As I wrote last week, whatever its current troubles, Reform UK has hardly disappeared. Meanwhile, those black-clad quasi-paramilitaries may well be another augury of a frightening immediate future. One more English settlement – the town of Barnham, in Norfolk – is seemingly poised to stage a pretend independence referendum in protest at plans to locally accommodate asylum seekers. Oh, and our new Labour prime minister has just held cordial talks with a US president who has not only brought a modern de facto fascism to his homeland, but wants to export it to Europe.
But hold all those cheerful thoughts for a moment, and let us have a look at the Labour party as it gathers in Liverpool. The slogan plastered all over its conference is “Hope Again” – which, unlike last year’s dreadful “Renew Britain”, suggests that a few people at the top might have belatedly learned the basics of pithy political storytelling.
The influence of the two slogans that are accepted modern classics – “Take back control” and “Make America Great Again” – is obvious. In Labour’s case, “again” not only implies how badly Starmer’s reign went, but looks back to a better past and implies that something comparable is eminently possible. You might take it as a reference to the best aspects of the New Labour period, Harold Wilson in his pomp or the magical glories of the Attlee years.
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The slogan also echoes some of the pronouncements made by Andy Burnham when he became leader, about the positive response of the voters of Makerfield to “the promised return of the Labour they once knew”. And it has to be said: those words and the conference tagline tap into his party’s ingrained nostalgia, and the idea that with enough effort, Labour might return to winning a commanding share of the vote, as it did back in the days when footballers chain-smoked and bowler hats were still a common sight (in 1951, although it lost to the Tories, Labour won a record 48.8%, and Wilson came very close to the same figure in 1966).
Numbers aside, Labour still largely believes that by rights it should monopolise the progressive half of politics. The Tories have the same idea about the right of the spectrum, which has recently fed into a seductive notion held by both “main” parties and many pundits: that with Zack Polanski’s PR slip-ups and the trouble that has engulfed Nigel Farage, we may be witnessing the rebirth of comfy, cosy, simple two-party politics.
What utter rot that is. The UK’s passage into a multiparty system is deeply rooted in a society and economy whose complexity can no longer be smothered by our ludicrous voting system. Look at what has happened where the electoral machinery is different. Labour recently lost control of Wales to Plaid Cymru, attracting a mere 11% of the vote. The SNP’s dominance in Scotland may have weakened, but it is more than intact. Meanwhile, even with first past the post still creakingly in place, whole swathes of what used to be considered middle England – particularly in the home counties – have switched from the Tories to the Lib Dems.
At the time of writing, the latest YouGov poll puts Labour on 23% (if that’s accurate, the “Burnham bounce” looks more like a modest bunny-hop), the Tories level with Reform at 21%, and the Greens and Lib Dems on 14% and 12% respectively. The same polling group has also done a multi-level regression and post-stratification – or MRP – that offers a picture of the House of Commons that would be elected if a contest were held today. It forecasts a hung parliament, with Labour dropping to 241 seats, and facing the inevitability of cross-party cooperation. Here, clearly, is further evidence of a fragmented model of politics that will endure for the foreseeable future. And in Liverpool, mostly at fringe meetings, it will be talked about, but not nearly enough.
Before he became leader, Burnham seemed to be the only senior Labour politician positively responding to these shifts. He has repeatedly backed proportional representation (which he insists he still supports), and said that embracing it would pave the way “for agreement with other parties on wider reforms”. With that, he said, would come “a more honest and collaborative way of doing politics”, a phrase that chimes with his promises of a lot less “finger-pointing” and “point-scoring”. Aside from his talks with the Tories and Lib Dems about social care, what this might look like is unclear; all we know is that Burnham’s drive for English devolution will definitely mean ceding power to other parties, and probably substantially change politics at a national level.
And so to the really important bit. Eleven days after the start of Labour conference comes the Holborn and St Pancras byelection. Publicly at least, Labour seems to be running a content-lite campaign, though it has attacked the Greens’ alleged fiscal impossibilism and sent members a communique framing the contest as a chance to “get our revenge” for Green triumphs in May’s local elections. The Green leader and candidate, Polanski, is aggressively accusing Labour of a miserable lack of solidarity with Palestine, while an ally also charged Burnham’s party with choosing its contender – the former child refugee Sagal Abdi-Wali – on the basis of opportunistic “identity politics”. It all looks like politics as usual – and as the far right gains more and more traction here and abroad, what is happening in this corner of London should make us feel very nervous about the next UK general election.
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The left-leaning cross-party pressure group Compass is about to convene the first meeting of a “council for the progressive majority”, which will bring together leading figures from each of the UK’s progressive parties – including Plaid and the SNP – to firm up how they might collectively defeat Reform. To quote from a recent Compass statement: “There is a progressive majority in this country … yet our outdated political system divides us … splitting the vote and clearing a path for extremist voices to win with little public backing.” This is the kind of urgent warning that will become very vivid in the buildup to the next election, amid campaigning – whatever the efforts of Burnham’s new National Centre For Information Defence – festooned with lies, deepfakes and worse.
A lot of us remain unsure of the exact solutions to a split left taking on a confident, tech-savvy and possibly united right. Electoral pacts tend to look like stitch-ups; parties agreeing to limit their campaigning in certain marginal seats can work much better. Whatever, millions of us – including, it seems, the new PM – increasingly feel that a cultural change is overdue, not least to stop the most basic civilisational values buckling before our eyes.
Talking of which, it’s grimly ironic that the man still benefiting most from the fractured politics of the 21st century is Farage, a self-styled throwback permanently surrounded by a cloud of Rothmans smoke. Here, then, is a question for everyone gathered by the old Liverpudlian docks: how can he be comprehensively beaten, possibly when he may end up healing divisions on the right by striking a deal (pre- or post-election) with the Tories, and even Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain? By ludicrously insisting that people must vote Labour whatever their political circumstances? Or somehow cooperating with other parties to ensure his defeat? Those parties also need to change, of course. But the age of monopolistic Labour hegemony is over. Let it go. We need to fight today’s most important battles together, so the prospect of hope might actually start to feel real. Again.
