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On the Reform problem, Labour faces a serious strategic dilemma

All was not well at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool.

The steady drip of knee-jerk policy announcements revealed a government in chaos; hardly surprising given the string of scandals over the past year, often for mistakes as basic as failing to report donations.

What’s more, Keir Starmer’s top team has suffered a weekly resignation or firing for five weeks running now – No 10 strategist Tom Kibasi, deputy leader Angela Rayner, US ambassador Peter Mandelson, senior aide Paul Ovenden, and communications director Steph Driver – and Labour has been behind Reform UK for over 100 consecutive polls, even facing wipeout in the party’s traditional Welsh heartland.

It’s these polls in particular that have the party panicking. If speeches from ministers on the main stage sounded like a direct response to the rise of Reform, it’s because they are. In the fringes and the bars, delegates talked about little else. They tended to see the problem in one of three ways, and can be split into three distinct groups accordingly. Taken together, these factions are deeply revealing about the fault lines of Labour politics.

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1) The technocrats

The first group is the smallest. They view the government’s challenges in purely technocratic terms; an administrative problem to be solved. “Get the asylum waiting lists down, and that will close down the hotels,” they say. “Somehow that might also stop the boats.”

It is an approach rooted in service delivery but completely baffled by the more emotional side of politics. Starmer’s natural instincts would make him a member of this group; he’s the Jimmy Carter of British politics, going for technical solutions and efficiency savings, and he’s staffed the ranks of his special advisers full of like-minded thinkers who are paid to deliver an analysis that boils down to, “Fix problem = everybody happy.”

2) Blue Labour

Then there is the loudest of the three factions: the Blue Labour tendency, which promotes ‘blue collar’ socially conservative policies in areas such as immigration and crime. This group counts among its supporters Starmer’s (increasingly embattled) director of strategy, Morgan McSweeney – and, as such, it has significant influence over the prime minister, not least through the Labour Together think tank/campaign group that McSweeney previously led.

Blue Labour’s founder, Maurice Glasman, was once regarded as a bit of a crank, not only in the Labour Party, but at an academic conference I attended with him 15 years ago. He was plucked from obscurity by then Labour leader Ed Miliband, who made him a Lord in 2011, though I saw Glasman being quite rude about Miliband to a fringe audience earlier this week. Glasman is now a major figure in Labour politics, not least because he’s seen as a “Trump whisperer”, having been the only Labour politician invited to Trump’s second inauguration.

His growing confidence was clear at Labour conference; at times, he could even look messianic. He started a fringe event I attended by announcing he would simply be chairing, not speaking, only to spend much of the meeting chipping in during panellists’ speeches, offering monologues on his own thoughts as he paced up and down the front of the room to rapt attention from a devoted audience - who were unusually ‘pale, male, and stale’ for a Labour grouping.

Glasman also used the event to defend McSweeney, whose political judgment and future have recently been called into question. Glasman reminded attendees that McSweeney started his career turning up with him to Labour campaign events against the BNP in east London in the late Noughties, and shares many of his political instincts.

It is this experience of “seeing off the BNP in Barking” that stands at the centre of the Blue Labour approach. Supporters claim the only way to defeat increasingly extreme right-wing politicians is to meet people’s “legitimate concerns”, often on immigration. In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Critics argue that this stance just legitimises the far right; after all, if you really want to vote for an anti-immigration party, why vote for a Labour Party giving mixed signals, when you can vote for the real deal in Nigel Farage’s Reform UK?

In its narrative, Blue Labour says that only it has defeated the far right; only it knows what it’s talking about. And members are convinced their time has come. But this narrative has been questioned. Byline Times political editor Adam Bienkov wrote a forensic examination of McSweeney’s career to date, and concluded that his campaigns were at best in keeping with normal swings to Labour, and arguably “actually significantly underperformed”.

Despite this, McSweeney’s grip on the party’s direction has held sway, particularly as he has seen off rivals such as Sue Gray, whom he replaced as the PM’s chief of staff. In the court of Sir Keir, his voice has often been the loudest.

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3) The broad front

The third group is largely made up of those who remember how Tony Blair’s 1997 majority was replicated in 2001, whittled away in 2005 and lost altogether in 2010. Labour did not actually lose to the Tories in 2010, they argue, since there were relatively few direct Labour-to-Conservative vote transfers and the Tory vote wasn’t terribly impressive, with the party failing to get a majority in 2010 (or in 2017).

Instead, they say, Labour’s 1997 voters were picked away, either protest-voting for the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party, or just staying at home. That argument has big echoes now. There are relatively few Labour-to-Reform vote transfers – some 3% of the electorate. By comparison, Labour is losing 4% of its supporters to the Greens and Lib Dems, and another 6% to apathy. The solution, goes this faction’s argument, is to unite the left-wing vote again.

Reform UK is polling between 28% and 35% – not actually that high a vote by historic standards. On those sorts of numbers, parties usually come a distant second in general elections. It’s only because Labour is doing so apocalyptically badly that Reform’s c.30% rump is enough to win, especially under Westminster’s first-past-the-post system.

For this part of the Labour Party, the path to victory is clear: Starmer’s government must actually deliver on its promises – economic reform, social reform, political reform. Labour’s lost voters are not deserting the party because it hasn’t yet humiliated enough immigrants; they’re leaving because 14 months ago, they voted for a Labour government to do Labour things – and are baffled and disillusioned as to why so little of that has happened. “There’s no money left” will only go so far as an excuse.

Believers in a broad front are probably the most numerous and the most disenchanted. But they’re also the least powerful in the party. They are the downtrodden Labour candidates and councillors and organisers, who cannot understand why their government is not delivering, and who don’t much care for being doorstep fodder.

How did we get here?

As I noted in my report for openDemocracy yesterday, there was little to no interaction between the three groupings at conference. The main hall hosted debates that were stitched up months ago, when the delegate line-up was elected, and the fringe events largely confirmed prejudices, instead of challenging them. “This is why we were right all along,” was the lesson learned by all three groups.

Why is Labour this way? To understand this, it is worth looking at two models. One looks at how the party’s leadership sees the country, the other looks at the division of opinion in the country.

Values modes

The first model is ‘values modes’, which has been used by academics and marketers for over 50 years. It was a staple of Labour strategy in the Tony Blair years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it is central to McSweeney’s thinking today. To understand this is to understand how Labour is caught in a trap of its own making.

Values modes sorts British voters into three broad categories: Pioneers, Prospectors, Settlers. Each makes up approximately one-third of the British electorate.

• Pioneers are your archetypal Labour voters: young, broke, creative, idealistic.
• Prospectors are more entrepreneurial, middle-aged, typically with young families. They often have a social conscience, but they’re also richer and more materialistic, wanting their families to do well. They’re classic swing voters, who might have voted for Thatcher and then Blair.
• Settlers are your typical Nigel Farage voters. Older, poorer, more socially conservative, often left behind, with a strong sense of nostalgia for tradition and certainty.

When the New Labour project was being developed, the intention was to build a party that could win commanding leads among both the Pioneers and the Prospectors, leading to Labour being permanently in government.

Unfortunately, New Labour became a victim of its own success. It overperformed. Against the backdrop of scandal-hit Tory governments of the 1990s, it did absurdly well among Pioneers, Prospectors, and Settlers. And once it had MPs defending seats won with the votes of all three groups, it was stuck trying to occupy every position, everywhere. It was a masterstroke of political positioning, but it was no basis for governing.

By the end of the Blair-Brown years, Labour had lost the Pioneers over Iraq, tuition fees, foundation hospitals, etc; lost the Prospectors simply because the government looked exhausted; and was hanging onto the Settlers with an increasingly authoritarian tone on areas such as crime, asylum and immigration, and ID cards. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015 was a reaction to the collapse of the values modes model.

McSweeney, however, draws a different conclusion from the New Labour experience: that ‘values modes’ is something to be resurrected, as a brilliant way to win a permanent voter coalition, by triangulating to win all three groups. Colleagues speak of McSweeney’s enthusiasm for this model in private. And again, like Blair, he has ended up chasing after the Settlers – the group least likely to vote Labour.

The political spectrum

The values modes model is invaluable, not because it is right or wrong, but because it lets us understand McSweeney’s worldview. But it is just a model. More useful than a model is understanding where British voters actually are.

The most comprehensive data on this is compiled by the British Election Study, an ongoing academic project dating back to 1964 that surveys 30,000 people at a time to produce comprehensive data on the changing state of the nation. It is far more accurate than any opinion poll, as its large sample size allows the sub-samples of minority groups to be properly understood. It’s the best way of understanding the cross-currents of British public opinion.

David Howarth of Cambridge University, a former Electoral Commissioner, is a keen observer of the BES data and has modelled it to show where the UK electorate is. He maps them out in 3D. There are two scales, from economically left to economically right, and from socially liberal to socially conservative. Howarth uses two proxy issues for this: whether people think the government should or shouldn’t redistribute wealth, and whether people believe that immigration enriches or undermines cultural life. The third dimension is how many voters are in each group. Voters move around the political map much less frequently than politicians like to think; Howarth’s work looks at their values, not their parties.

Howarth concludes that there are three big concentrations of voters in UK politics. One is on the authoritarian-right, one is on the authoritarian-left, and one is on the liberal-left. Each contains between 28% and 36% of the electorate. (Interestingly, the liberal-right just doesn’t have much of a following in the UK. While it’s of endless fascination to right-wing think tanks, Howarth finds it makes up just 7% of the British electorate.)

Labour’s greatest strength is that it can span both the authoritarian-left and liberal-left voters. Labour’s greatest weakness is that it is irretrievably divided between the authoritarian-left and liberal-left voters, with little in between.

And that is what you see being played out in the party’s politics, and at Labour conference. It also explains why so many Labour factions hate each other more than they hate the other parties. They really are worlds apart.

A friend was a Labour councillor across several decades, and his experience bore this out. On paper, he represented an ultra-safe Labour ward. Half his constituents were extremely poor, and half extremely affluent. The Labour vote was often over 60% among both groups. My friend said he spent most of his time trying to stop the two groups of Labour voters from ever meeting each other, or they might realise how little they had in common.

So in one sense, these fault lines are nothing new. But these are not normal times. The British political system is in meltdown, with the old two-party system very much in doubt. For decades, Labour (and the Conservatives) have been able to depend on disillusioned voters eventually coming back to them. But that’s not happening in our fractured electoral environment.

British politics is now much closer to that of France, India and (sometimes) Canada; a first-past-the-post system still delivers total power, but the parties are so fragmented that a party could now win a general election with as little as 26%. And that is terrifying Labour activists.

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