which says a bit about how much work singers are willing to do to keep it interesting).
Let’s say that’s “what we do”; that’s what we want to preserve. What’s good about it? Is there something valuable that singarounds like this one do, or preserve, or enact – and if there is, do we need singarounds to do it? If singarounds are doing X, can we imagine X carrying on without singarounds – and would it be as good? Alternatively, we could start from the position that singarounds are the good thing that should be kept going, and then ask what it is about them that makes them good. In other words, if singarounds are doing X, can we imagine singarounds carrying on without X – and would they be as good?
The singaround repertoire
The repertoire itself is the most obvious candidate for X. How does it shape up?
Traditional songs without singarounds? In terms of literal survival – in terms of not actually being lost to future generations – traditional songs certainly don’t need singarounds; in fact they don’t need any help from anyone, with the possible exception of a few conscientious librarians and database administrators. As someone pointed out in the discussion the other weekend, before the Revival began a lot of them had been lying around unperformed and unrecorded – or else performed only in social settings somewhere down an unnumbered road – for half a century or more. If organised sessions and concerts where you can hear traditional songs stopped tomorrow, the researchers of a future Revival wouldn’t need to do the rounds of the inns and sheep sheds; they wouldn’t even need to go down to the stacks and blow the dust off volumes of Sharp and Child and Bronson. They’d just need to find Walter Pardon and Sheila Stewart and Sam Larner on YouTube and press Play.
Revival singer-songwriter material without singarounds? There are plenty of non-traditional songs that I’ve heard at singarounds but never heard anywhere else – “Icarus”, “Queen of Waters”, “Dust to Dust”, “Rolling Home”… In fact there are songwriters whose songs I’ve only ever heard at singarounds – Graeme Miles, Keith Marsden, Roger Watson, Bill Caddick… I think it’s undeniable that singarounds are keeping some of this material in circulation – but the job could be done just as well by concert performances, YouTube uploads and artist Websites like this one and this one (creaky as that second one is).
So both halves of the singaround repertoire (as I know it) could manage without singarounds. In another sense, though, singarounds are a way of keeping the repertoire alive – at least, if by ‘alive’ we mean something stronger than ‘not extinct yet’. Something about a song is lost if it’s only heard in recordings and concert performances, especially if those recordings and performances are a long way from the sound of an unaccompanied singer. When you take a song and layer on rock guitar, or grime beats, or even a wholly-acoustic Bellowhead-style knees-up, to some extent the song stops being a song in its own right and becomes material, a contributory element of an overall sound. And that in turn means that keeping the song alive becomes a job for the professionals – there’s no way for you, the listener, to be part of the process, except perhaps by forming a band. To really play a part, you’d need to strip the song back to its essentials – the words, the tune, the voice – and keep the song alive by, well, singing it.
Singarounds without traditional songs – or Revival songs? I don’t see why not. Really, there’s no reason why singarounds couldn’t do what they do just as well with – and for – a completely different repertoire. I had a curious illustration of this once in Cornwall. I’d gone to a singaround on the Monday night (there was a lovely “Curraghs of Kildare”, I remember), and assumed the singing part of the holiday was over. In a pub on the Wednesday lunchtime, I noticed a group of men of advancing years in a side room, and realised that they were having a bit of a sing; I think they were celebrating one of the group’s retirement. I drifted over and joined in the odd chorus. After a while I got chatting with one of the singers, who showed me their song list – which was very long and included quite a few songs I knew to listen to (“Wooden Heart”, “My Grandfather’s Clock”, “The Three Bells”), but very few I could sing along to, and none that I could have led. Some things were familiar but different: they did “Lamorna” in stage-Cornish (“‘Er said, I know ‘ee now”) and without any percussion on the “wet”s. (I’d come from Manchester (home of Albert Square and indeed Pomona) but kept my trap shut.) They even sang one song that I’d heard at the Monday night singaround – “Goodnight Irene” – with the same tune and chorus but without any of the same verses.
Conclusion: any singaround needs a repertoire – and once it’s got one, it keeps that repertoire alive in a way that nothing else can do. But there’s no rule that says that the repertoire has to be mostly traditional, or even partly traditional. And it’s possible that, as time goes on, some singarounds will fall silent, taking their specific repertoires with them; I can only really speak about (and for) the singarounds I know as a singer.
The singing (solo)
High-quality singing withoutsingarounds? Not a problem, obviously – although it should be said that there aren’t that many other ways to hear a really good singer sitting in the same room and on the same level as you.
Singarounds without high-quality singing? Would singarounds still be singarounds – would they be worth keeping on with – if there were no really good singers? It all depends what you mean by ‘really good’. A performance can be technically perfect and soulless, sounding more like an audition than a contribution to a social occasion. Equally, there are performances with great communicative power – songs that come across as moving, gripping, horrifying or hilarious; songs where the singer is transported and so are you – despite the odd missed high note or fumbled lyric.
Conclusion: singarounds and ‘good singing’ in a Cardiff Singer Of The World sense don’t necessarily go together. But ‘good singing’ in that second sense – singing seriously, with commitment and passion – is one of the things that singarounds are all about, because they’re all about investment in the repertoire – and that’s how you sing if you’re personally invested in what you’re singing.
The singing (together)
One way of identifying a really good singaround is from the quality of the choruses and harmonies. Not that everyone involved needs to be musically trained; some of the best harmonising comes from people just listening to one another and finding a note that nobody else is singing. What is essential is that people know the songs – or rather, that they know some of the songs and that they’re willing to pick up the ones they don’t know.
Chorus and harmony singing without singarounds? Not really a problem – there are choirs, there are shape note classes – although in those, more structured, settings the material is less likely to be familiar, and I imagine that the “find a gap and jump in” approach will often be frowned on.
Singarounds without choruses and harmonies? Obviously they exist; the online song sessions we’ve all been going to for the last three years are almost all harmony-deprived. Even in person, a session may not feature much or any joining in; low numbers and poor acoustics may militate against it. But a singaround where joining in on choruses and refrains was actually discouraged – as a matter of policy, not practicality – would be a strange thing.
Conclusion: chorus singing is a natural part of a singaround, where by ‘chorus singing’ I mean
knowing what to sing to songs you know
working out what to sing to songs you don’t know, and
doing both of these on the basis of a judgment of what sounds right at the time, rather than having a preconceived melody or harmony line
Again, it’s a way of singing that goes with investment in the repertoire – the kind of investment that makes you want to lend your voice to the collective effort of singing it; and that goes for the parts of the repertoire you don’t know as well as the parts you do.
The singing (by everybody)
At all the singarounds I know, anyone who doesn’t have a song will be welcome to stay and listen. But, at all the singarounds I know, everyone who’s there will be asked if they do have a song – and anyone who sings will be asked to sing again when their turn comes round.
Singing in turn without singarounds?
Now you’re asking. I can’t think of another social setting where everyone present is given the opportunity to sing a song or lead a chorus – perhaps the kind of party where people are literally asked to give their ‘party piece’, but when did you last go to one of those?
Singarounds without singing in turn?
Again, this is hard to imagine. True, there are ‘jump in’ singarounds – where you get the next song by, in effect, taking it – but I haven’t been to one in a long time. Besides, even there the assumption is that everyone will get a chance to sing, or at least that everyone will have the chance to take a chance to sing. A singaround where you know in advance that only some of those present will be singing would be a very different proposition – more like a concert, with performers and an audience.
What makes a singaround?
The essentials seem to be
an opportunity for everyone to sing (and be listened to)
a repertoire with a familiar core and an open boundary
singers who are invested in the repertoire and interested in learning more of it
…and (at least) some of whom sing well, (at least) in terms of passion and intensity
So a singaround is an informal social gathering of people who like hearing singing done well and want to do it well; who enjoy listening to one another and singing together; and who like hearing familiar songs and learning new ones. It’s a social grouping which embodies a practice: a practice of singing based on commitment to the songs you’re singing and their delivery, a commitment which in turn is grounded in a substantial but finite repertoire. What the singaround’s repertoire is will vary from one to another, but it will be broadly definable in each case – which is to say, anyone who visits a singaround more than once will be able to tell more or less what they can expect, whether it’s “Sweet Lemany” or “Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime”, “Young Waters” or “A Mon Like Thee”. Each singaround’s repertoire is perpetuated through practice, song by song and session by session – and lines are drawn informally, over time, dictating the kind of thing ‘we’ do and don’t sing.
Singarounds, then, are a social practice which have a symbiotic relationship with their repertoire, mediated by individual singers’ investment in that repertoire. If you want to keep a repertoire of songs alive – keep the songs in people’s throats and minds – there’s nothing like them.
In terms of the questions I started with –
Is there something valuable that singarounds like this one do, and if so, do we need singarounds to do it? If singarounds are doing X, can we imagine X carrying on without singarounds – and would it be as good?
If singarounds are the good thing that should be kept going, what it is about them that makes them good? If singarounds are doing X, can we imagine singarounds carrying on without X – and would they be as good?
this isn’t a very satisfactory conclusion, although it has the merit of simplicity: not only is the valuable X that singarounds are doing not being done anywhere else, it’s the same X as the X that makes singarounds what they are. From “how do we get new people interested in singarounds?” I’ve gone all the way to “how do we get new people interested in a particular kind of social practice, based on equal participation among a group of people committed to a particular repertoire, and currently found mainly in singarounds?”.
But that formulation does at least suggest a possible answer:
The singarounds themselves are what we want to keep going – not ‘social singing’ generally, not ‘folk clubs’ (or ‘folk’ anything, necessarily), not even the traditional-centred repertoire itself, but singarounds as a social practice.
Singarounds have a basic, undeniable value as a meeting-place for people who know and care about their repertoire and as a shared practice ensuring that repertoire stays alive and keeps being sung.
Off nights apart, that value is obvious to anyone who goes to a singaround and already cares about – or is mildly interested in – that singaround’s repertoire.
So what we need is:
Singarounds that are working well and welcoming newcomers
A continuing supply of newcomers, i.e. people who are at least mildly interested in the repertoire[s] of our singarounds and have a chance to experience them
A lot of people, especially people who got into folk when they were young themselves, tend to assume that the challenge we face is attracting young people. That’s part of the challenge, but only part of it, and probably the most intractable part – how can we get young people to spend time with a lot of old people? how can we get young people to prefer folksong to whatever it is they’re into now? Since it’s rare for anyone to succeed in doing either of those things, answers tend to be speculative; the discussion is liable to drift off into talking about “Wellerman” and TikTok and social media and socialising online and do we all have to be in the same place, maybe that’s just what we’re used to…
But actually we don’t need – wait, let me be careful how I phrase this – we don’t necessarily need young people rather than older people. What we need is (point 2 above) a continuing supply of newcomers. To take a slightly absurd worst-case scenario, if everyone stopped going to singarounds when they turned 75, singarounds could still remain viable indefinitely by recruiting enough people who had just turned 70. The age distribution in singarounds does tend to skew old, of course – that’s where we started; indeed, the fact that the singaround I referred to at the beginning happens on a weekday afternoon tells its own story. There are good reasons for people to be worried about whether the baton is going to get passed; numbers are going to start depleting fairly steeply at the upper end of the age range before too long. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve got to start appealing to young people specifically – it’s a long way down from 70-75 to 18-24; it just means that we should appeal to as wide an age range as possible. I was recently at a singaround where about one in three of the singers were in their twenties (and a really good sing it was too – I was hoarse by halfway through) so I know it’s not impossible to get younger people interested, but it may well not be the easiest age range to pitch to; it may be that, at least in periods when folk isn’t in fashion, there’s an affinity between folk and middle age. (There’s an awful lot of death in those old songs; I lost my parents in my forties, and let’s just say that Lemony Snicket was right.) Perhaps it’s 40-somethings we should be worrying about rather than under-25s. Better, in any case, to keep the door as wide open as we can and not focus on – but also not exclude – any age group, as far as possible. Which certainly means not holding all our singarounds on weekday afternoons, and probably means not holding all of them in pubs. (I don’t think I’ve ever been to a singaround and been stone cold sober at the end of it, but it might be worth a try.)
Whether we need to do any work on the repertoire to avoid repelling newcomers is another question. I tend to think that what’s come down to us is ours to learn and sing, not to edit (at least, not deliberately), and that if we’re offended by elements of a song’s lyrics we should just not sing it. Admittedly sometimes it’s offensive to hear a song, let alone to be surrounded by people happily joining in with it; I sympathise, but rather than draw up a list of Songs To Walk Out On I’d advise patience and not judging singers, or singarounds, too hastily. (I vividly remember the look on a friend of mine’s face when he came into a singaround midway through an enthusiastic performance of The Chinee Bum Boat Man (about which all I’ll say is that it’s not quite as bad as it sounds). But he stayed, and he came back the next time. It was a good session.)
I also think that when it comes to traditional songs potentially offensive material is very hard to avoid. Rape, for example, is treated as a routine plot element in songs as varied as The Bonny Hind (tragedy), Knight William (romantic comedy) and Tam Lin (supernatural weirdness); in John Blunt the prospect of rape is played for laughs. People do draw lines, in point of fact, even with traditional songs. (I was once at a singaround where a singer who usually did the same three or four songs branched out by singing Bonnie Susie Cleland. We clapped, and then someone asked him, Why on earth did you learn that? Harsh but fair.) But even if you confine yourself to learning songs where all the sex is consensual and nobody gets burned at the stake, in most singarounds you’re going to hear songs about people (mainly men) behaving very badly indeed; songs like that are part of the repertoire, and often they’re really good songs. You have to come to your own accommodation: appreciate songs like that as horror stories, or failing that just enjoy the singing – or else take deep breaths and wait till the song’s over. (That was certainly the reaction at one Zoom singaround where I did Andrew Rose. I swallowed spit at one point and had to cough, and somebody said afterwards they’d thought the song was making me gag… too. Sorry about that.) In the nature of the singaround, there’ll be something completely different along in a minute or two.
As for point 2. up there, and the work of ensuring that there is a continuing supply of people (of all age ranges) with at least a vague interest in and awareness of English traditional songs, I guess we should all do what we can – although I’m aware that most of us can’t do a lot. The only thing I’d say is that we should reverse the order of the terms “English traditional songs”: we should focus on the qualities of the songs themselves rather than promoting them on the basis of being traditional, and not focus on the ‘English’ part at all if we can help it (beyond the fact that most of the songs we’re talking about are in English). There’s a way of thinking – expressed forcefully here – to the effect that “the English” have lost something that Celtic and migrant nationalities have hung on to, and that we need to make English folk music popular again in order to get it back (or possibly that we need to get it back again in order to make English folk music popular). I agree that it’s a damn shame that more people aren’t singing the old songs, and that traditional music gets more high-level backing in Ireland (and even in Scotland) than it does in England, but I don’t think we should be tempted to go any further than that. At the end of the day English nationalism is, to all intents and purposes, impossible to disentangle from British nationalism and the British Empire. A ground-up, subaltern English nationalism would have its own cultural forms – and might well embrace a lot of what we do in singarounds – but we’ve no idea what a subaltern English nationalism would look like, and we certainly can’t just make one up. Little bit of politics, my name’s Benedict Anderson, goodnight.
In conclusion, while folkies do a lot of different things (attending concerts, buying albums…), I think singarounds are a particularly pure and focused form of that thing we do; and the best way to hand it on to future generations in good order is to keep doing that thing we do, attracting people who are likely to be attracted and as far as possible not shutting anyone out. Let’s keep the singarounds going and keep them as open to newcomers as possible – and let’s keep the songs out there, pinging the cultural radar from time to time. Good luck to everyone who’s doing anything to extend the reach of traditional songs in English, with all their strangeness and beauty and horror, whether the songs are from England, Scotland, Ireland, America or Australia; whether they’re performing the songs with kids, teaching them to students or just finding some way to put them in front of adults born since the 1970s.
(Most of them won’t like it, of course. Most people never do. Fortunately, we don’t need most people, just enough.)
The Guardian reported yesterday, following an investigation by the Daily Telegraph, that
Roald Dahl’s children’s books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin
although later in the article the changes are described as being made by “Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company”, the latter being the owners of Dahl’s rights. This is significant, because in 2021 the RDSC was bought out by Netflix. According to a statement from the RDSC, the review was initiated by Puffin and themselves in 2020, before the buyout. However, Netflix’s announcement at the time of the acquisition states that it “builds on the partnership we started three years ago” (i.e. 2018) “to create a slate of animated TV series”; this is going to include “a series based on the world of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (with Taika Waititi, Thor fans!). All in all, it seems likely that Netflix wanted to square off anything that might have created bad press for their forthcoming Dahl properties.
Bad press meaning what, though? There’s no suggestion (that I’ve seen) that the books were marred by the anti-Black racism seen in the characterisation of the original Oompa Loompas (more on whom anon), or by Dahl’s personal antisemitism. I haven’t got access to the original Telegraph feature, but here are some of the changes listed in the (many) articles which have been written about it.
Before
After
fat (Augustus Gloop)
enormous
ugly and beastly (Mrs Twit)
beastly
“Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat
And tremendously flabby at that,”
“Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute
And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,”
“Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire
And dry as a bone, only drier.”
“Aunt Spiker was much of the same
And deserves half of the blame.”
most formidable female (Mrs Trunchbull)
most formidable woman
“So I shipped them all over here – every man,
woman and child in the Oompa Loompa tribe!”
“So, they all agreed to come over – each and every Oompa Loompa.”
“I wish I was a grown-up,” Nigel said.
“I’d knock her flat.”
“I wish I was a grown-up,” Nigel said. “I’d give her a right talking to.”
“You’ve gone white as a sheet!”
“You’ve gone still as a statue!”
Bunce, the little pot-bellied dwarf
Bunce
We are no longer told that witches disguise themselves as women so successfully that a witch might be “working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman” without anyone knowing; instead, the hypothetical undercover witch might be “working as a top scientist or running a business”, a change which inadvertently cranks up the paranoia in an already rather queasy conceit – not only are witches everywhere, they’re running everything! The grandmother in The Witches doesn’t tell the narrator that if he tries to pull off a woman’s wig to see if she’s a witch he’ll get into terrible trouble, but reminds him rather sententiously that women can wear wigs for many reasons, and there’s nothing wrong with them doing so. Elsewhere, Mike Teavee’s eighteen cap guns have been written out of the text and edited out of the illustrations; Matilda reads Jane Austen and John Steinbeck instead of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling; the Smallest Fox in Fantastic Mr Fox expresses his appreciation of cider before, rather than after, taking a drink; and all descriptions of people as “fat” or “ugly” (or “female”) have been removed or replaced. There are a lot of changes, and it’s hard to identify any overall rationale to them, unless it’s to remove anything that a liberal parent in 2023 might be embarrassed or reluctant to read out.
But I’m less concerned with the reason for the changes than with the fact that changes have been made, and a lot of them; the new, post-2021 edition of any of these books won’t be the same text as the pre-2021 edition. This isn’t the kind of thing we would want happening to Jane Austen (or Joseph Conrad); as a matter of fact it isn’t the kind of thing that happens to other early- and mid-twentieth century authors – Dorothy L. Sayers or Josephine Tey, for example – and if anyone tried it on we can easily imagine the reaction. By extension it seems like a bad thing to be happening to Roald Dahl. Doesn’t it?
Counter-Argument 1: “Oh come on, these are kids’ stories…!”
Not buying that one. You can keep your hands off Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit, Noel Streatfeild and Alan Garner, and in a very real sense wasn’t J. R. R. Tolkien…
CA 2: “Oh come on, you’re not putting Esio Trot and George’s Marvellous Medicine alongside The Hobbit?”
I’m saying whatever kids read is important enough to take seriously as literature – or at least, if there is a literature/trash threshold, it’s well below the Esio Trot level. And you don’t rewrite books that you take seriously as literature.
CA 3: “This is old news, though – and authors themselves aren’t precious about their text, not when there are good reasons not to be. Notoriously, And Then There Were None originally had a different title, but it was renamed – presumably with Agatha Christie’s approval – within two months. Dahl himself rewrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after approaches from the NAACP, which was concerned about the racist portrayal of the original Oompa Loompas.”
Yes, and it’s very much to his credit. The point when Roald Dahl died, however, is the point beyond which Charlie and the Chocolate Factory could no longer be revised by its author.
CA 4: “Authorial intent? Seriously? Are you telling me the words on the page of even the first edition of one of Dahl’s books were identical to the words he originally wrote? Have you any idea how many stages a book like that goes through, how many people get to look at it and make – sorry, suggest – changes? When it comes to mass-market publishing, the author is dead and has been for some time. By the same token, it’s not unusual for the text of a book to get a few tweaks when it’s reprinted.”
Fair enough, but the author Roald Dahl – like (say) J.R.R. Tolkien but unlike (say) J.K. Rowling – is also dead in the sense of being dead. Authors may not write every word that comes out under their name, but for anything that appears in their lifetime, we can assume that they have at least approved it. Past that point, we know for certain that they haven’t. (And what we’re looking at here is more than a few tweaks.)
CA 5: “So that’s it, the text is sacrosanct and should be preserved for evermore? What’s next, should kids be reading Little Black Sambo?”
I’m not saying any existing text should be preserved for evermore. Philip Pullman’s comment on the current brouhaha is instructive:
“If it does offend us, let him go out of print. That’s what I’d say. Read Phil Earle, SF Said, Frances Hardinge, Michael Morpurgo, Malorie Blackman. Read Mini Grey, Helen Cooper, Jacqueline Wilson, Beverley Naidoo. Read all these wonderful authors who are writing today who don’t get as much of a look-in because of the massive commercial gravity of people like Roald Dahl.”
If it offends us, let it go – there are plenty of other authors. It’s harsh, but I think it’s correct. When I was a kid I was a huge fan of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books, some of which – sadly – prominently feature an African character for whom ‘problematic’ is barely an adequate word. You won’t find those books in the kids’ section of bookshops now, and I find it difficult to regret that, as fond as my memories of some of them are. J. P. Martin’s Uncle books are both masterpieces of unhinged inventiveness and unabashed hymns to the nobility and refinement of the hugely wealthy; personally I’d love to see them back in print, but I’m not sure where they could be shelved.
So no, I’m not saying everything should be preserved, or even everything that I liked. Dahl’s books have qualities that you won’t find in Jacqueline Wilson or Michael Morpurgo, but so do the Uncle books, so do the Doctor Dolittle books, so does The Wind on the Moon, so does The Log of the Ark… Times change, readers change; new books appear, old books disappear, and sometimes with good reason. But what I am saying is that any existing text that is preserved should be preserved unchanged.
CA 6: “It isn’t a big deal, though – it’s not government censorship, just a private company making an informed decision about what will and won’t sell.”
I don’t think anyone’s said that it’s government censorship. What it is, is a capitalist business rewriting children’s literature on the basis of what will and won’t sell. I think that is a big deal, even if some of the changes are hard to object to.
CA 7: “You said it yourself – you don’t actually object to the changes. There’s a reason for that – the changes are basically correct. They’re in line with the way that contemporary sensibilities have developed. Sure, there’s a minority who just want everything to stay the same, and we can have a bit of sympathy for them – we all have fond memories of the books we read as kids, after all – but most people realise that things have to change. Readers didn’t want racially-caricatured Oompa Loompas by 1971, so the book was changed – and today’s readers don’t want colonialism and body-shaming, so the book’s changing again.”
This is begging the question – to be precise, begging two different questions. We don’t know that the changes that have been made are appropriate to changing contemporary sensibilities. We know that Puffin and RDSW – Penguin Random House and Netflix – brought in an agency called Inclusive Minds to do a sensitivity reading of the Dahl corpus, and that these are the changes that resulted. In other words, we can be fairly sure that changes appropriate to changing sensibilities were what they were trying to achieve, but whether these actual changes do that is anybody’s guess; maybe it would be truer to today’s sensibilities to make a lot more changes (or just not reprint the books any more). Alternatively, maybe the mark to hit would actually involve making a lot fewer changes – perhaps take out the bit about women working as secretaries and leave it at that – although in that scenario Puffin and Netflix might not feel that Inclusive Minds had given value for money.
In any case, there’s a more important question here, which is simply the question of whether any changes should be made to a published book after its author’s death – and this counter-argument does nothing to answer that.
CA 8: “But what kids read is important – you said so yourself. Perhaps adult readers can skate over Josephine Tey’s right-wing politics or Dorothy Sayers’ casual antisemitism, but we don’t expect children to have that level of sophistication. Roald Dahl’s books are full of potentially hurtful allusions to appearance and body shape, and much else that could inculcate unthinking prejudices in child readers.”
Roald Dahl’s books are full of a number of things, including spite and cruelty; it’s worth remembering that he was not, in many ways, a nice guy. More importantly, the remorseless nastiness of some of his characters (and of what happens to them) is of a piece with the heightened, fairytale quality of his world-building – you should see what happens to people in some of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. Dahl’s narrators label people fat and ugly for the same reason that Miss Trunchbull calls her pupils ‘midgets’ – not despite the offence it could cause but because it’s offensive.
I think we should recognise the work that cruelty and spite – and dark themes and characters generally – can do, in children’s as well as adult literature; and, as far as imbibing prejudice from the page is concerned, we should probably have more trust in children’s reading ability. That said, if any of Dahl’s books (as he left them) turn out on repeat viewing to be really toxic, there’s always the option of not reprinting them. Otherwise, hey, publisher, leave that text alone – just like Dorothy L. Sayers, just like J.R.R. Tolkien.
CA 9: “You’re paying an awful lot of attention to what’s basically yet another anti-“woke” culture-war feature in the Telegraph. Shouldn’t we resist this scaremongering, the same way we resist all right-wing attempts to drum up a moral panic?”
If we should ignore culture-war journalism, then we should ignore this story – as in, not react to it at all: if we should avoid getting dragged into culture wars, then we should avoid getting dragged into this one. (How many demonstrations in favour of vaccination have you seen, or in favour of the World Economic Forum? Not our circus, not our monkeys.)
More specifically, if we think there’s an issue here we should take our own position on whatever that issue actually is, rather than look at what the Right’s saying and take the opposite position. Calling the Telegraph piece a culture-war feature is fair enough, but it doesn’t mean the analysis in it is necessarily wrong, let alone that the Left should be rallying to the defence of [check notes] Bertelsmann and Netflix.
At the end of the day, the rewrites – which is to say, the fact that they’re happening at all – are bad news for children’s literature. I hope all concerned take note of the reaction in the press – which has been substantial and global – and draw their horns in sharpish.
Per Wahlöö (1926-75) is best remembered now for the ten political crime thrillers, centred on the character of Martin Beck, which he co-wrote with Maj Sjöwall between 1965 and 1975. Wahlöö was also the author of several other novels, written both before and after beginning his partnership with Sjöwall. One of these was 1966’s Murder on the Thirty-First Floor, published by Vintage in 2011 in a translation by Sarah Death; I’ve just read it and feel the need to get some thoughts down. Although I didn’t ultimately like the book very much, it got under my skin in an odd way. I was born in the 1960s, and Wahlöö seems to have been writing from a world that I recognise, and with radical commitments that I intuitively share. But the book brought it home to me that that world is gone for good – and I can’t help wondering how this reflects on those commitments.
More on that in a moment. (Warning: ends up being about Charles I’s headCorbynism.) First, some thoughts on the book itself. There will be spoilers; if you’re keen to read the book on the basis of what you’ve read so far, you’d better bookmark this and come back later. Continue reading →
Back in May 2020 I wrote a post summarising some of the points I’d taken from Labour’s leaked report (now on archive.org). At the time admitting to having read or downloaded the leaked report was disciplinarily problematic, let’s say – never mind discussing its contents – so I changed all the names of the organisations involved and reskinned the whole thing as sf. With the Forde Report now being available, I think this degree of circumspection is no longer called for. So here’s what I was actually writing about.
– We’re here to consider some problems that have recently surfaced in the Labour Party. Take this, for instance.
“OK. So, what we see here is that there was an election coming up, and one individual with responsibility for election-related and other forms of campaigning within the Labour Party writes: Let’s hope the Liberal Democrats can do it. I’m sorry, what?”
– The person in question appears to hope that the Liberal Democrats will win the election in question.
“Thankyou, I had got that far. But the person in question is responsible for the Labour election campaign. You wouldn’t expect them to have any doubts about who to support.”
– Or to express those thoughts to Labour colleagus, on a Labour communication channel.
“Good grief. Were they – all of them – actually working against their own party? Why?”
– Firstly, not all of them, but quite a few – up to and including the then General Secretary. As to why… well, let’s look at the next piece of evidence. So, here’s somebody who enjoyed ridiculing the leadership…
“The Labour leadership?”
– Yes, their own leadership – there’s going to be a lot of this, so I should get used to the idea; they enjoyed ridiculing the leadership and dismissed anyone who supported them as Trotskyite subversives.
“Trotskyite… I did read about this. Meaning… very marginal to the Party and very bad?”
– Meaning a whole variety of things – but yes, in this context the main meaning was ‘very bad’.
“And why do we care about this unpleasant and disloyal individual?”
– Mainly because they came under suspicion. Not from the leadership – from their colleagues; they were suspected of being a bit of a Trotskyite on the quiet.
“You mean to say, people in responsible positions at the Labour Party were so obsessed with the threat of these… Trotskyite tendencies… that they ended up working against the leadership of their own Party – and even dismissed anyone who didn’t agree with them completely as a Trotskyite in their own right? How did they ever get those positions of responsibility? How did they keep them? Were they just astonishingly good at their jobs?”
– Here we come to the question of antisemitic abuse.
“Ah, I remember the part about antisemitism. So at this stage our traitorous office-holders are dealing with… sorry, how many? In a party with half a million… surely there were more cases than that? And they’re taking… what? Why are they taking so long? And they haven’t got a process for tracking cases? None at all? Sorry, that’s a lot of questions.”
– All good ones.
“Ah, but weren’t these… Trotskyites, was it… weren’t they also supposed to have trouble with Jews? Maybe the reason those people weren’t processing complaints was that the leadership were slowing them down.”
– Actually, no. The leadership appears to have washed their hands of some close allies and personal friends, if those people seemed to be using antisemitic language or getting close to it.
“I’m confused now. The Party was dealing with them?”
– Ah, no. I said that the leadership washed their hands of them, not that they were promptly removed from the Party itself. This note here, for example, shows that one prominent individual’s case was allowed to drag on for two years. Jewish groups were up in arms about it. And, since this person was politically and even personally close to the leadership, naturally people suspected that the leadership was responsible. But they weren’t; if anything they were pushing for expulsion.
“Let me get this straight. People working within the Party, with responsibility for membership and discipline, believe that the leadership are all Trotskyites, and Trotskyites are all antisemites. A friend of the leadership makes statements seen as insulting to Jews. The leadership cuts this person off, but the Trot-hunters – who are the ones with the power to kick them out of the Party – do nothing about it, for…”
– For two years, yes.
“Were they just very, very inefficient? What’s this say – they had a very basic system for tracking complaints about members, which they then replaced it with another equally basic system, which they didn’t consistently use? Again, whyever not?”
– Very hard to say – not using a system doesn’t create much evidence. But it doesn’t seem to be an antisemitism-related thing, if only because all sorts of complaints were being dealt with just as slowly and just as inefficiently. As far as we can see the only time these people really sprang into action was when there was a leadership election, and a chance of party members deposing the leader.
“I suppose they would want to help that along.”
– It’s more that they hindered the people who wanted to vote for the leadership. Lots of Labour members suddenly discovered they were ex-members, or else that they’d been suspended for the length of the contest.
“They used membership of the Labour Party as a political tool?”
– To be granted and withheld as they saw fit.
“Ah well. At least it didn’t work. Still, you’d think the leadership would have noticed what was going on; you’d think they’d complain about having people in charge of membership who were good at kicking out allies of the leadership and bad at kicking out actual antisemites. I mean, assuming there were any actual antisemites in the Party to begin with, and it wasn’t just part of the big Trot hunt…”
– Let me stop you there. Antisemitic prejudice has deep historical roots, takes many different forms and can be found in all the main political parties, the Labour Party included.
“I just thought, seeing that so few of them were being expelled, perhaps there wasn’t enough…”
– Oh, there was plenty of evidence. After the General Secretary – well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Anyway, to answer your question, the leadership were well aware that their membership and discipline specialists were kicking out far too many of the wrong people and far too few of the right ones – not least because some pro-Jewish activists made sure that they knew about it.
“That’s where this [REDACTED] individual comes in, is it?”
– Yes. Quite suddenly the membership people are being bombarded with hundreds of vague, half-formed accusations against people who may or may not have been in the Labour Party to begin with. And they deal with this in two ways.
“Let me guess – number one is ‘very badly’?”
– And number two is ‘by reporting that everything was fine’.
“This all looks quite efficient, though. They’d had this many complaints from the [REDACTED] account; they’d all been investigated; this many were against Party members, and investigation had led to this many expulsions. What’s wrong with that?”
– Read this part.
“None of it was true? And we know that none of it was true – the data was right there and they… they lied about it? Even though they were all in favour of getting rid of antisemitic activists, even though it had the potential to embarrass the leadership – which, as we know, they wanted to do?”
– I suppose visibly failing to deal with the antisemitism problem had the potential to be even more embarrassing to the leadership. Or they may not have thought that far ahead; they may just have been extraordinarily inefficient.
“At anything other than kicking out allies of the leadership and other suspected ‘Trots’.”
– Yes. The Party was a hard organisation to get kicked out of, if you weren’t an ally of the leadership. You could post antisemitic propaganda or various other forms of bigotry online; you could even advocate joining the Conservative Party. If you were reported once, it was an isolated occurrence; if you were reported twice or three times, your case had already been looked at so there was no need to do anything else.
“That isn’t sectarianism, though – just rampant inefficiency; these people seem to have treated senior jobs in the Party as if they were sinecures requiring only that they turn up for work, and gone on acting that way even when there was vitally important work to be done.”
– Let’s not lose sight of the broader picture. It would be fair to say that these individuals exhibited both sectarianism – in opposition to their own leadership – and rampant inefficiency. There is a happy ending of sorts, though: at this point here, there’s a new General Secretary, and almost all of the other people mentioned here resign. The disciplinary process becomes considerably more efficient as a result, as you can see here.
“A ninefold… no, a tenfold increase. No, wait. A factor of 25. In fact, in one sense it’s a factor of 45. It’s a big improvement, anyway.”
– But there’s more. If you’ll just watch this programme…
“Unwritten guidelines… leadership interfering… antisemitic sympathies… obstructing their investigations… This just isn’t true! It can’t be true.”
– I’m afraid witnesses’ veracity can’t always be relied on.
“Clearly. Apart from anything else, if the leadership had the power to impose these ‘guidelines’ which supposedly slowed everything down so much, how could all of those leadership sympathisers have been excluded? And how could the process of dealing with the antisemitic element have got so much better when the leadership had a new General Secretary and new people in place? What they say here simply cannot be true. One can sympathise with them in a way – nobody likes being reminded of how inefficiently they’re working, least of all when they have ceased to support the goals of the organisation they’re working for. But this reaction is… excessive.”
– Some would call it a pack of lies.
“I dare say they would. So, remind me, what’s the remit of our investigation?”
– We’re to investigate the content of this leak.
“Quite right too.”
– Also, the circumstances under which it came to be leaked. Oh, and we’ll be working with individuals nominated by the Party under its new leadership, specifically including one known supporter of the former General Secretary –
“I’m sorry, the former General Secretary?”
– If I might finish – one supporter of the former General Secretary, and one individual who was actually a staff member in this period and whose name appears in the leak.
What does Labour’s victory in the Wakefield by-election tell us about “Red Wall” seats more generally, and about Labour’s prospects in the next General Election?
1. Where We’re Coming From
Drawing lessons for Labour from previous elections is horrifically difficult, for (at least) four reasons. The first is the fact that the whole field is bitterly contested, so that discussions are likely to be distorted by partisanship. There are some (among whom I’m sure I wouldn’t count you, dear reader) who turn a deaf ear to any attempt to identify positives about the Corbyn period, typically pointing out in a discussion-ending tone that Labour didn’t win in either 2017 or 2019, whereas we did win in 1997, 2001 and 2005. (Good to know. I’ll make a note.) On the other hand (secondly), 2017 shouldn’t be taken as a model, either: some elements of the 2017 campaign went well and could usefully be repeated, but other elements we could do without. Polarisation, for example. Opponents of Corbyn will sometimes say that the only reason Labour did so well in 2017 was that Theresa May’s Conservatives were so weak, but if anything the opposite is the case. The only reason Labour didn’t do even better (and, e.g., win) was that the Conservative result was so strong: in 2017 the Conservative Party got its highest vote share since 1987, and took more votes than Labour did in their landslide victory of 1997. So it was a big success for mobilisation of the Labour vote; another time we just need to work out how to get our voters to turn out and theirs to stay at home. Demobilisation of the other side seems more like a Blair-era achievement, but – thirdly – if the Corbyn period isn’t to be discounted, the Blair victories shouldn’t simply be celebrated. You’d think it’d be reasonably easy to draw lessons from the most recent period when Labour did win general elections – three in a row, I’m reliably informed – but examined in detail the New Labour electoral record is rather qualified, not to say flukey. If we want to improve on 2017’s “40% of the vote and a hung parliament”, saying that we should be pitching for 2005’s “35% and a majority of 66” isn’t very helpful. And that leads on to the fourth reason – but I’ll save that for later. (It’s a corker.)
Here, anyway, is how the last few elections look, UK-wide.
Dark blue: far Right; purple: UKIP/BXP; green: Green/independent Left. %s shown when 3% or above.
Red line: Lab – Con vote %, right-hand axis.
We can see some trends here.
2010: Labour vote drops by 6% in the wake of the 2008 crash; some of those votes go to UKIP, the far Right and the Lib Dems (“I agree with Nick”), but most go to the Tories. Hung Parliament leading to Tory/Lib Dem coalition.
2015: Lib Dem vote drops by 15% after the Coalition; Labour and Tories pick up some of their vote and the Greens pick up more, but by far the biggest beneficiary is UKIP. Given the lack of common ground between the Lib Dem and UKIP manifestos, it seems that quite a lot of people had been voting Lib Dem on general “sod the lot of ’em” principles. Either that or the Tories have gained the adherence of a lot of former Lib Dems, while losing an equally large number of their own voters to UKIP. In any case, the result is a Tory government.
2017: The previous election’s Green and – more dramatically – UKIP votes vanish like melting snow in a heavily polarised election. The Tories’ vote share rises by 5.5%; Labour’s share rises by 9.6%. Tory minority government.
2019: Almost 8% of that Labour increase disappears again, to the benefit of the Lib Dems, the Greens, the Brexit Party and the Tories. Between people who didn’t trust Labour to deliver a second referendum, people who didn’t trust Labour to deliver Brexit and people who thought that if they wished hard enough they could vote for a hung parliament, Labour’s vote got driven down in many different places, for many different reasons and entirely to the benefit of the Conservative Party. Tory government.
2. The Fall of the Not Actually A Wall Actually
So that’s the baseline. Were things different in the Red Wall, though?
Hmm. [FX: Grits teeth] Red Wall, is it? I find it hard to believe how firmly that term’s ensconced in the political lexicon, having being coined less than three years ago and repeatedly redefined since then. But it looks as if we’re stuck with it now. In practice it means a whole variety of things, but usually when people talk about the “Red Wall” they’re talking about long-term Labour seats that went to the Conservatives in 2019, generally in post-industrial or semi-rural areas, generally in England but north of Luton, and which are thought to have gone to the Tories for primarily ‘cultural’ reasons. Either that, or seats that Labour still hold but which qualify on the other criteria and might turn out to be vulnerable next time round – a decidedly malleable definition.
Even if we confine ourselves to seats Labour actually lost, though, there are problems. What do we mean by a “long-term” Labour seat – one that’s been Labour since 2010, say? (Twelve years is a long time for most people.) Should we look for continuous holds since 1997? Since 1983? Longer? And what do we do about constituencies whose boundaries have been redrawn in that time? (The longer we go back the more likely that is to have happened, making “long-term” Labour seats harder to identify than you might think.) As for seats “going to the Conservatives”, surely we want to focus on seats where there have been substantial changes in absolute and relative vote share, not just a change in who tops the list. A seat that’s 39% Labour and 38% Tory at one election and 38%/39% at the next has “gone to the Conservatives”, after all, but hardly anyone there has actually changed their mind. The picture’s even more complicated when a seat has a strong Nationalist presence, and show me a Scottish seat that hasn’t; even Plaid Cymru’s ~10% presence in Wales makes them a bit of a wild card. So for simplicity we really need to confine ourselves to England.
With all of this in mind, in an earlier post I looked at all Labour’s losses in England in 2019 and categorised them as
big wins (Labour continuously since 1979, decisive win in 2019)
narrow wins (Labour continuously since 1979, but not a decisive win in 2019)
marginals (had changed hands at least twice since 1979)
I defined a “decisive win” as one where
the Labour vote in 2019 fell 10% or more relative to 2017 and was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001, and where the eventual Tory majority was 5% or more
I then took some averages of the three groups, which worked out like this:
1
2
3
Diff 1
Diff 2
Lowest Labour vote %, 2019
24.4
39.3
36.9
12.5
2.4
Highest Labour vote %, 2019
39.8
44.5
46
4.7
1.5
Average Labour vote %, 2019
34.8
41.7
41.1
6.3
0.4
Biggest Tory majority in %, 2019
31.4
12.6
15.7
15.7
3.1
Biggest drop in Labour vote %, 2017-19
24.9
15.7
18.1
6.8
2.4
Diff 1: difference between 1 and either 2 or 3, whichever is closer
Diff 2: difference between 2 and 3
Essentially there’s not a huge amount of difference between the ‘marginals’ and the ‘narrow wins’ (Diff 2), whereas they’re both quite distinct from the ‘big wins’ (Diff 1). Which makes sense: even in a seat that’s been held by one party for a long time, you can score a narrow win by putting on a few hundred votes and driving the other side’s vote down by 5-6%. That – like a marginal changing hands – is the kind of thing that happens in any good election campaign; and the Tories in 2019 had a very good election campaign.
The big wins, though, really are different. So that’s my first finding, in terms of the reality of the Red Wall: yes, there was a group of long-term Labour seats that fell to the Tories in 2019 by really big margins, with really big drops in the Labour vote. And yes, they were Up North, if you define that term loosely enough (Derby and Durham are both in the North, but you wouldn’t want to walk it). There were only about 16 of them, though, meaning that if Labour had held every one of them and lost all the other seats they lost, the Tories would still have gained a big majority.
(Wakefield wasn’t in this group, although arguably it’s on the borderline: the Labour vote in 2019 fell by 9.9% relative to 2017, and Mary Creagh’s losing vote share of 39.8% was higher than her winning share of 39.3% in 2010.)
The analysis of big Tory wins ended up overlapping with something I wrote some time ago, analysing trends in Labour vote share in General Elections since 2005 in Labour seats in England. Having heard some Labour MPs bemoaning Corbyn’s leadership as electoral poison, and having seen Labour surge pretty well everywhere in 2017, I wanted to know whether there was any truth to that negative perception even at a local level. Was there a substantial group of seats where Labour’s vote share, relative to the Tories, had actually fallen in 2017? (Clearly there were some, as we lost six seats (while gaining 36) – but a handful isn’t really enough to generalise from; weird things do happen in elections.)
I compared 186 English Labour seats (as of the 2017 election) across the last five elections. The metric was simple: if we compared this election’s comparative vote share – “Labour % – Tory %” – with the previous election, had it gone Up or Down? I identified 50 seats where comparative vote share had in fact gone down in 2017, in all of which it had also gone down in 2010. In 39 of the 50, relative vote share had gone up in 2015 (so Down, Up, Down or DUD); in the other 11, vote share had gone down at all three elections (=DDD).
Remember those “big wins”? On inspection, almost all of them fitted the DUD pattern, and the remainder were all DDD. So there genuinely was a group of long-term Labour seats – a minority, but a substantial minority; around one in five – where the election campaign led by Ed Miliband seemed to deliver the goods in a way that 2017 didn’t; where the end result of that amazing May of campaigning was a sitting MP holding on with a smaller majority. And a lot of those seats were vulnerable, given a hearty shove in 2019, to going Tory in a big way.
But how?
3. None Of The Above: The True Story
Here’s what happened in one of the “big win” seats, Don Valley. (More detail in this post.)
2010: Nationally, the Labour vote drops by 6%, about half of which goes to UKIP or the BNP; here, the drop is double that, and it all seems to go to anti-political candidates of the Right and far Right: UKIP, the BNP and the English Democrats.
2015: Nationally, a big drop in the Lib Dem vote and a rise in UKIP’s. Here, again, it’s the same but much more so: the Lib Dem vote doesn’t drop so much as collapse; Labour picks up some Lib Dem votes, but UKIP takes a big chunk from the Lib Dems as well as absorbing the far Right and taking some from the Tories, finishing in a close third place. (It’s possible, as suggested above, that there were two big vote flows rather than one – Lib Dem to Tory, Tory to UKIP – but in this seat the numbers involved make it doubtful: more than half of the people who voted Tory in 2010 would have had to switch to UKIP and be replaced by former Lib Dem voters.) The division of the Right vote leaves the Tories looking substantially weaker; if all you were focusing on was the comparison between the winning Labour vote and the Tory runner-up, it would look like a big improvement.
2017: Nationally, a big shift to two-party polarisation, with a substantial UKIP vote collapsing and Labour’s vote going up about twice as much as the Tories’. Here, the UKIP vote in 2015 was only a couple of points shy of the Tories’, and it disappears completely in 2017 – no candidate on the ballot paper. Labour’s vote goes up, but not twice as much as the Tories’ – it’s the other way around. Labour’s vote increases by nearly 7%, but its majority falls by nearly 10%.
2019: Nationally, Labour’s vote drops by 8% with compensatory gains by multiple different parties; here, the drop is closer to 18% and the main recipient of Labour votes is the Brexit Party – although it’s the Tories who take the seat.
A few conclusions, quoted from that earlier post.
There’s a substantial anti-political, “none of the above” vote in this seat: 10-20% of the vote at every election since 2001
The Lib Dems profited from this, until they didn’t: joining the government was the kiss of death, and the Lib Dems have effectively been irrelevant (at least in this seat) since 2010
Parties of the Right and extreme Right are legitimate in this seat as a repository for anti-political votes; the strength of the BNP and ED vote in 2010, and the extent to which UKIP built on this, is not to be underestimated
UKIP/BXP is strategically ambivalent, operating as a pure protest vote (2010, 2019), as a more respectable alternative to the far Right (2015) and as an ante-chamber to voting Conservative (2015, 2019?)
Without Corbyn, the 2017 result would have been much worse for Labour: Labour’s acceptance of Brexit and Corbyn’s image as an anti-system outsider both prevented the 2015 UKIP vote transferring to the Tories en masse
However, 2017 looked worse than 2015 for the sitting MP (Caroline Flint), as – with higher Labour and Tory votes – Labour won by a much narrower margin; this supported the narrative that a decline in Labour’s vote had continued or even accelerated under Corbyn (whereas in reality it had begun to be reversed)
What lost the seatin 2019 was the strength of the anti-system vote up to 2015, the Tories’ success in converting 2015’s UKIP protest vote to 2017 Conservatives, and Labour’s inability in 2019 to pre-empt the appeal of the BXP protest vote, due to the ambiguity of Labour’s Brexit positioning and the tarnishing of Corbyn’s image.
Wakefield? Here you go:
The angles are shallower but the shape of the line’s the same: Wakefield’s a DUD. It all looks very much the same, albeit on a smaller scale – Wakefield wasn’t a big loss in 2019, and it hadn’t ever really been weigh-the-vote territory before then (it was a bona fide marginal back in the 1980s, albeit one that the Tories never actually took). Still, the key indicators are all there. The drop in the Labour vote in 2010; the far Right presence (the BNP saved their deposit in 2010); the Lib Dem vote collapsing in 2015, with UKIP the main beneficiary (directly or indirectly); the uneven redistribution of the UKIP vote in 2017, leading to a larger absolute Labour vote share with a smaller majority; and then the hoovering up of disaffected Labour votes by the Lib Dems and the Brexit Party, to the benefit of the Tories.
2010: disaffection with Labour, legitimation of anti-system parties. 2015: disaffection with the Lib Dems, rise of UKIP. 2017: collapse of UKIP, diversion of some anti-system votes to Labour under Corbyn, conversion of most anti-system votes to the Tories. Then in 2019 we’re back to disaffection with Labour and legitimation of anti-system parties, this time with some diversion of anti-system votes to the Tories under Boris Johnson (portrayed – absurdly but effectively – as an anti-system figure). It was blowing much harder in the Don Valley, but the same wind was blowing in Wakefield.
Some of these trends were operating nationally to a greater or lesser extent, admittedly. Labour’s vote share fell across the country between 2005 and 2010, having also fallen between 2001 and 2005; indeed, considering that turnout was lower across the board, Labour’s vote in 2010 was two million down on its level in 2001 – and that was nearly three million down on 1997. (And that epoch-making result was itself substantially below the 55%+ that Labour had been polling when the election was called. 55%!)
The key difference in this sub-group of seats was what happened in 2017, where the national trend was for Labour’s vote to increase substantially more than the Tories’ relative to 2015. The seats where the Tories picked up more votes than Labour in 2017 seem also to show some relative rather than absolute differences from the national trend: a bigger fall in the Labour vote between 2005 and 2010; a bigger rise in the far Right vote in 2010; a bigger fall (a more complete collapse) of the Lib Dem vote in 2015 and a bigger rise in the UKIP vote.
4. What’s Really Happening?
We’ve reached the point where we can identify the three key driving forces of the last election result for Labour. The first – which is arguably one of the key driving forces of the last twenty years of politics – looks back to those five million voters Labour lost between the two victories of 1997 and 2005, and all the people who thought like them. That’s a big bloc of actual and potential Labour voters shaken loose from the party. Over time many, perhaps most, will have got the habit of staying at home at election time, but many will have taken the opportunity in 2005, 10, 15 to cast an anti-system, “sod the lot of ’em” vote – for the Lib Dems, for the BNP, for UKIP. (The British public also had an opportunity to cast an anti-system vote in 2016, of course. How’s that working out?) Roll that bloc of voters forward to 2017 and 2019, and the only question is how many of those people will be open to Corbyn’s anti-establishment appeal, and how many will prefer their anti-system politics with a definite Right-wing stamp.
Which brings us to the “Red Wall” question – why did some Labour seats go particularly heavily for the Tories? – and here we see the second key factor at work in 2019: the greater strength, and legitimacy, of the far Right in some areas than others. This is a factor that feeds through from 2005 on, first in higher votes for far Right parties, then in substantially higher votes for UKIP – and then, in 2017, in blunting the edge of Corbyn’s “anti-establishment” appeal. Local factors will be involved here; I can’t put the blame on Tony Blair, as much as I’d like to. What I will say, though, is that the BNP got more than 8% of the vote in eight constituencies in 2005 and twelve in 2010, including five in both – and they were all Labour seats. If I ran the Labour Party, having a fascist party even retain its deposit in a Labour constituency would be grounds for deselection; it doesn’t exactly suggest an assertive local party. To be fair, Labour didn’t go on to lose all of those seats – just a little over half, eight out of the fifteen – so it’s not an exact science. Anyway, we couldn’t go around holding the threat of deselection over good socialists like Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn, Margaret Hodge and checks notes Ian Austin, could we? That would never do.
Have I looked at the data? You bet I’ve looked at the data. Here’s “total far Right vote in 2010” vs “rise in UKIP vote between 2010 and 2015”, Labour constituencies only.
(I tried it without the zeroes; very little difference.) And here’s that rise in the UKIP vote, 2010-15, vs the total Labour vote in 2019.
I don’t bandy R-squared values around a lot, but those look pretty chunky to me.
(Interesting point for anyone else who wants to run some numbers: the relationship between the changes in Lib Dem and UKIP votes between 2010 and 2015 did not look like these charts. It’s actually a (very weak) direct relationship: a big drop in the Lib Dem vote makes a big rise in the UKIP vote slightly less likely – or rather, knowing that the Lib Dems did really badly in a seat makes it slightly less likely to be a seat where UKIP did really well. Three-way traffic, I guess, or something more complicated than that.)
Are those factors really relevant to 2019, though? 2019 wasn’t 2017, and Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-establishment appeal was wearing pretty thin by election night. Actually that just makes those two factors more effective: if you didn’t want your anti-system radicalism with a Glastonbury ribbon on top, you certainly weren’t going to want it wrapped in allegations of antisemitism. Which is to say, those two factors applied along with a third: an anti-Labour campaign of a scale, viciousness and shameless mendacity that I’ve never seen before in British politics (and I remember Bermondsey), much of it emanating from people Labour should have been able to count as supporters or allies. (Or, y’know, as members, officers, elected representatives – people like that.)
The significance of this last point, in the present context, is what it implies for Wakefield, and for all the other seats Labour lost which didn’t tick all of the ‘Red Wall’ criteria I’ve set out. Past voting figures suggest that Wakefield, like many other constituencies, didn’t have that big a deracinated ex-Labour bloc from the mid-2000s on, and nor did it have that big a far Right bloc later. So, while those first two factors operated to depress the scale of Labour’s vote gain in 2017 – and depress Labour’s majority – the effect wasn’t that big (Labour’s majority fell by 1.4%). What really made the difference was that third factor – which hopefully won’t be a factor at the next election. Even without the Tories conveniently falling apart as they did at the recent by-election, a relatively normal election campaign for Labour – without the relentless negative campaigning of 2019, other than from the Tories – should be enough to keep Wakefield in the fold, and win back quite a few of 2019’s other losses.
5. The Fourth Reason
So that’s nice. Whether that will be enough to win a general election, though, is another question, and it’s a question to which the answer is No. This brings us back to the fourth reason why it’s hard to draw lessons for Labour from past elections, as promised earlier: it’s a fact that everyone knows but that tends to be quietly ignored. The fact is that Labour, by and large, doesn’t win general elections. Eleven Labour governments have been formed after an election, the first being Ramsay MacDonald’s first government in 1923. Eleven in a century doesn’t sound that bad, even if five of the eleven only added up to seven years between them. But consider: three of the eleven were minority governments (1923, 1929, 1974/Feb), and another three had majorities of five of less (1950, 1964, 1974/Oct). Of the remaining five, three were second- or third-term governments (1966, 2001, 2005) – which is to say that Labour went into the election with all the advantages of an incumbent government. That only leaves two – and one of those, the 1945 landslide, saw several of the leading figures of the wartime coalition remaining in office (Churchill’s Deputy PM Clement Attlee not least), meaning that it too was effectively a second-term government.
So that’s one Labour government, with a workable majority, formed after an election won by the Labour Party in opposition: one out of eleven; one in a century; one, not to put too fine a point on it, ever. Mr Tony Blair, come on down! 1997 wasn’t just unusual for Labour, it was – literally – unique. It follows that when people talk about Labour winning the next election, they’re not talking about competence and putting the grownups in charge and getting back to business as usual – at least, they certainly shouldn’t be, because that’s not going to do it. And when they talk about 2017 as if the only salient fact about that election was that Labour didn’t form the next government – as if a solid majority over the Tories was there for the taking by any half-decent Labour leadership, so that any campaign that failed to win outright deserved only contempt – they’re talking “absolute tripe”, as Michael Foot and my father used (separately) to say. (Born the same year, those two. Inter-war slang, I guess.)
New Labour’s victory in 1997 had many parents. The property crash of 1992 dislodged many natural Conservative voters from their party; standing at 45% in mid-1992, the Tories’ polling average had dropped below 40% by the end of the year and below 30% by the end of 1993, only beginning to recover in the months before the election was called in 1997. This fed through into both vote-switching and abstention: the Tory vote was down 4.5 million in 1997 relative to 1992, while Labour’s vote only increased by two million. (Yes, ‘only’. We put on 3.5 million between 2015 and 2017.)
Labour was polling 15-20 points ahead of the Tories when John Smith died in 1994. A new-broom leadership was meat and drink to political commentators, who seemed equally dazzled by Tony Blair’s personal style and his bite-sized political philosophy. Taking no chances, Blair and Brown were in any case assiduous in getting the media (as well as the City) on side. Meanwhile the “cash for questions” scandal was undermining the credibility of the Conservative government even further, enabling political commentators to pick up and amplify popular disaffection from the Tory Party under the general heading of “sleaze”.
As for the other parties, the Lib Dems were tacitly operating as New Labour’s small-L liberal outriders, in the (forlorn) hope that their contribution to victory would be rewarded. (Don’t get fooled again, eh?) Scotland was in the bag before campaigning began: the SNP finished as the third largest party in Scotland in 1997, just as they had in 1992. On the Right, the Referendum Party stood 547 candidates and took 2.6% of the vote; UKIP (est. 1993) stood 193 candidates and got 0.3%. (The only UKIP candidate not to lose their deposit was a Mr N. Farage; wonder what happened to him.)
You get the idea. 1997 really was a perfect storm: a confluence of multiple wildly different factors, some of them not of Labour’s doing, some of them downright impossible to recreate now. (O my 20% Lib Dems and my 20% (in Scotland) SNP of yesteryear!) And 1997 is the only time Labour’s won a working majority from opposition. Not the biggest or the most enduring or the most elegantly arranged – the only one.
So when people talk about Labour winning the next election, they really aren’t talking about getting back to business as usual; what they’re talking about is replicating a single, bizarre and unparallelled combination of circumstances. Or else they’re thinking – or they need to start thinking – in terms of striking out in a new direction, and pulling together some other combination that might prove equally effective. (We could try populist rhetoric attached to radical policies, perhaps, with a likeable figurehead and a credible pitch to young people. Worth a shot.)
I get the impression that the current leadership team believes that a competent campaign and a halfway friendly press will win Wakefield and seats like it, but that they need to reposition Labour – as patriotic, fiscally responsible, tough on crime and so on – in order to get the true “Red Wall” seats back. They also seem to believe that once the Red Wall comes back, the country will come with it. I agree that Wakefield’s probably staying Labour next time out, and some – perhaps as many as half – of the “Red Wall” seats will probably come back. But Don Valley and seats like it are almost certainly gone; that damage has been done, a long time ago. And – more importantly – where the “Red Wall” goes, goes… nowhere else in particular. Neither of those two groups of seats are big enough, or typical enough, to mean that winning them would be enough to win the election.
What will? One thing we know is that we aren’t going to have another 1997 – the preconditions for it aren’t there. That in itself means that something fairly dramatic is going to be needed – something a great deal more dramatic than talking about tax cuts and waving the flag. Unfortunately, unless there’s a big change in the leadership or (less probably) in leadership style, Labour just isn’t going to have the kind of inspirational appeal that enables the party to make new inroads into Tory territory. (I mean, it’s not as if people were oh say for example spontaneously chanting Keir Starmer’s name, is it.)
Wakefield or no Wakefield, on a national level it all adds up to another loss. I’ve got a nasty feeling that the leadership’s already working on that basis, and that the next election will see Starmer, well, doing a Kinnock – putting a brave face on a few gains and arguing that the gains the party didn’t make just show that his work is not yet done.
If it does come to that, I just hope that some of the people who backed Starmer on the basis that Corbynism was a vote-loser will draw the right conclusions.
Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for picking fights with the Left, together with his – and Labour’s – lacklustre performance over the last couple of years, has led to speculation about his role. Does he – and do the people who advise him – see him as the next Labour Prime Minister? Or is he occupying his position purely as an interim leader, someone who can do the necessary dirty work and then step aside in favour of a better candidate? Is he, in short, doing a Kinnock?
1. The first Kinnock…
Neil Kinnock was elected leader of the Labour Party in 1983, having been an MP for 13 years and a Shadow Minister for four. A member of the Tribune group, Kinnock was seen as “soft Left”; the right-winger Roy Hattersley was elected deputy leader alongside him, and both seemed genuinely happy to work together. In both these respects Kinnock’s leadership marked a break from the leadership of veteran Tribune leftist Michael Foot, under whom Labour had suffered internal divisions, the defection of the SDP and its most disastrous election defeat since the 1930s; the impression of a ‘new broom’ was heightened by Kinnock’s relative youth (he was 28 years younger than Foot).
Of course, to say that Labour had been riven by internal strife under Foot is also to say that the Left had been stronger – in the parliamentary party, in the membership and especially in the unions – than the Right was happy with; to say that Kinnock’s version of Tribune Group leftism displaced Foot’s is also to say that the centre-left defeated the Left; and to say that the election of Kinnock and Hattersley represented left-right reconcilation is also to say that it put the lid on any possibility of the Left making real progress in the party, even after the departure of some of the worst right-wing blowhards to the SDP and oblivion. The Left was not strong in the party in 1983, and Kinnock’s election did nothing to make it stronger – rather the reverse. If we judge politicians not by their stated political positions but by direction of travel – by the trends and tendencies that they assist and those they obstruct – then it’s pretty clear that Kinnock was always leading from the Right (or rather, leading towards the Right).
In any case, he didn’t waste much time making it clear where he stood. In 1984 – the year after he was elected – Kinnock took pains to dissociate himself from the striking miners, endorsing the principle of keeping the pits open but saying little about the strike itself other than to denounce “picket-line violence”. The following year, after the defeat of the strike, Kinnock devoted his speech to Labour Party Conference to attacking the Left both in the unions and in local councils, whose struggle against the Thatcher government’s rate-capping proposals was already crumbling. While Kinnock’s “grotesque chaos” line attacking the Militant-led Liverpool Council is remembered to this day, it’s also worth remembering that what was being described was a single, failed tactic in a struggle that was already being lost. It’s certainly true that a fight against injustices imposed by Conservative governments can be pursued beyond any hope of victory and using poorly-chosen tactics, but denouncing these errors hardly adds up to a political platform – particularly when the fight itself and the reasons for it are allowed to slip out of the frame. True to Kinnock’s character as an operator and a speechmaker, this was knockabout political theatre far more than it was analysis.
Considered as a message to the Labour movement, Kinnock’s attack on Liverpool Council was wholly negative and – bizarrely for an opposition party polling in the mid-30%s – defensive. The message was that the Labour Party’s sole aim was electing a Labour government; as such, the party was not a vehicle for extra-parliamentary action, whether in the unions or through local councils; and anyone who thought differently was not welcome in the party. That said, considered as a message to the commentariat and the political establishment – the gatekeepers of public opinion – it was a triumph, for precisely the same reasons: it signalled that the symbolic defeats of Arthur Scargill and Derek Hatton would be allowed to stand, that there would be no return to the militancy of the early 1980s (let alone the late 1970s), and that the Labour Party under Kinnock’s leadership could be trusted to manage British capitalism. In short, Kinnock’s 1985 conference speech set the seal on the message his 1983 election had sent, assuring his audience(s) that the implicit commitment to consign the Labour Left to history was one that he intended to put into effect.
He didn’t really get a chance to do so, of course. At the 1987 General Election, two years after that conference speech, Labour gained 26 seats and lost six; the Conservative majority was reduced, but only from 144 to 102. Even the 1992 election – widely thought to be in the bag for Labour after a year-long period of 10%+ poll leads – left the Conservatives in power, albeit with a majority of only 21. The trouble was, that period of strong poll leads had begun when Mrs Thatcher announced the poll tax in 1989, and ended when she was replaced as leader. John Major was, initially at least, a much more popular leader, who projected competence and normality without any offputting personality quirks or ideological baggage; Kinnock’s selling-points were no longer unique, in other words. In the event, Major’s popularity had a short shelf-life, declining rapidly after Black Wednesday in September 1992; the Tories were polling below 30% for the next four years, with Labour in the mid- to high 40%s under John Smith and passing 50% under Blair. But none of that was Kinnock’s doing.
2. The Kinnock Effect
Why is Kinnock – why is that speech – still a reference point? Come to that, why wasn’t Kinnock consigned to political oblivion after his first General Election defeat as leader, let alone his second?
Brief reply to imaginary centrist
Labour went into the 1987 election with the Tories 8% ahead in the polls; when the votes were counted the Tories were 11% ahead and had an overall majority of 102. Labour went into the 2017 election with the Tories 21% ahead in the polls; on the day, the Tories were 2% ahead and had a majority of -17. So no, I don’t think the two are comparable.
Ahem.
Kinnock’s success – at least, what’s now seen as his success – had two key elements. The first, easily forgotten now, is that he presented himself as being on the Left; he even had the receipts to prove it, as a fairly long-term member of the Tribune group of Labour MPs. As a commitment to the Left this shouldn’t be overstated; after 1981 there was no love lost between Tribunites and the “hard left” of the Campaign Group – and in any case Kinnock personally was always longer on rhetoric than on tangible commitments. Nevertheless, he did position himself as in some sense on the Left – and there’s no doubt that he played on this.
The second key factor in the Kinnock project was the state of the party, deeply divided – in Parliament as well as in the country – between Right and Left. Kinnock offered to address, even to mend, this division. The dynamic on which Kinnock was elected, with Hattersley (his runner-up in the leadership election) as deputy, was precisely “Left moving Right” – or, more specifically, “new reformed Left, abandoning old antagonisms and reaching out to the Right”. Old wounds would be healed and bridges built. It was actually quite inspiring, if you were relatively new to all this and didn’t have a suspicious nature; I very nearly joined the party at the time.
With a bit of historical distance, we can ask a couple of questions about this idea of a new reformed Left, reaching out to the Right in a spirit of brotherhood and unity. Firstly, why reach out to the Right – how many battalions have they got? If the country’s being brought to a halt by striking miners, demonstrations against rate-capping and Stop the City – all of which was going on, not to mention kicking off, in 1984-5 – the Labour Party certainly needs to do something, but “improving working relations between the Tribune Group and the Manifesto Group” doesn’t seem like it should be high on the list. Secondly and relatedly, if the “new reformed Left” is represented by the leadership, what happens to the rest of the Left – where do they go?
The 1985 conference speech answered that question loud and clear – which is why it is still celebrated on the Labour Right, and treated as if it had heralded imminent victory and not twelve more years in opposition. Essentially Kinnock offered to remake the Labour Left in the image of the Right – as a group of Labour MPs and other office-holders, who could be trusted to take their turn in charge of the Labour Party just as Labour could be trusted to take turns with the Conservatives in governing the country. Not only did he point the way for New Labour; by taking on the extra-parliamentary Left, both programmatically and personally, he paved the way, doing some of the heavy lifting for the greater leader who was to come. By cutting themselves loose from the Left, the membership, the unions and the party’s history, and above all by declaring that they were doing so in the name of Labour, New Labour followed where Kinnock had led – and succeeded where he failed.
3. (Not) Another Kinnock
How does Keir Starmer fit into this picture? With difficulty, it has to be said.
The appeal of a Kinnock-like narrative for the Starmer camp is obvious. Putting it into action, though, was tricky, for two reasons – in fact, precisely because of those two key factors.
In 2019/20 the party was certainly divided. The trouble was, nobody on the Right wanted to admit it, not least because the division had a strong ‘vertical’ component. With right-wing officeholders (and placeholders) jealously guarding their positions and crying Foul at any suggestion of greater accountability, people in positions of power in the party were much more likely to be anti-Corbyn than not – and a left-wing party divided between office-holders and rank-and-file members is not a good look.
So a variety of narratives grew up to explain what had happened to the party since 2015, mainly involving unrepresentative handfuls of thugs and Trots seizing control of party branches, just like the old days – and certainly not involving the existence of rival factions with equal legitimacy. The trouble was, this meant that Starmer couldn’t stand as “left reaching out to the right”; in these narratives there was no Left, just a gang of infiltrators who had somehow seized control of the party. By extension there was no Right – just the ordinary decent members of the party who cared more about electing a Labour government to deliver for our people than about having the correct ideological position (spit!).
What made this particularly difficult – attesting to the long-term damage caused by the anti-Corbyn campaign of 2015-19 – was the fact that Starmer still needed to run from the Left and appeal to the Left, while reaching out to the Right. (The second part of this was particularly important: in reality there were an awful lot of left-wing members out there, and everyone knew what happened when you didn’t try to appeal to them – look at Angela Eagle and Owen Smith; look at Jess Phillips.) The shape of the manoeuvre Starmer was aiming to carry out was unchanged; there just wasn’t a political vocabulary available for him to do it with.
The second problem the Starmer camp had was that, unlike Kinnock, their boy didn’t really have an image or a past to run against. Come to that, he didn’t really have any record as a politician – other than being Labour’s Mr Remain, known and trusted throughout the chancelleries of Europe, and for some reason they didn’t want to go big on that.
So the only way that Starmer could “do a Kinnock” was to, in effect, fake up a political hinterland – “I’m Left just like you! I always have been! Just in a slightly different and more moderate way, which is why you’ve never seen me around before!” Hence the ten pledges; hence the extraordinarily conciliatory campaign statement; hence the professions of friendship and solidarity with Jeremy Corbyn. Like Philip Gosse’s creationist explanation of fossils – yes, there were millions of years of history in the rocks, but that was because God had created the world looking as if it had a past – Keir Starmer the Leftist was created out of nothing for the purposes of the 2020 leadership election, and Keir Starmer’s leftist past was created with it.
Brief reply to imaginary leftist historian
OK, his leftist past wasn’t entirely created in 2020; I’ve heard good things about his radical early 30s, when he was a lawyer to radical campaigns, and I actually knew him slightly in his radical mid-20s, when he was a Pabloite. But the man’s pushing 60; there’s been precious little sign of that radical past lately, and there’s certainly no continuity with it.
4. Where are we now?
So if Starmer is doing a Kinnock it’s a very particular kind of Kinnock – a virtual Kinnock, a “fake news” Kinnock. Needless to say, it’s an approach that leaves the field littered with hostages to fortune.
Admittedly, left-wing reminders of Starmer’s ten pledges, his “hands up” to energy nationalisation and his reference to Corbyn as a friend haven’t made much of a dent in Starmer’s standing. But then, Starmer’s standing – as distinct from his election as party leader – isn’t dependent on the Left. It could be a different matter when the right-wing press decides to use that information – and use it they certainly could. It wouldn’t be beyond them to borrow the Left’s argument as it stands and use it as an attack on Starmer’s character – if this is what he’s willing to say to his friends, how can you believe what he says to you?
Alternatively, they could turn the Left’s argument on its head and ask, not whether Starmer was lying when he professed left-wing commitments, but whether we can trust Starmer not to revert to those commitments. This is potentially a really explosive line of attack; everything Starmer says now to differentiate himself from Corbyn could be undermined by those past statements. We can see here the importance of those two factors in Kinnock’s victory. On one hand, his Tribunite back story made it credible that someone could be on the Left and join with the Right in attacking the “hard Left”. On the other, the fact that divisions within the party could still be defined in terms of “left” and “right” – and not in terms of “ideological fanatic” and “pragmatic moderate”, or (grotesquely) “antisemite” and “anti-racist” – made it credible that someone could have been left-wing in the past and oppose the Left now. Neither of those escape routes is available to Starmer: if he’s publicly shown to have been a leftist in the past – nay, a Corbynite! – his story falls apart. Whether he’ll be allowed to lead Labour into a General Election, when he’ll surely face all that and more, seems highly dubious.
Will Starmer be judged a success on the “Kinnock” criterion on leaving his current post – will he have succeeded in both moving the party substantially to the Right and in re-energising it, making members believe the next election is winnable? (I’m not saying anything about the actual outcome of the next election; polling data suggests strongly that it was public reaction to Black Wednesday in 1992 that won it for Labour in 1997, and a conjuncture like that isn’t to be counted on – particularly seeing that economic incompetence no longer seems to be a problem for Tory governments.) Even on this restricted criterion, I’m not confident. Kinnock’s victory hadn’t been gained entirely by fair means – and the defeat of the miners certainlywasn’t – but the Right didn’t press home its advantage; the Left was sidelined and irrelevant within Labour, but largely retained its political legitimacy. A nominally left-wing leadership, drawing on the Right of the party as well as the centre-left, could afford to ignore them: the leadership was where the action was, after all.
None of this is true under Starmer. The Left remains a substantial presence within the party but is entirely deprived of political legitimacy; indeed, so incomplete was Corbyn’s victory, this was very largely the case even before Starmer came to power. (The well of political discourse was well and truly poisoned between 2015 and 2019.) Starmer’s leadership has taken steps to reduce the representation of the Left and deter left-wingers from staying in the party, but all this does is repress the problem, storing up trouble (or, depending on your vantage point, opportunities) for the future. (I mean, we’re still here. Not quite so many of us, and we’re not exactly happy, but we’re here.) On the other hand, “reformed Left” discourse and political renewal, even of the bland and half-hearted kind embodied by Kinnock’s “Meet the Challenge, Make the Change” policy review, is nowhere to be seen. But then, it’s hard to renew politically without drawing on different political positions – and it’s hard to do that if you’re committed to denying that there are any different political positions.
The blandness and vacuity of Starmer’s leadership – and Labour’s seeming inability to stretch its poll lead beyond 4-5%, even against the worst Tory government anyone has ever known – are telling signs of the sheer exhaustion of the Labour Right. (We were defeated, and we’re still knackered – but they won, and they’ve got nothing.) We can be pretty sure that Starmer is never going to be PM, but we can also be confident that he isn’t going to “do a Kinnock”, redefining the Left in his own image and leading Labour to a new home on the sunlit uplands of vaguely leftish neo-liberalism. This is partly because neither he nor the people around him have even that much to offer in terms of ideas – and partly because neither he nor the people around him are willing to acknowledge the existence of the Left, let alone redefine or claim to lead it.
A second Kinnock? Starmer will be lucky not to go down in history as a second Jo Swinson.
Earlier this year I was delighted to be asked to contribute a post to Verfassungsblog. The post is here; you can also read a draft below.
Counter-Terrorism, the Rule of Law and the ‘Counter-Law’ Critique
“Counter-law”, as theorised by Richard Ericson, involves “using law against law”: the use of legal resources “to erode or eliminate traditional principles, standards, and procedures of criminal law” and facilitate pre-emptive policing interventions in areas such as counter‑terrorism. This, Ericson argues, threatens the rule of law, defined as the principle that “[p]olice and citizens alike should know what is and is not legally authorized … to ensure a predictable environment in which to make rational choices about rule‑governed behavior”.
Should the image of “law against law” be discounted as a polemical gesture to add weight to a liberal critique – or can it be grounded in a defensible theoretical model of the Rule of Law?
Rule of Law: Minimal, Maximal or Neither?
Ericson’s definition of the Rule of Law (hereafter RoL) echoes Hayek’s formulation: “government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand”. The content of those rules is entirely undefined: a state under the RoL may impose any combination of duties and freedoms on its citizens, or on different groups of its citizens. All that is required is that everything the state does is first enacted into law.
Spelt out, this minimal definition of the RoL does not seem particularly desirable. It is highly permissive, but at the same time highly restrictive—so much so as to make deviations and trade‑offs inevitable. The question would not be whether government conduct falls short of the RoL but how often, in what ways and with what costs and benefits.
Other definitions of the RoL go considerably further than Hayek’s. Bingham’s widely-cited definition of the RoL includes provision for the protection of fundamental human rights and state compliance with international law, as well as stipulating that laws should be intelligible, apply equally to all and bind the government as well as its citizens. This has been criticised as excessively wide-ranging; Raz criticises Bingham’s definition as “an assembly of diverse principles, with diverse rationales behind them”, arguing that “the law, to be just or legitimate, or fundamentally good, should conform to more than one moral principle or doctrine”.
Raz for his part offered two alternative extended definitions of the RoL. His 1979 definition combines a formal definition in terms of the properties of laws themselves (which should be clear, stable, publicised, prospective and general) with a set of principles of procedural justice. In 2019 Raz again cited the necessary formal properties of laws, then added a set of provisions relating to the reasonableness of government decisions. Ironically, both of Raz’s own definitions are vulnerable to a critique similar to his own. Each of the two definitions is, arguably, not a singular doctrine but a pair of principles, with the first group of stipulations defining good laws in formal terms and the second defining the proper administration of justice and good governance respectively.
The multi-dimensionality which Raz decries in Bingham’s definition of the RoL—and which, to a lesser extent, can also be identified in Raz’s own definitions—makes compliance to the RoL difficult to achieve: the more internal complexity the concept is understood as having, the more likely it is that government action will depart from one or other aspect of it. Once again, the RoL is defined in such a way as to make trade-offs inevitable, reducing the force of any critique which would make departure from the RoL an evil in itself.
In short, the RoL represents either a procedural restriction on government, or a set of principles whose partial or total realisation is conducive to greater government legitimacy. In both cases departures from the RoL are easy to justify on other grounds (e.g. for reasons of public safety), meaning that the RoL cannot be invoked as a stand-alone ground for critique.
A Third Alternative: The Formal Rule of Law
It may be possible to rescue the RoL as a ground for critique by using a purely formal definition, akin, though not identical, to the first half of Raz’s two pairs of principles. The definition proposed here draws (like Raz’s definitions) on Lon Fuller’s eight “principles of legality”. Fuller argues that laws should be general, be publicised and be prospective in effect; should not be unintelligible, mutually contradictory, impossible to obey or so changeable as to be impossible to identify; and should exhibit “congruence between the rules as announced and their actual administration”, to be secured primarily through excellence in legal drafting, interpretation and administration.
I have argued that Fuller’s eight principles can be summed up as the principles that laws should be universal, knowable and followable, and that the RoL also requires a fourth principle of justifiability. In fact, the eight principles reduce to two. Generality, publicity, intelligibility, stability over time and congruence of official action are factors of knowability: only if all these requirements are met is it reliably possible for any individual, in any situation, to ascertain what laws effectively apply to them. Knowability thus entails comprehensiveness: there can be in principle no social situation, and no group of people, not covered by any law.
Secondly, the requirements of prospectivity, non-contradiction, and possible obedience are factors of followability. Followability entails freedom of choice to follow a law (or not to do so): if the requirement of followability is to be met, an individual’s social existence may not be structured to the point where no margin of choice remains, nor may obedience to law generally be secured oppressively, through actual or threatened coercion.
Justifiability is not a separate principle but an implication of the first two. If following the law’s commands is a free choice (followability) based on knowledge and comprehension of the law (knowability), it must be possible to explain the applicability of a law to a given person in a given situation, and for the explanation to be rationally challenged. If law-compliant behaviour is not to be secured by force, it must also be the case that a rational challenge will, in some cases, succeed, and the law be amended accordingly.
Like Raz’s models, this formal model of the RoL does not encompass every standard to which the law in a just society would conform. However, it does not go as far as Raz’s argument that the RoL “has no bearing on the existence of spheres of activity free from governmental interference “, to the point that “[t]he law may … institute slavery without violating the rule of law”. These assertions run counter to the requirement of followability: a freely followable law must guarantee some “spheres of activity free from governmental interference”, while a law to enslave rational and previously free citizens is one that could only be secured by oppressive force.
The formal model does, however, omit most of Bingham’s desiderata, including the fundamental liberal requirement of equality before the law: while it must be possible for each individual in a society under the RoL to ascertain and choose to follow the laws applicable to them, there is no requirement that the same laws apply to all. The formal RoL is thus compatible with a high degree of social stratification—and, as such, with “very great iniquity”, at least if that word is used in the archaic sense of “want or violation of equity”. It grounds only a weak universalism: discriminatory treatment of different groups is compatible with the RoL thus defined, for as long as those groups accept their treatment as just.
However, the formal RoL is arguably better suited than either the minimal or maximal models to be used as grounds for critique. Whatever its other defects, any society operating under the RoL must have laws that can be known and can be followed (and can be justified in response to challenge); defects from any of these properties are identifiable as shortfalls from the RoL.
Counter-Law and Counter-Terrorism: Preventive Offences
Contemporary counter‑terrorist legislation has created numerous offences which violate the requirements of knowability and followability. Examples include the groups of offences classified as inchoate (offences of attempt or encouragement), preparatory (otherwise lawful conduct in preparation for the commission of an offence) and situational (offences defined in terms of a state of affairs).
Inchoate counter‑terrorism offences can involve long and speculative causal chains: it is an offence under the Terrorism Act 2006 to state that a terrorist act is worthy of emulation, if the person making the statement intends, or is reckless as to the possibility, that hearers should be encouraged to commit or instigate terrorist acts. This offence has since been joined, under the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, by the offence of expressing an opinion or belief indicating support for a proscribed organisation, recklessly as to the possibility of others being encouraged to share this support. To commit either of these offences does not require that anyone is in fact encouraged in these ways, let alone that any terrorist act takes place.
The key preparatory offence under counter-terrorism legislation is the catch-all offence of ‘preparation of terrorist acts’ under the Terrorism Act 2006, covering “any conduct in preparation for giving effect to [the] intention” to commit a terrorist act. Given that the goal of counter-terrorist legislation is preventive rather than reactive, the preparation offence makes it possible to criminalise actions which were harmless and otherwise lawful, on the grounds that the offender possessed an intention which these acts would—if they had not been interrupted—have realised in the commission of acts of terrorism.
Situational counter-terrorism offences, lastly, are offences where a guilty act is inferred from a state of affairs, elevating what might more usually constitute circumstantial evidence to an offence in its own right; an example is the offence of possessing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism (Terrorism Act 2000). This offence has been expanded by the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 to include having viewed any such information over the Internet.
Given the crucial importance of the offender’s – unrealised – intention in making out the elements of offences, offences like these are neither knowable nor followable. A law prohibiting the commission of any act which might subsequently be presented as having been preparatory to what might have been a future act of political violence is not a law whose scope can reliably be known. Similarly, a law prohibiting any statement which could be presented as tending to encourage support for one of a designated list of groups (even if no such encouragement had taken place) is not a law that can freely be followed: it enjoins either silence or the affirmative act of a disclaimer.
Instead of the classical requirements of ‘guilty act’ and ‘guilty mind’, these offences share two unusual and complementary characteristics. The acts brought to trial are not themselves harmful and could potentially be proved against a wide range of people, many or most of whom would have carried them out without criminal intent. When charges such as these are brought, the prosecution attests not only to the factual element of these offences but to the correct interpretation of the facts. These are ‘ouster’ offences: the criminal court is ‘ousted’ from its role of determining guilt by the public prosecutor, being presented with offences defined in such a way that only one verdict is possible.
This degree of latitude is only available to the prosecution because—secondly—these are terrorist offences, subject to their own body of legislation. What this means, however, is that not merely intent or recklessness but a specific guilty mental state has been assumed: the defendant is suspected of intending to carry out, or intending to threaten to carry out—or welcoming the possibility of others carrying out or threatening to carry out—one of the broadly defined disruptive acts listed in the Terrorism Act s2, for the broadly-defined purposes listed in s1. The factual elements of the various offences look quite different if this assumption is not made: if the prosecutor is persuaded that the suspect is a harmless fantasist whose professions of innocence can be trusted, no terrorist intent can be inferred and no terrorist charges brought.
The Rule of Law: How to Use
Counter-terror legislation has created a catalogue of offences offering enormous scope for prosecutorial discretion, allowing for individuals to be convicted on the evidence of having committed innocuous acts. Moreover, in an extraordinary irony, suspicious acts and individuals qualify to be considered as ‘terrorist’ on the basis of an act of more or less speculative labelling, which is itself an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.
The Rule of Law, I have suggested, requires that the law be a reliable and non-oppressive guide to how citizens should act: as such, the laws governing every citizen must be rationally knowable and voluntarily followable (and, by extension, open to rational challenge and justification). These tendencies in counter-terrorist legislation clearly run counter to the RoL thus understood. Every move away from knowable and followable laws is a move away from the RoL—and towards a landscape in which police discretion decides not only who will be put on trial but who will subsequently be found guilty. Conversely, every move in this direction can be resisted by reference to the RoL, if this is understood as neither a technical desideratum nor a broad set of liberal ideals, but as the simple requirement that citizens should be able to know, understand and choose to follow the laws that apply to them.
Actually filtering that chart into "2017 losses trying to regain" versus "Ye Olde Laboure Heartelandes" would be useful (as would a split of incumbent Labour MPs between "absolute danger expelled from Labour party" and "absolute danger not yet expelled from Labour party")
The chart referred to is a list of the top 60 Tory targets in the 2019 election, ordered by the size of swing required (which effectively means by the size of the incumbent party’s majority over the Tories, but the figures look smaller). 24 are Labour seats, in England, with majorities of less than 5%; in the event the Tories took 19 of them (step forward Battersea, Bedford, Canterbury, Portsmouth South and Warwick & Leamington – good work, lads).
Here are all the gains the Tories made from Labour in England – well, almost all; the map doesn’t extend far enough south to show Ipswich, Stroud and Kensington, so there are 45 seats here instead of 48.
Following Dan’s suggestion, the colour coding on this map based on how many successive elections each constituency had had as a Labour seat when it was taken by the Tories. Pale blue are 2017 Losses, seats that Labour took in 2017, or in two cases in 2015. (Labour made quite a lot of gains in 2017, didn’t they? Wonder if anyone’s drawn any lessons from that.) The deep blue are Ye Olde Laboure Heartelandes, seats that had been Labour since at least 1983; most of them go back to February 1974 (the first general election under the current franchise). Medium blues are Labour going back to 1997 (or in one case 2001); lastly, greys are seats whose Labour election count stood at zero, as they had gone into the 2019 election with an MP who had already left Labour – and who was, in all these cases, actively campaigning against their old party. (I’m referring to John Woodcock, John Mann, Ian Austin, Ivan Lewis and Angela Smith. Any resemblance between this list and a list of “absolute dangers expelled from the Labour Party” is for the reader.) I don’t usually set much store by the Ned Lagg Effect – people tend to vote for a party, not an individual, as individuals ranging from Jim Sillars to Ivan Lewis have discovered to their cost. But 2019 wasn’t a normal election; in a campaign one of whose dominant messages was Are You Going To Hand Britain Over To Terrorist Communist Traitors?, the discovery that your own (formerly) Labour MP was actually endorsing the whole Communist-terrorist thing must have shifted a few votes in those constituencies.
First impression: there’s a lot of pale blue. There’s also a fair bit of deep blue, but it’s scattered all over the map and consists very largely of spread-out, semi-rural constituencies. But we can do better than that. Here’s a map from the previous Red Wall post – now revised and updated, incidentally, and featuring the definitive description of the Red Wall courtesy of its original inventor (tl; dr interesting, but I’m still not impressed). This map has 51 constituencies on it: the (only) 50 Labour constituencies where the Labour vote share went down in 2017 relative to 2015, and Scunthorpe (I’ll explain why Scunthorpe in a minute).
Edit 13/2 Thanks to the reader who pointed out that I’d misidentified Scunthorpe as Hartlepool. No idea how I did that – it’s not even on the coast! Corrected.
The colour-coding here is the version used in the previous post: the deep blues are long-term Labour seats where the 2019 Tory majority was 5% or more and the Labour vote had fallen by 10% or more relative to 2017 and the Labour vote was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001; the mid-blues are other long-term Labour seats that went to the Tories in 2019, while the reds are seats that Labour held in 2019. (Scunthorpe, in purple, is a ‘deep blue’ seat that doesn’t strictly qualify to be on this map, as Labour’s vote share rose between 2015 and 2017 – by half of one percent.)
Now, let’s tidy up and simplify a bit. I said at the top of the post that there were 24 seats where Labour’s margin over the Tories was 5% or less, and that the Tories took 19 of those. Let’s say for the sake of argument that any party having a good election is likely to have successes at that kind of level: if what we want to explain is why the Tories got such a big majority, or why Labour’s seat total fell so low, the sub-2.5% swing seats aren’t the place to look. So we’ll eliminate those 19 seats from the first map, to give 29 gains instead of 48, of which the map shows 29 instead of 45 (the three southern seats omitted from the map are among the 19).
As for the “long-term Labour, vote share down in 2017” map, let’s take out the Labour holds – we’re not interested in those right now – and, again, take out the 19 sub-5%-majority seats. We’re left with a fairly sparse map showing only 20 seats.
And here are those two maps.
Spot the similarity.
As I said, there are 20 seats on the right-hand map and 29 on the left; the set of Tory gains from Labour in England overturning a majority greater than 5% isn’t identical with the set of long-term Labour seats where Labour’s vote share fell in 2017. But it’s close. The left-hand map (Tory gains against a >5% majority) includes all 20 of the seats in the right-hand map (long-term holds, relative vote share down in 2017); of the remaining nine, five are pale blue (only taken by Labour in 2017), three are mid-blue (1997 gains) and the ninth is grey (step forward Ivan Lewis).
My conclusion here is pretty much the same as the conclusion to the previous, big post (have you read the big post, by the way? recently? it’s revised and updated, you know). In five words, Red Wall: real but small.
The phenomenon people refer to as the Red Wall was the unexpected, large-scale loss of Labour votes to the Tories, apparently caused by long-term Labour voters deciding that they’d liked Labour in the old days but they couldn’t be doing with all this here political correctness, and taking place in the North the North-East and North-West the North-East, parts of the North-West and parts of Yorkshire the North-East, parts of the North-West and parts of Yorkshire, the East Midlands and some places around Birmingham the North-East, some of the more rural parts of the North-West and Yorkshire, the East Midlands, some places around Birmingham although not Birmingham itself, and also Stoke a whole bunch of places which really don’t have much in common other than being south of the border and north of Luton. I’m caricaturing, but I do actually think this is a real phenomenon: look at those two maps. But it’s only one phenomenon, and it wasn’t what won the 2019 election for the Tories – arguably it was only because the Tories were already winning the 2019 election that the Red Wall effect really kicked in.
If we’re interested in the Red Wall phenomenon, we’re interested in something that (a) genuinely happened and (b) happened up and down the country, but (c) only happened in a small number of places. Labour needs to make a lot of gains next time round, but whether it needs to make precisely those gains is more debatable – and whether the kind of Labour campaign that would win back Ashfield and Great Grimsby would win the country is very dubious indeed. Apart from anything else, look at the sub-5%-majority places that Labour did hold in 2019 – Portsmouth South, Bedford, Canterbury; look what happened to Labour’s vote share in 2017 in the south-east (scroll down, and brace yourself). If you were thinking tactically for Labour, which area would you concentrate on – the one where Labour lost vote share despite intensive campaigning and national media attention, or the one where Labour gained vote share with hardly anyone even noticing?
So if we are interested in the Red Wall phenomenon, at this stage we’re interested in it partly for purely historical reasons (something unusual did happen in those seats), and partly on a secondary tactical level. Nobody should be asking “how might learning from the Red Wall be useful for Labour?” – but “what errors might the belief that the Red Wall is useful for Labour lead to?” is an interesting and potentially useful question, as is “what biases and presuppositions are likely to have led people to believe Labour should learn from the Red Wall?”. And I think the answer is going to come from a closer look at those 50 seats. (Or 51 if you count Scunthorpe.)
This isn’t a question into which I’ve got any personal insight. I went out canvassing in several seats, and I couldn’t swear to you that Bury South wasn’t one of them; the name of the candidate doesn’t ring any bells, though, so I’m guessing not. So I don’t think Bury South was the place where a mock-furious resident jokingly threatened to come and batter us – or rather, as I quickly realised, a genuinely furious resident seriously threatened to come and batter us, and would have done if he hadn’t had to go back inside for his outdoor shoes. Nor was it the place where a hailstorm began, apparently centred on me personally, in the (long) two minutes between my ringing a doorbell and the door opening; or the place where someone who wasn’t even there explained patiently through his Ring device that my party leader was in fact a terrorist, in case I hadn’t realised; or the place where an Asian man and his partner told me that yes, they were definitely going to vote Labour, but told me very quietly and closed the door as quickly as they could.
Ah, the memories.
But no, I don’t remember Bury South. So this is based purely on publicly available data (viz. Wikipedia) and one or two weird tricks in Excel.
Click to embiggen, probably (WordPress has been very weird lately).
What’s going on here? These are the vote shares of the main parties (red, blue, orange), plus UKIP (purple), independent Right-wing parties and individuals (navy) and the Greens and independent Left-wingers (green). Rather than ordering them from Right to Left, I’ve grouped the two major parties and all the minor parties together (ordered Right to Left in both cases). The purple block includes the Brexit Party (2019) and the Referendum Party (1997); the orange block includes the SDP (1983 and 1987). The navy block includes Ivan Lewis (2019) – unfair, perhaps, but he certainly wasn’t standing as an independent Left-winger. Percentage shares are given every time a party gets 3% of the vote or more.
Although the vote shares of all parties add up to 100% in each column (check the first couple of columns if you don’t believe me), the overall height of the column is scaled to turnout. To put it another way, the total turnout can be read off on the left-hand Y axis from the height of the composite column; the (complementary) height of the translucent grey column represents the proportion of the electorate who didn’t vote (less than 20% in 1992, more than 40% in 2001).
The other wrinkle is the red line. This, measured against the right-hand Y axis, gives you the Labour percentage majority over the Conservatives at each election: positive every year from 1997 to 2017, negative 1983-92 and 2019. (Which is another reason why it would be fatuous to call this a “Red Wall” seat; when people talk about places that have been safe Labour seats time out of mind, they’re usually going back a bit further than 1997. “Nay, lass, it’s all Labour round here – has been since Euan Blair were a lad…”)
So what do we see? First, in 1987 and 1992, we see mobilisation of non-voters, primarily to the benefit of the Tories. Labour are coming back from the 1983 low, but – in this seat at least – they’re mainly coming back by reabsorbing the SDP vote and driving the Lib Dems back down to single figures.
1997 looks different, and the two elections after that look the same only more so. Turnout is down in 1997, and it looks as if it’s Tories who are staying at home (although a few of them have gone over to the Referendum Party). There’s also been a substantial shift from the Tories directly across to Labour, who now take the seat. Turnout is through the floor in 2001 and 2005, and again the Tory vote is hitting historic lows; the Lib Dem vote is recovering, however, apparently mainly by taking votes back from Labour.
Then there are 2010 and 2015. The Tory vote is recovering, but only slowly; the real action is in the ‘minor party’ section, which – in this seat as in several others – appears to have been (a) a repository for anti-system, ‘sod the lot of them’ votes and (b) a playground for the far Right (in this case, BNP and English Democrat as well as UKIP). The Lib Dem vote collapses in 2015, as it did in most places; the beneficiaries, in ascending order, are the Greens, Labour and UKIP.
Now look at 2017. Turnout’s up a bit, but what really leaps out is the level of two-party polarisation: even with a Kipper, a Lib Dem and a right-wing independent (listed in descending vote share order), Labour and the Tories together take almost 95% of the vote. Even in the three-party days the two parties’ share never reached 91% – and it had been below 80% at the three(!) previous elections. Voter mobilisation and massive polarisation, greatly to the benefit of Ivan Lewis MP (and was he grateful?).
2019, finally, was… 2019: turnout falls; the minor-party area takes 13% of the vote instead of 5%, as separate fringes of pro- and anti-Brexit voters make their respective points; the Tory vote increases a little while the Labour vote declines quite a lot; and Ivan Lewis himself standing in person isn’t really in the race but does attract 1,366 votes, in a seat taken by the Tories with a majority of 402.
What happened in Bury South, then, was that the New Labour years drove down political participation, demoralised Tory voters in particular, and created a relatively small but significant group of voters whose main motivation was to protest against what they saw as a rotten system. The Coalition, austerity and the collapse of the Lib Dem vote hardened this group’s opposition to politics as usual. In 2017 voter mobilisation and polarisation saw most of those voters going to the Tories, but a minority of them – together with the Green and some of the surviving Lib Dem vote – went to Corbyn, seeing him (correctly) as an outsider planning to shake things up. Finally, in 2019 – just as the bad name that four years of negative campaigning had hung on Labour finally began to cut through – the party’s Brexit positioning brought it into the realm of “politics as usual”; the minor-party vote duly revived, along with the (quietly continuing) revival of the Tory vote; and Christian Wakeford took the seat for the Tories by a margin of 0.8%.
To put it another way, what happened in 2019 was a small-scale replay of what had happened in 2015 – which in turn was only possible because of what had happened in 2001 and 2005 – together with the unwinding (after much persuasion) of what had happened in 2017. Add unfavourable background conditions (the debasement of the nationaldebate, a cynically effective Tory campaign) and unpredictable local factors (Ivan Lewis MP (ret’d)) and you’ve got a Tory win.
How Labour win back similar seats I’m not sure, although one answer would lie in the mobilisation and polarisation exemplified by the impressive 2017 result. (And 2019 didn’t just happen, let’s not forget; a lot of people put a lot of work into reversing that result.) That said, 2017 nationally was also a record year for the Tory vote (highest vote share since Thatcher, more votes than Labour took in 1997); a rising tide floats all boats if you’re not careful, as the 1987 and ’92 results here demonstrate. The reverse strategy – depolarisation, demobilisation and generally driving down the vote – seems to have worked rather well in the Blair years, but I would urge anyoneplanning a repeat of that particular strategy to remember that New Labour began by exclusively driving down the Tory vote; the attack on Labour’s own vote came later, and began from a high base. Also, of course, the chart rather strongly suggests that 2001 and 2005 led (through the medium of a lot of grumpily apathetic ex-Tory voters) to 2010, 2015 and 2016, which is very much where we came in.
One other thing to stress about Bury South, finally, is that it was a close and a flukey result, as several of Labour’s 2019 losses were. None of the above would have mattered if one in six of Ivan Lewis’s voters in 2019 had stayed with Labour – or if one in 50 of Christian Wakeford’s had stayed at home.
On the bright side, Wakeford’s our comrade now, so none of it does matter! Isn’t democracy great?
The pollsters – J L Partners – hail from Downing Street, no less; James Johnson was previously a SpAd to Theresa May and Rory Stewart.
What I found particularly interesting about this was the reference to “45 Red Wall seats” – the constituencies in which the polling had been carried out, presumably. Could this be a definitive answer to the old question, what is the Red Wall?
Well, (a) it’s not that old a question, and (b) yes it could, sort of – although this is, to my knowledge, the fourth distinct version of the “Red Wall”, so it could all change again. (Update 15th February: it turns out that this was actually the sixth version; seebelow for details.)
Let’s go back a bit. (NB Some overlap with my earlier series of posts, but at least this way it’s all in one place.)
Red Wall v0: to August 2019
The Red Wall as we know it is the creation of a right-wing think-tanker, an FT writer who previously worked for the Telegraph and the Spectator and an FT dataviz specialist, with additional contributions by Downing Street advisors. And the Red Wall is something we didn’t know – at all – until relatively recently. Up to the middle of August 2019 – less than four months before the election where the Red Wall would feature so prominently – the Red Wall as a political concept didn’t exist; the only people who talked about a Red Wall on a regular basis were Wales football supporters (not shown here).
And then there was
Red Wall v1 (August 2019)
In August 2019, James Kanagasooriam of right-wing think tank Onward identified four groups of seats where the Conservative Party tended to under-perform relative to what the demographics of the area would lead one to expect. One of the four was
a huge “red wall” stretching from N Wales into Merseyside, Warrington, Wigan, Manchester, Oldham, Barnsley, Nottingham and Doncaster. When you talk about cultural barriers to voting Tory – this is where it is. This entire stretch shouldn’t be all Labour but is
This Tweet was accompanied by a map showing 46 constituencies. Removing one Lib Dem seat and a number of seats that had either changed hands multiple times or only been formed relatively recently – and where, either way, we can’t presume those “cultural barriers to voting Tory” applied – gave 39 seats. Here’s what happened to them in December 2019:
Five of the 39 went Conservative, one of them (Leigh, in paler blue) quite narrowly – and one of the remaining four was Bassetlaw (chequered), whose sitting MP had left the Labour Party and was actively campaigning against it at the time of the election. Cultural barriers one, demographics nil.
But the really odd thing about this, first version of the Red Wall, at least in retrospect, is how little traction it got: nobody really picked up on it at all.
Red Wall v2 (October 2019)
Not, that is, until the end of October, by which time the December election had already been called (and was less than six weeks away). It was then that Kanagasooriam – in the context of a report about something else entirely – revived the Red Wall; now it referred to
a belt of sixty seats in the North and Midlands which the Conservatives have never won. They include places like Wakefield, Great Grimsby and Penistone and Stockbridge. Termed elsewhere as the ‘Red Wall’ by the framework’s author James Kanagsooriam, it is made up of a mixture of constituencies which for demographic reasons have always been quite marginal but have consistently remained Labour; constituencies where the Conservatives significantly increased their vote share in 2017 but didn’t win; and a scattering of seats with five figure majorities but which could be become marginal because of voters’ strong pro-Brexit views.
This more expansively defined group was itself said to be one of three groups of seats which would be determinant of the election result, totalling 109 battleground seats – 60 ‘Red Wall’, 38 ‘Uniform National Swing’ and a cluster of eleven seats in Wales. It’s not clear which were seen as the Red Wall seats, though; while the JRF report listed all 109, it didn’t break them down into the three sub-groups. Sebastian Payne’s book Broken Heartlands does include a table supplied by Kanagasooriam and itemising the ‘Red Wall’ and ‘Uniform National Swing’ seats; however, the table only lists 43 ‘Red Wall’ seats, and several of those listed are not named in the JRF report. In search of a definitive list, I put the two lists together and took out any seat listed under ‘Uniform National Swing’ and anywhere south of the Midlands, then did a bit more tidying-up. It seemed to me that if we were going to talk about seats that the Conservatives have never won, “never” ought to mean something; strictly speaking a seat that was created in 2010 and won by the Tories in 2017 had never been won by the Tories up to that point, but it’s not the impression that word gives. So I removed any seat that had come into existence since 1983, and any seat that had been held by the Tories or Lib Dems at any time between 1983 and 2017.
At the end of all that I didn’t have a list of sixty seats, but I did have 45; and here they are. I give you the Red Wall, version 2, late October 2019. The dark blue seats (14 of them) are big Tory wins; the mid-blues (11) are narrow wins; the chequered area is Bassetlaw, whose sitting Labour MP was campaigning against the party by the time of the election; and the remaining 19 are bricks in the Red Wall that unsportingly stayed red.
It’s… not that much of a wall, really, is it? It’s an awfully long way from Birmingham Northfield to Blyth Valley – 230 miles, in fact – and neither of them has much in common with Blackpool South, Don Valley or Great Grimsby, or Workington for that matter. Apart from being (a) Labour seats up to 2017 and (b) Up North, that is.
Shortly afterwards it was decided – by Kanagasooriam, James Burn-Murdoch of the FT or both – that anything called a ‘wall’ really ought to look a bit like a continuous series of blocks leading from A to B. The FT duly publicised a third iteration of the Red Wall, which is partly a Lancashire/Yorkshire/Midlands slice out of the map above and partly… not. As you’re about to see.
Red Wall v3 (November 2019)
This is what the FT described as “a near-contiguous span of 50 Labour-held seats stretching from the Vale of Clwyd in North Wales to Great Grimsby on the East Coast”. The 43 English seats shown on the FT‘s accompanying map are above, colour-coded according to what would happen in December. Again, grey chequers indicate a seat whose former Labour MP was campaigning against the party; again, deep blue is a big Tory win (9 constituencies), the mid-blue is a narrow win (7) and the red are Labour holds (15). The remaining 12, in the pale blue, are seats that went Tory in 2019 but hadn’t consistently been Labour since 1983 – and consequently didn’t feature in previous versions of the Red Wall. The point of the Red Wall rhetoric, let’s not forget, was that these were Labour strongholds which were now tumbling due to the waning of tribal loyalties. The mid-blue seats – many of which are constituencies where the Tories squeaked a win, as parties having a good election campaign often do – are already a poor fit with this model; the pale blue seats depart from it altogether. In this iteration, “Red Wall” didn’t mean much more than “Conservative targets north of the Wash and south of Morecambe Bay”.
Red Wall v4 (December 2019)
(Updated February 2022) Up till now I’ve somehow missed this morning-after Telegraph story – variously headlined “The 24 Labour heartland seats lost to the Tories for the first time in decades” and “The 24 Labour heartland seats lost to the Tories for the first time” tout court (as we’ll see, the latter is actually more accurate). The seats (22 in England, two in Wales) are listed in a table headed “Fall of the Labour wall”, so I think this listing deserves its place in the genealogy of the Red Wall.
22 wins, right enough; but they weren’t all big wins, they weren’t all seats that had been Labour for longer than a decade or so, and some of them were won with assistance from the former MP. Also, with the exception of Stoke-on-Trent (whose politics have been decidedly troubled for some time), these constituencies look less like “Labour heartlands” than rural and semi-rural seats where Labour supporters had been in the majority for historical reasons. (Which, to be fair, was more or less what James Kanagasooriam was getting at to begin with, even if he later helped bend the concept out of shape.)
Red Wall v5 (The Definitive Red Wall)(September 2021)
(Updated February 2022) It’s been brought to my attention that James Kanagasooriam has not only identified the seats making up the Red Wall but explained how they were selected, in an article in Political Insight co-written with Elizabeth Simon and modestly entitled “Red Wall: The Definitive Description”. All right! Let’s get some political science on this thing!
The Red Wall, in this telling, began with a demographic model predicting the level of the Conservative vote in a given constituency – factors such as deprivation (negatively correlated), higher education (also negatively correlated but less strongly) and the proportion of residents in managerial positions (positive correlation). Constituencies not held by the Tories in 2017 were assessed according to whether they had an anomalously low score on this model, as well as three other factors: a Conservative vote share over 25% in 2017, a swing of over 5% to the Conservatives between 2010[sic] and 2017, and a greater than 55% Leave vote.
70 of the 269 eligible seats hit all four criteria. This group was then winnowed down by excluding seats outside England (and perhaps making other unspecified “geographic exclusions”), as well as excluding seats “deemed too unlikely to switch allegiance”; this gave 28 seats. From the pool of constituencies meeting only three of four factors, another 11 were “designated part of the Red Wall through qualitative selection” (Kanagasooriam doesn’t mention how many were in this pool); finally, “a further three seats, which met two or less of the criteria, were also included based on geographical proximity to other Red Wall seats”.
The 42 included the Speaker’s seat of Chorley; excluding Chorley gives 41 seats, as follows.
That’s 30 out of 41, although only 13 of the 30 are big (dark blue) wins – and again, the East Midlands excepted you’d be looking at that map a long time before you thought you were looking at a ‘wall’ of any kind.
In the discussion section of the paper, Kanagasooriam suggests that his results would have been even better if he’d trusted the data more: none of the three seats that were added on “geographical” grounds (despite only ticking one or two boxes) went to the Tories in 2017, while two of those that hit all four marks but were excluded as “unlikely to switch allegiance” – Leigh and Redcar – did. It’s nice to see a researcher own up to fudging the data, but Kanagasooriam’s suggestion that an unfudged version would have been more accurate isn’t borne out by the data he presents.
The problem is that, as soon as any judgment calls were made on inclusion or exclusion, the whole sample was fudged (to put it euphemistically). What we really need to know is the content (and hence the hit-rate) of all the subsamples – the 28 constituencies that were judged to be ‘true’ Red Wall seats; the 42 that weren’t despite hitting all four marks; the 11 that qualified on three criteria and were added to the sample; the unknown number that qualified on three criteria and weren’t added to the sample; and, of course, the three erroneous ‘geographical’ choices. If all the judgment calls had been omitted, Leigh and Redcar would certainly have been on the list, but none of the 11 added at the third stage would have been. In any case, the list would have numbered 70 constituencies – which, given that the Tories only made 48 gains from Labour in the whole of England, would be bound to bring down the Red Wall’s hit rate and hence its predictive accuracy.
Red Wall v6 (the pollsters’ Red Wall) (January 2022 and doubtless earlier)
So far the December election result has seen the Tories win 5 out of 39 Red Wall seats, 26 out of 45, 28 out of 43, 22 out of, er, 22, and 30 out of 41. The changing meaning of the concept is clearly closing in on the actual result – although the big, eye-popping, “dude where’s my core vote?” victories account for 3 of the 39, 14 of the 45, 8 of the 43, 12 of the 22 and 13 of the 41. (Needless to say, there have been varying degrees of overlap between the 39, the 45, the 43 and the 41.)
You may well be wondering how it can be that opinion polling shows the Tories potentially losing all but three of their 45 Red Wall seats. The three they’re projected to hang on to are familiar enough – Dudley North, Bassetlaw and Great Grimsby, or one former deep blue seat and two chequered in defectors’ grey (interesting in itself) – but where had J L Partners found another 42 Conservative gains? Particularly since, as just noted, the Tories only made 48 gains from Labour in the whole of England (and one loss)…
Hold on to that thought. Here’s the pollsters’ Red Wall.
The list of 45 seats published by the pollsters includes one in Wales (Delyn) which I’m ignoring. The other 44 are shown here, with the usual colour coding. And, wouldn’t you know it, the Tories won all 44! Anyone wondering if there was perhaps a touch of the Texas Sharpshooter about one of the earlier versions can relax – that’s all this is. Red Wall = Tory gain, Tory gain = Red Wall, with a handful of exceptions – in fact the only Tory gains in England not forming part of the Red Wall are Kensington, Stroud, Ipswich and Peterborough, which presumably weren’t considered “Northern” enough. (Scare quotes used because Peterborough is actually on this map – by latitude it’s slightly North of Birmingham.)
The phrase “Red Wall” now means nothing more than “one of the seats the Tories won from Labour in 2019” – which is to say, it means nothing.
Postscript: Is there a real Red Wall?
No. No, there isn’t. Stop it now. Put the psephological buzz-phrase down.
What there is – and what is quite interesting – is a relatively small group of seats which had genuinely been Labour for a long time, and which genuinely went Tory in a big way in 2019. The ‘deep blue’ seats in all the above maps are defined as long-term Labour seats where the 2019 Tory majority was 5% or more and the Labour vote had fallen by 10% or more relative to 2017 and the Labour vote was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001. These three criteria do seem to identify a real phenomenon, setting these seats apart from the ‘mid-blue’ seats (long-term Labour seats won by the Tories in 2019 but where one or more of those factors don’t apply). The highest Labour vote in 2019 in a ‘deep blue’ seat was 39.8%; the lowest Labour vote in a ‘mid-blue’ seat was 39.3%.
On investigating the deep-blue seats more closely I found that almost all of them showed a similar pattern over the previous three elections, with Labour’s margin over the Tories going down in both 2010 and – most unusually – 2017. There are, in point of fact, only 50 Labour constituencies (of 232) where Labour’s margin fell in 2017 – anyone who looked at that election with a degree of objectivity would have to say that 2017 was a good result in lots of ways (as long as they can silence the nagging voice saying yeah but we didn’t win did we…).
Here are those 50 seats.
Key: as before, except that seats with defectors aren’t singled out any more. There’s also one seat – Scunthorpe – in deep purple; this was a ‘deep blue’ where Labour’s margin over the Tories didn’t go down between 2015 and 2017 (it went up by 0.05%).
What does this tell us, though? I think it tells us that, while substantial numbers of people in the East Midlands and the North East (and a couple of other areas) didn’t really feel the love for Corbyn, this only created the opportunity for a major (local) political upset when other factors were present. In a previous post I suggested that the distinctive characteristics of the ‘deep blue’ constituencies were the presence of an sizeable anti-system, “none of the above” protest vote, together with the legitimation of the far Right as a vehicle for protest votes. Both of these localised trends – established in those seats since the New Labour years – made it possible for substantial numbers of voters to switch from the Lib Dems to UKIP in 2015, and for the Conservatives to attract a majority of those voters in 2017. This led to a reduced Labour majority in those seats – and a lot of publicity for some of the affected MPs, who blamed the result on the new leader (although, ironically, under a more ‘establishment’ leader than Corbyn the minority of anti-system voters who returned to Labour might have been much smaller). In 2019, Labour’s Brexit positioning left it looking like the ‘establishment’ party, standing in the way of the Tories’ endorsement of the revolt of 2016; as a result it lost whatever ‘protest vote’ credibility it still had, and lost ground to both the Tories and the Brexit Party. The result, in those 17 constituencies, was a dramatic collapse in the Labour vote.
But note: in those 17 constituencies. The Tories made 47 net gains in England; if they’d made 30 in the entire country they would still have come out with a solid majority. The map immediately above tells us where in England Labour’s margin over the Tories fell – against the current – in 2017, whether or not the Tories won those seats two years later and if so, how well; the map above it tells us where in England the Tories won a Labour seat in 2019, and what kind of a win it was. There’s a lot of overlap, but there are also an awful lot of differences; and lots of the wins – enough wins to make an election victory – were narrow, chancy, unpredictable wins. (They still count, that’s the thing.)
What this whole exercise tells us is that the Red Wall is useful as a concept if you define it tightly enough, but that what it’s useful for is telling us why Labour lost some of the seats it did in 2019 and, perhaps, where similar factors might apply in future. What it definitely doesn’t tell us is “why Labour lost”; this is a small, untypical group of seats, meaning that any reorientation of the party based on the idea of “winning back the Red Wall” would be disastrous.
We can also see that, in practice, the concept of “Red Wall” has steadily converged on that of “Conservative target seat”, to the point where it’s now more or less synonymous with “Conservative gains from Labour in 2019 in England”. (It’s precisely synonymous with “Conservative gains from Labour in 2019 in England, north of 52.4 degrees N, with the exception of Peterborough”, but that’s not quite as snappy.)
Once more with feeling: there Is No Red Wall. If you mean “seats the Conservatives gained from Labour”, say “seats the Conservatives gained from Labour”. If you mean “longstanding Labour seats in the North and the Midlands that the Conservatives gained from Labour by unexpectedly large margins”, say that – but be aware that:
The North is a very big place; it’s 140 miles from Manchester to Newcastle, 115 to Grimsby, 90 to Birmingham. What do you suppose all those places have in common? (Similar distances from London would get you to Southampton, Hereford and, well, Birmingham.)
Our electoral system paints a constituency in the colour of the largest single sub-group of voters, no more and no less than that. If a 38%/42% split between Conservative and Labour at one election turns into 42%/38% at the next, the constituency has certainly gone to the Tories, but the Labour voters haven’t – or rather, only some of them have, and they’re not necessarily the most representative ones.
The story of those longstanding… gained… unexpectedly large seats is an interesting one, but it doesn’t really tell us about anywhere else (e.g. The North, or even The East Midlands), or about anything else (e.g. the overall election result).
Those places have their own political history, which you can dip a toe in by looking at previous election results. You may be surprised by what you see; you may not like what you see. (“Cultural conservatism” doesn’t just mean you aren’t a fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race.)
Not everyone who offers Labour bad news and hard truths is doing so because they want Labour to win. The party that doesn’t have any bad news to deal with – the party whose common sense is the other party’s hard truths – starts at an advantage.
Generalising about Labour strategy on the basis of an imaginary version of the ‘Red Wall’, what it stands for and why it supposedly fell into the arms of the Tories (suit and tie, support our boys and God save the Queen) would be idiotic: basing strategy on fantasy can’t possibly work.
Generalising about Labour strategy on the basis of an accurate understanding of the ‘deep blue’ seats, what voters there believe in and why they actually switched to the Tories would be cynical and unprincipled. And – again – it couldn’t possibly work, outside those seats; it wouldn’t even be a recipe for winning back the other 31 losses or holding Labour’s existing seats, let alone making the additional gains the party needs.
What Labour needs above all is to set its own direction, without looking over its collective shoulder at how policy X might play with demographic Y. A good start would be to stop listening to people offering to feed this habit – and to remember that those people aren’t always friends of the party.
Now that Labour seem to be heading back down the New Labour route, there’s been a bit of debate about just how bad the Blair years were. Iraq we know about, of course, and PFI, but apart from that – it was a Labour government, after all, wasn’t it? They did fund public services properly – after 2001, at least; and there’s the Human Rights Act to think of, and the minimum wage, not to mention Sure Start… Lots of stuff in their favour, surely. Lots of reasons to vote Labour, even if Labour meant New ditto – a choice that may be confronting us again soon.
Looking for something else just now, I stumbled on a letter I sent to Jack Straw – in his role as Shadow Home Secretary – in March 1996. I knew I hadn’t voted Labour in May 1997 – which put me in quite a lonely place, even on the Left – but I’d forgotten that I’d made up my mind about the blighters some time before then. In March 1996, at any rate, I knew what I thought.
Before I quote the letter, here‘s the news story that sparked it off.
Labour wants to change the law which forbids research into juries, to allow academics to find out whether working-class or unemployed jurors are more likely to acquit defendants than middle-class ones. Jack Straw, Labour’s home affairs spokesman, says that at the moment the evidence is little more than anecdotal but, he says, “There should be research on who refuses jury service and on the composition of juries.”
Even if research produced no correlation between class and acquittal rates, he still says everybody should sit on juries as part of the obligations as good citizens. Mr Straw believes that too many of the middle classes evade jury service.
Stephen Ward, the Independent. Ward adds:
An earlier smaller study in Birmingham, before research was banned in 1981, showed no correlation between sex, age or class and the number of guilty verdicts, and found manual workers were under-represented on juries.
This, as you can imagine, struck me, and I wrote to Straw asking whether he actually meant what he appeared to be saying. (The new improved WordPress editor makes it almost impossible to write a quoted block of multiple paragraphs and won’t allow a quoted block containing bullet points at all, so you’ll just have to imagine the formatting of the following.) (Update: there’s still a back door to the “Classic Editor” – go in via yourblognamehere/wp-admin/edit.php.)
Take it away, 1996 me:
Dear Jack Straw,
For the last fifteen years I have always voted Labour, at council, General and European elections. I think it’s only fair to mention that at present I can see no prospect of being able to vote for the party again, and that your actions and pronouncements as Shadow Home Secretary have a lot to do with this decision.
However, I’m writing about a more specific point, on which I would genuinely appreciate some clarification. You have been reported as saying that the propensity of wealthier individuals to opt out of jury service, results in juries which are disproportionately working class (my terminology) and hence less likely to believe police evidence, which is a bad thing and likely to result in perverse verdicts (your deductions).
Assuming you were reported correctly and believe what you were saying, I wonder:
do you believe that Britain’s police forces operate to such high standards of probity and accuracy that credulity can safely be preferred to scepticism?
do you believe that working class people suffer from some sort of irrational bias against the police, to which their social superiors are immune?
how does this argument against the working class fit in with New Labour’s aspiration to represent the whole nation equally? (I assume that you regard the party’s association with the working class in particular as so much historical baggage).
One final query. Now that Labour stands for an ideology as socially reactionary as it’s economically timid, what do you recommend to those of us who support common ownership and legal raves, who believe in raising income tax and decriminalising soft drugs? We’re clearly not welcome in the Labour Party any more. Any chance of a referendum on PR?
Yes, now it can be told – 25 years ago I was in favour of a new Left party, just as soon as one became electorally viable. (If I’d lived in Scotland I might have ended up wasting an awful lot of time.) As far as Labour went, though, there was hardly anything there to vote for, let alone campaign for – or perhaps it’d be fairer to say that there was a lot there to vote against, and even to campaign against.
I think the point I’m making is that there’s no shame in being opposed to New Labour, Sure Start or no Sure Start. (Did you know SS was a Home Office project, by the way? Tough on crime…) Let’s be blunt: we’re not talking about “holding out for your dream manifesto” or “refusing to settle for 70%” – and we’re not talking about ancient history either. Within the last 20 years, the Labour Party has advocated (and implemented) policies in a range of areas that no one on the Left could support or even tolerate.
New Labour was a huge lurch to the Right relative to the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, let alone the 1945 government. We’re not back there yet, but it’s pretty clear that that’s the direction of travel. As the neo-New Labour settlement emerges from the triangulating murk, we need to see it for what it is and be prepared to act accordingly (…a Labour Party member writes. I didn’t say we need to act immediately.)
Earlier this year our Labour Party branch held its AGM (online). The main business of the evening was electing officers, or rather re-electing officers: of nine elected positions, seven office-holders were re-elected and an eighth position was taken by someone who had held other positions in previous years (eight other positions, to be precise, in the previous five years). Even the sixteen positions of delegate to the constituency party were mostly taken either by officers or by people who had served as delegate multiple times before.
The secretary, in particular, was elected to the post for the fifth successive time. Back in 2017, when the Left took a run at getting some positions in this branch, we stood a candidate for secretary, but they didn’t really have a chance: incumbents have many advantages over any challenger, and an incumbent secretary has more than most. Everyone who goes to so much as one party meeting knows the secretary; everyone knows he’s efficient and even-tempered, keeps things running and doesn’t wind anyone up. Which is all true. He’s also a member of a clique dedicated to keeping things much as they are, with offices shared between a rotating cast of familiar faces and with the Left kept firmly at arm’s length – but it’s hard to get the vote out on that basis, not least because any Left candidate would need to be able to show that they had the qualities to be a competent secretary. Which I’m sure lots of people do, but it’s difficult for any of them to demonstrate it to members of this branch without first getting elected to something.
A few weeks ago the branch was called on to re-select – or de-select – one of our three councillors. (The ward used to be competitive between Labour and the Lib Dems, but then came the Coalition, which had the usual effect on the Lib Dem vote; our councillors have all been Labour since 2011.) It was the turn of a long-serving, well-liked and not particularly right-wing councillor, and nobody was very surprised when reselection was a formality. What did come as a surprise was the announcement soon afterwards that one of the other two councillors was standing down for personal reasons; a by-election would be called, and we needed to elect a candidate to stand in it. Word was that the favoured candidate was our secretary.
A shortlisting meeting was duly announced to the membership, with a lead time of a few minutes over 96 hours; the same email also announced a selection meeting, to take place four days after that. Seven days, not four, is the minimum interval laid down in party rules; however, the rules also stipulate that the Manchester party hierarchy – like the NEC nationally – can waive requirements like this if it sees fit. I was surprised to see that a list of six candidates emerged from the shortlisting meeting – our secretary, a Left candidate and four others – but less surprised to hear, on the night of the selection meeting, that three of them had withdrawn.
In the mean time candidates had been given an opportunity to send out emails to all members – and, two days after the shortlisting meeting, our secretary and the Left candidate both did so. The Left candidate set out an impressive record of campaigning and activism, both in the party and in the local community. Our secretary for his part offered us a double-sided full-colour flyer, complete with pictures of himself out and about in the area, testimonials from colleagues within the party (“he will be a fresh face on the council and a brilliant councillor”) and five pledges to his (future) electorate – although on closer inspection these consisted largely of itemising the people he intended to “work with” (“our current councillors”, “local traders, businesses and the local Traders Association”, “officers at Manchester City Council”, etc). We also learned that he had been a caseworker for the local MP for the last six years. (A friend asked the Manchester party whether other candidates would have the chance to send out something like this, and was essentially told that there was nothing stopping them – with the strong implication that their candidate and ours started out on a completely even footing, and that neither had any materials or facilities available to them other than what they could rustle up in two days and pay for personally.)
At the selection meeting, two days later, quite a long time was spent on checking the credentials of everyone involved, by the novel method of having one person compile a handwritten list of names (in the order they logged in) and then call them out for checking by two other people who had the membership list, while a third person kept an eye on the chat and called out anything that cropped up there. (Strange that more people don’t attend these meetings, really.) When all that had been sorted out, the three remaining candidates each gave a brief address and answered a selection of questions. Questions on social care and on a local green space campaign gave both the Left candidate and the third candidate the chance to demonstrate principled commitment and engage with the detail of what’s possible locally, identifying specific actions which the council could take. A question on the EHRC report seemed less directly relevant – indeed, one Jewish party member objected to having their identity put up for debate at a council candidate selection meeting – and could have been designed to put a left-winger on the spot. Our Left candidate trod a careful line, neither minimising the problem of antisemitism in the party and society nor acquiescing in the conflation of anti-semitism with anti-Zionism. The third candidate’s answer seemed designed mostly to avoid the issue entirely, although they did begin with the curious assertion that the pandemic had made racism and antisemitism worse. (Whereas in fact antisemitism stopped being a problem in April 2020, of course.)
As for our secretary, his answers to the substantive local questions could not have been blander or more vague; his stress throughout was on damping down expectations of how much could realistically be achieved, and the need to “work with” people – and charities, and businesses – in order to deliver even that. He only really displayed any passion on the question relating to the EHRC report: those were dark times for Labour… how far an anti-racist party had fallen… he was proud to have put his name to a motion to affiliate to the Jewish Labour Movement… it was imperative for us to build bridges with the Jewish community… anyone who didn’t agree with that objective, frankly, he didn’t think they belonged in the party. We shall see if anything comes of that; all I’ll say here is that, considering the high probability of the axe falling on anti-Zionist Jewish socialists (here as elsewhere), talking about swinging it in the name of “the Jewish community” is a bad joke.
So the Left candidate performed well, at least in terms of having good ideas, being on top of the issues and handling a tricky question on the fly. The third candidate was a bit more vague and waffly, and the secretary didn’t really cover himself in glory at all – unless what you want from your local Labour councillor is extreme gradualism and a staunch commitment to one particular position in a century-long dispute within the British Jewish community. Would the voters be swayed?
Well, what do you think?
It was at our last council candidate selection meeting that the similarity between our local party meetings and a wedding first struck me. There were three candidates that night, too; the people the local establishment had turned out voted for their candidate, the people we’d turned out voted for the Left candidate, and the third candidate basically got the votes of the people she’d come with. It would have saved a lot of time to cancel the speeches and just station ushers on the doors where people came in – left-wing challenger side or centre-right establishment side, sir?
I wouldn’t have thought that the voting this time round could be even more polarised, but it was: the Left candidate got about a third of the votes, the secretary got two-thirds and the third candidate got… one vote. Second preferences did not need to be counted. This, for a safe seat on the council; this, for a candidate explicitly offering business as usual (with a side order of war on the Left); this, in one of the biggest ward branches in the city. All this, in a meeting taking place a week and a day after the vacancy was first announced to branch members, and attended by approximately one-eighth – maybe even less – of those members.
And that, children, is where Labour councillors come from.
My anniversary post is the same this year as it was eight years ago, on the 40th anniversary. I’ve nothing to add, other than to say that for some of us 2017 felt a tiny bit – a tiny bit – like that.
Growing up in the 1970s, it’s hard to overstate how important the cause of Chile was. 11th September 1973 was, I suppose, a “naked lunch” moment – a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork; we knew who was on whose side, and what they were willing to do.
on the 18th of September … a young man came to my house, said, “Please, I need to talk to you. I’m a friend. I’ve been working in the city morgue. I’m afraid to tell you that Victor’s body has been recognized,” because it was a well-known — his was a well-known face. And he said, “You must come with me and claim his body; otherwise, they will put him in a common grave, and he will disappear.”
So then I accompanied this young man to the city morgue. We entered by a side entrance. I saw the hundreds of bodies, literally hundreds of bodies, that were high piled up in what was actually the parking place, I think, of the morgue. And I had to look for Victor’s body among a long line in the offices of the city morgue, recognized him. I saw what had happened to him. I saw the bullet wounds. I saw the state of his body.
And I consider myself one of the lucky ones, in the sense that I had to face at that moment what had happened to Victor, and I could give my testimony with all the force of what I felt in that moment, and not that horror, which is much worse, of never knowing what happened to your loved one, as what happened to so many families, so many women, who have spent these 40 years looking for their loved ones who were made to disappear.
But the real significance of 11th September wasn’t the treachery or the horrors of the coup itself, or the years of brutal misery that followed. The coup mattered because of what it destroyed: the beginnings of a radical social experiment, bringing millions of people a chance of a decent life, some power over their own lives, a bit of confidence in the future. The sheer joy of that period has never been captured better than in this song (which I’ve cited before but not linked). Listen to the middle eight – it’s as if Victor Jara’s saying, you get it now? being alive is good, being in love is great, but this – this is happiness! this is how we were meant to live!
Forty-eight years after that hope was destroyed, let’s celebrate it. (Translation in comments.)
Maria, abre la ventana y deja que el sol alumbre por todos los rincones de tu casa.
Maria, mira hacia fuera nuestra vida no ha sido hecha para rodearla de sombras y tristezas.
Maria, ya ves no basta nacer, crecer, amar, para encontrar la felicidad.
Pasó lo mas cruel, ahora tus ojos se llenan de luz y tus manos de miel
Maria…
Tu risa brota como la mañana, brota en el jardín Maria…
UPDATE: 'Soft left' NEC member Ann Black has added her signature to a letter raising concerns over the way the ban on groups is being implemented by the party: https://t.co/Q37YKQVYcy
Here’s what I know about politics: people pull strokes.
If you’re working in an organisation like the Labour Party, there’s a gap, in terms of goals and ideals – a normative gap – between what you say is happening and what’s actually going on in procedural or institutional terms. Narrow votes are a particularly glaring example of this gap: you say that the party is united behind your programme, and maybe it is – or maybe you took a vote on the programme committee, your programme won by eight votes to seven and that’s that. Thinly-attended meetings are another: you say you’ve got a large and lively membership firmly committed to Labour victory, but on closer inspection the ‘large’ membership is mainly on paper, the ‘lively’ refers to the two or three new faces who always seem to appear for doorknocking sessions, and everyone’s ‘firmly’ committed because your faction has a lock on any decision-making meetings.
Looking back on Corbynism – a phrase that’s almost physically painful to write – I think a large part of the Right’s failure to comprehend the phenomenon, and a large part of our indignation and outrage in response, had to do with the unexpected narrowness of this gap. We said that there were thousands of us and we were united, and they automatically translated this into a more mundane procedural reality – some bunch of Trots has pushed this whole thing through and got a load of kids to sign up to the mailing list… Hence 2017, of course; by 2019 they’d realised that there were thousands of us and we were united, and stronger measures needed to be taken.
But there’s also another normative gap, between what you say you’re doing in procedural terms and what you’re actually getting away with. Rules very often aren’t written down, and when they are they need to be interpreted; applying a rule at all involves applying a secondary rule of equity and fair play, to the effect of Any rule should be enforced in all cases where it applies, and only those cases. How effectively that rule gets applied is more important than the content of any written rule.
Of course, rules don’t exist, at least in the sense of tangible things in the world: if you’re physically unable to do something, your behaviour in that respect is not being controlled by a rule, and vice versa. (The shopkeeper who takes alcohol off sale outside licensing hours is following a rule; the punter who doesn’t try to buy it in those times isn’t.) Rules only exist to the extent that people observe them – and to the extent that they expect others to observe them and apply pressure on others to observe them. This is particularly true of that secondary rule, the rule that rules should be applied fairly. Anyone who, as an individual, visibly breaks the rules, or pulls strokes in selectively applying the rules, will tend to get stopped by their peers – not because those people are high-minded idealists, but because they know that they would get stopped if they did the same thing.
Rules don’t exist as tangible objects, so people can ignore them – the ‘fair play’ rule in particular – without any immediate or automatic consequences. But rules do exist, in the sense that everyone internalises them and brings pressure to bear on anyone who flouts them – the ‘fair play’ rule in particular. Only when somebody is powerful enough not to fear other people’s social pressure can they really get away with ignoring the rules – and very few individuals are that powerful, at least not for very long.
A group of people, on the other hand, is insulated from social pressure, at least from outside the group. If a group of people, with shared goals in the longer term and shared enemies in the short term, can apply rules to its advantage, there’s every reason to expect that they won’t apply those rules fairly. Attempts to bring social pressure to bear on the group are unlikely to have any effect; all that anyone outside the group can really do is try to stop them. Stop them collectively and stop them altogether, that is, not just stop the bad apples within the group who are applying the rules badly; it’s up to the group to do that – and they’re not likely to do it for as long as applying the rules badly works to the group’s benefit.
This, then, is the first lesson from the story linked to above. If you pass a rule saying that Socialist Appeal is proscribed and anyone involved with it can be expelled, and people are then expelled for being seen at a public meeting held by Socialist Appeal before it was proscribed, it’s perfectly clear that this is not a fair or appropriate application of the rule: to that extent Ann Black is quite correct. The question is, given the factional makeup of the current Labour leadership, what did anyone think was going to happen when that rule was passed? The disciplinary apparatus of the Labour Party hasn’t gone rogue, despite appearances; the people involved are only acting this wildly because they’re acting with factional, and leadership, endorsement. Social pressure won’t reach them; they can only be stopped.
How to stop them is another question – and this is the second lesson. The current frenzy of expulsions wouldn’t be happening if those responsible couldn’t get away with it. If we could stop them, we would have stopped them by now; in particular, if organising against expulsions could stop them, it would have worked by now. (One of the organisations proscribed was Labour Against The Witchhunt, for goodness’ sake.) These expulsions are a kind of random, symbolic punishment beating for the Left, administered in the hope of getting us to shut up and/or leave. We can resist – at least by not leaving – but we can’t, at the moment, stop them happening.
There are times when bullies overreach, usually because their victims are stronger than they wish to acknowledge. That’s not what’s going on now, though. This is just plain, ordinary bullying, and it’s being done because we’re weak. Nothing is going to change for the better until that changes.
On April the 6th, as you’ll doubtless recall, I started a series of posts called In Search of the Red Wall, in which I was sceptical of the thesis that Labour had lost in 2019 because, ultimately, we’d lost the old working class vote, and specifically because we’d lost a huge tranche of culturally conservative “heartland” seats in the North of England. Having traced the development of the concept – which followed a surprisingly tortuous and disjointed path – and shown how fatuous it basically was, I concluded by proposing to analyse what had actually happened in 2019.
This takes us up to the 21st of April. On the 28th I returned to the topic and began the explanation of what happened – and what didn’t happen – in December 2019, in a post ending with these pregnant words:
Something big happened to Labour’s vote in 2019, and it happened right across the country – and it wasn’t a swing to the Tories, despite the Tories benefiting from it in a big way.
But what was it?
Here we are in June – not even the beginning of June – and still no ‘part 2’. I will get to it, and I have got some idea of what I’m going to say – at least, I’ve got some numbers, and any amount of charts – but I’ve not found it easy to get around to, and not just because I’ve had other stuff on.
I suspect that one underlying reason is the reason why I didn’t do much to analyse the figures straight after December 2019: it’s just too damn depressing. And not ‘depressing’ in the ‘why I’d rather not watch Schindler’s List with my takeaway’ sense – depressing in the will-depleting, immobilising, what was I trying to do never mind don’t suppose it matters sense of the word.
Which is also, frankly, why I haven’t been having a lot to do with our local Labour Party. Last year – just pre-pandemic – I wrote about the ward AGM which had been due in the Autumn of 2019 and was postponed to February 2020. I went along, but I wasn’t hugely impressed:
several officers either stayed in post or moved sideways, and several posts were uncontested. … looked at from outside it might seem odd that, in a ward branch with a membership nudging four figures – the size of some entire CLPs – it’s only possible to find one person interested in any of the officer positions.
We met in the same place as last year, and I think we were pretty much the same people as last year; we were certainly in very similar numbers to last year, viz. around 70 … Which also helps explain the uncontested elections. Seven days (the notice period required when calling a branch AGM) is not a very long time – and membership secretaries don’t hand out contact lists to anyone who might want to do a quick bit of phone-banking. This is all according to the rules, of course, but these ‘home team’ advantages (and others created by officers’ role in the AGM itself) mean that the likelihood of anyone disrupting the orderly self-perpetuation of the dominant faction is pretty slim. … The result is a kind of political Sealed Knot, an annual reunion of the office-holders and their factional activists on one side and the diehards of the excluded group(s) on the other. They might as well take allegiances at the door, like ushers at a wedding, and declare the results straight away.
This year… sorry, it just looked too much like hard work. But it looks as if I’m not the only member locally who felt like that. The email announcing this year’s results opens
Thank you to the fifty members who attended our online Annual General Meeting on Monday 7 June 2021. It was great to see so many people.
Oh, the people!
Viewed with a colder eye, even without the barrier to participation of having to turn out and sit in a church hall, attendance was down from 70 to 50 – which is to say, down from about one in 14 of the 2020 membership to about one in 20. (Although the 2021 membership may also be lower, of course.)
As for the business of the meeting, here’s a summary:
Chair: re-elected x1, former x4
Vice Chair: re-elected x1, former x3
Vice Chair: former x8
Secretary: re-elected x4
Treasurer: re-elected x3, former x1
Membership Secretary: re-elected x3, former x3
Women’s Officer: new
Political Education Officer: re-elected x1, former x2
Diversity Officer: re-elected x1
Delegates to the constituency party General Committee: 16 candidates, all elected unopposed (Chair, both Vice-Chairs, Treasurer, Membership Secretary, Diversity Officer, plus two delegates re-elected x4, four re-elected x2 and four new members).
“Re-elected” = re-elected to the post; x2 (etc) = re-elected for the 2nd time (etc); “former” = held one or more elected post in one or more previous year. (My data only goes back to 2016; the re-election counts for some of these candidates will certainly be too low.) Note also that last year’s GC delegates included five members from the Left of the party, none of whom stood this time – so the four new members are unlikely to add to the ideological diversity of the delegation.
It’s not, as they say, a good look. As I said in 2020,
what kind of membership are we building, if members keep seeing the same names in the same posts, or else (for a change) the same names in different posts? … I’ve always believed that uncontested elections and musical-chairs rotation of posts were signs of a local party in decline – not of one that’s going from strength to strength, as ours apparently is. Perhaps the problem is precisely the apparent absence of factions – or rather, the impossibility of multiple factions arising when a single faction dominates for long enough. Perhaps what we’re seeing is how unchallenged factional dominance sows the seeds of decline.
It’s certainly not motivating.
So, anyway – what happened in 2019? One contributing factor to Labour’s defeat in 2019, it seems to me, is that self-perpetuating cliques like the one I’ve just described threw away the enormous asset created by the party’s increased membership, because it wasn’t an asset that served their factional purposes – and threw away any slim chance to get a Labour government elected, because that wouldn’t have served their factional purposes either. In this they acted entirely logically – mobilisation of the membership would inevitably have threatened their position, and another 2017 (or better) would certainly have increased the demand for mobilisation – and really, all they can be blamed for is valuing local posts within a political party more highly than the possibility of a Labour government.
But that’s an impressionistic explanation, and one from a source that may not be entirely reliable (embitterment can do that). What else happened in 2019?
To unpack that a little: Labour’s vote fell by a fifth, but the Tory and UKIP/BXP vote rose only a little; the main beneficiaries in terms of votes were the minor centrist (and pro-Remain) parties. The sole beneficiary in terms of seats was the Conservative Party, for reasons which both were and weren’t predictable: that they would benefit was predictable because of the two-party bias imposed by our absurd electoral system, but as for how much they would benefit, have you looked at our absurd electoral system recently? Another table:
2010
2015
2017
2019
Conservative
36.1%
306
36.9%
330
42.3%
317
43.6%
365
Labour
29%
258
30.4%
232
40%
262
32.1%
202
Labour’s 2019 vote share is significantly higher than 2010’s, for less than 80% of the seats. Or you could look at the Tories’ 2015 vote: in comparison, Labour got 8/9ths of the votes, for 3/5 of the seats. We can even see this disproportion happening from one election to the next: both Labour in 2015 and (more dramatically) the Tories in 2017 increased their vote share and lost seats. (“All hail, Theresa May, who shall lead the Conservative Party to win its highest vote share since Thatcher, with more votes than Labour took in 1997!” The witches were having a laugh that day.) Really, the system’s a lottery; it’s amazing we take it as seriously as we do.
But that is the system we’ve got, and those are the figures it produced. And, speaking of disproportions, there’s something about the scale of the Tories’ gains from Labour, compared to the much more modest increase in votes, which seems to cry out for explanation. One candidate explanation, as we’ve seen – albeit a hazy and impressionistic explanation, as we’ve also seen – is the ‘Red Wall’. Perhaps it wasn’t a Tory wave but a Labour collapse. Perhaps the youth-powered bien-pensant liberalism of today’s Labour Party had drifted so far from the ageing demographics and conservative culture of the party’s traditional support base that some of its northern strongholds were ready to drop into the Tories’ hands (always bearing in mind that the word ‘north’ covers everywhere from Coventry to Berwick-upon-Tweed).
Well, perhaps. The trouble with this explanation (as we’ve seen) is that it only explains about a third of Labour’s losses. But might it be useful anyway, applied not to the seats we actually lost but to near misses? A good question, and one that calls for a map.
The nationwide trend for Labour was a drop of 7.9%, with the Tory vote going up by 1.3%; this adds up to a deterioration in Labour’s relative vote share of 9.2%. The deep purple constituencies on this map are the big losses: the ones that Labour lost with a drop in its relative vote share of 18% or more, roughly twice the national change.
The pale purple are all other losses – barring a few further south – and, as you can see, they outnumber the deep purple handily. What’s more interesting are the red seats, which are all those seats that Labour held with a drop in its relative vote share of 18% or more – in other words, the seats where the same factors that were at work in the deep purple group are (perhaps) lurking, storing up trouble for future elections.
In short, if there is a Red Wall, this is the map to show it – and, if there is a Red Wall, it’s partly in south Yorkshire and Derbyshire, partly north of Durham. There’s no denying that this is an interesting map, and one that highlights some problem areas for Labour (that stretch running from Pontefract down to Bolsover in particular). But do those red and deep purple areas tell us anything about “Labour’s heartlands” in general – or about how the election was lost? I can’t see it.
The other end of the scale is interesting too – and for this one we’ll be venturing south of the Wash. Two maps:
On these two maps, the red and orange areas are Labour holds, the blue Tory holds. The pale blue and orange areas are constituencies where Labour’s vote share relative to the Conservatives fell in 2019 by less than 4.5% (i.e. less than half of the national average). The darker blue and deep red areas are constituencies where Labour’s vote share relative to the Tories actually rose in 2019 (including one where I went canvassing – which is pretty much the first evidence I’ve seen that any of the canvasses I was involved in had any positive effect).
What’s interesting about the red and orange seats is not so much where they are (Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Bristol, recent wins Canterbury and Portsmouth South and of course the capital) as how few there are of them; the Labour vote just fell away, by a lot, right across the country. Or at least, right across the country in Labour seats: check out the duck-egg blue South-East. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that you can walk from Lewes to Aylesbury without ever entering a Tory constituency where Labour’s relative vote share fell by more than 4.5%; not very much, probably. Still, those washes of pale blue are at the very least interesting, particularly considering how many of those same seats saw a rise in Labour’s relative share in 2017.
One last map. Was this a victory for the Conservatives? Clearly it was in terms of seats gained, but see above, absurd electoral system. In terms of a big rise in vote share… not so much.
The purple and blue areas are constituencies where the Tory vote rose by at least 5% relative to 2017. The purple areas are seats lost to the Conservatives, as usual; the blue areas are Labour holds. Pale blue and pale purple show a rise of 5-9.9% in the Tory vote, dark blue and dark purple a rise of 10% or more. The beige areas, finally, are constituencies where the Tory vote didn’t go up by as much as 5%, but Labour lost the seat to them anyway.
It’s striking, relative to the beige areas, how few Labour losses are purple, and how very few are deep purple. It’s also striking, relative to the map as a whole, just how few seats are either blue or purple. Despite the huge shifts in relative vote shares in some constituencies (shown on the first map), there were only a handful of constituencies where the Tory vote share rose significantly. Conversely (referring to the second and third maps) it was only in a minority of constituencies – and a small minority of Labour constituencies specifically – that Labour’s vote share didn’t show a significant fall.
Something big happened to Labour’s vote in 2019, and it happened right across the country – and it wasn’t a swing to the Tories, despite the Tories benefiting from it in a big way.
Workers’ Playtime 