Labour’s North Shropshire disaster
JVL Introduction
It was hard to fathom Labour’s strategy in the North Shropshire by-election.
What is clear is that Labour has moved from being a contender in 2017 to being a marginal political force in the area.
All self-inflicted. Voters clearly wanted to give the Tories a kicking. Who better to support than Labour – if only Labour had anything to offer!
For starters, Labour HQ refused to allow Graeme Currie, the candidate in 3 previous General elections, to even stand for selection.
In this guest post on Skwawkbox, Labour activist Rosie Dee offers a general diagnosis: listen to your members on the ground!
“‘Quality candidate’ spin can’t replace community involvement and activism…”
But does Starmer’s Labour want to learn?
A post-mortem of Labour’s N Shropshire disaster
Labour activist ‘Rosie Dee’ on her party’s humiliation in last night’s by-election, in which a leave seat voted for the most ‘remain’ party and rejected Starmer’s offering outright
Earlier this week, ‘Rosie Dee’ – a popular activist still in the Labour party – wrote in withering terms of Keir Starmer’s foolish squandering of an opportunity to actually oppose and set Labour apart from the Tories, when Starmer propped up Boris Johnson to save him from a Tory rebellion over ‘Covid passports’ and compulsory vaccinations. Starmer did not even demand any concessions from Johnson in return.
Now she analyses Labour’s catastrophic result in last night’s by-election as a ‘nightmare’ for the Tory PM – and for the Tory-lite Starmer:
North Shropshire – a Nightmare for Johnson, A dream for Lib Dems and sleepless nights for Labour if they are to approach this result with honesty.
So why did Boris Johnson lose such a safe seat with a stonking majority of 60 plus percent to the party that began the race in a poor third place? And how did Keir Starmer’s Labour replace the LibDems as the new poor third?
This was a leave seat but voters swung to LibDem despite it being the most pro remain party in England. It’s not that the Brexit divide is over, it’s that single issue politics have led to an urgency. The single issue here was the Prime Minister because it is urgent.
But don’t be fooled into thinking it was the only issue, it was an opportunity and Labour failed to recognise it and so failed to take it and build a strategy, because it doesn’t listen to its members on the ground any more.
Technically Labour started in a far better place. In 190 years, Labour has almost always been second. Labour’s strategy has been to win back voters from the Tories and LibDems, but clearly they didn’t. Even the Greens gained on 2019, while Labour lost well over half its vote share and fell to its lowest number of votes – by a distance – in its history in the seat.
The Lib Dems had the better story and given Labour’s new, supposedly focused ‘campaign to win’ machine that’s shocking.
If tactical voting was the sole name of the game then statistically Labour should be sitting where the LibDems are today.
Helen Morgan stood in the 2019 general election. She is the most local of the three. Clearly local ownership of candidates is more important than ever and it’s not hard to understand why. But there’s an additional factor: since 2019 Helen Morgan has continued her local activity. Door knocking and listening, building her name and focus, bedding herself into the local communities.
Labour HQ refused to allow Graeme Currie, their candidate for 3 General elections, to even stand for selection. His name was known, he had that local connection. That was cast aside.
What Labour did to Graham was to many local people unfair. And ultimately the strategy failed.
Keir Starmer failed the ‘comparison with other party leaders’ test
Surely if you are going to vote because of a party leader then you are going to compare the other possibilities. That comparison with Keir Starmer failed. Labour may continue to claim it was ‘never possible’ for them to win in North Shropshire – but clearly they thought they could, as the front page of the regional paper carries a personal recommendation from ‘Sir’! Never have so many Labour MPs been seen on the doorstep and still that didn’t make up for the lack of Labour activists willing to campaign for Keir Starmer.
Voters are simply not seeing Labour as an alternative to the Tories.
This week as Labour helped the Tory cabinet by lending them their votes to get through controversial Covid legislation and the LibDems didn’t. When the country distrusts the Prime Minister, the LibDem’s had the sense not to bail him out.
Labour now claims this election was never winnable. What an attitude. One that wasn’t shared by Labour activists and wasn’t accepted by the LibDems – and they won with a massive thirty-seven point gain last night, more than the Tories lost, while Labour collapsed.
Having enjoyed supportive media Labour that Jeremy Corbyn could never have dreamed of, Keir Starmer can now forget it for a while. The LibDems are going to be up there, gaining visibility they or any smaller party rarely ever get.
Now after two historic by-election votes no one from Labour can realistically argue this is a flash in the pan. The LibDems’ Chesham and Amersham victory – another worst-ever Labour performance under Starmer – was in the all time top ten of parliamentary swings, North Shropshire is one of the top seven. There’s going to be a focus on that, plus a focus on discipline problems on the Tory back benches. The focus will be on them and not on Labour as any kind of government in waiting – especially if the LibDems can make even clearer that they are not going to back the Government for no return for themselves.
We are in a time of political volatility. The voting landscape has changed. No one that wants to see an end to this poisonous government is going to accept an alternative that’s just a slightly better version of what we have – if Labour as it stands is even that. ‘Quality candidate’ spin can’t replace community involvement and activism, no matter what how much the friendly media try to help. Last night’s winner Helen Morgan is the proof of that pudding! The attacks on her by the Right wing press failed.
Tories are Damaging the Tories. Labour isn’t. People see the Lib Dem’s as hurting Tories. Labour isn’t. Those chickens are coming home to roost.
Why was Graeme Currie not allowed to stand for election??? Surprise, surprise! He put a Palestine flag on one of his comments on social media!! He committed other grave crimes against Starmers dictates. He MAY have been found guilty of not liking bagels? At any rate he is clearly a raging antisemitic and so are all those ex labour voters who did not endorse his Starmer chosen replacement!
A provocative analysis of Labour’s disappointing, or should I say, ominous performance. If Labour did far worse than in 2019 when Brexit was the primary election issue and currently with Johnson’s ‘fall from.grace’ in the public’s eyes, then the future looks grim. Not only has Labour lost touch with the electorate; it has lost touch with the Party’s activists. It is obsessed with eradicating any lingering Corbynist influence, that it has failed to keep an eye on what Labour stands for.
I’m not sure how “In 190 years, Labour has almost always been second”. Labour was only founded in 1900, that’s 121 years ago for those who are mathematically challenged. The ILP was fed in 1893, that possibly gets us to 128 years. Just saying.
But more seriously, from its first creation in 1832 to its abolition in 1885, the constituency almost always elected 2 Conservatives (a Whig came second on one occasion). When the modern consituency, with different boundaries, was created in 1983, the Liberals took second place until the Labour national landslide of 1997, when Labour moved into second place.
Does it matter? Well, if an article has such blatant errors, why should anyone trust the rest of it?
Graeme Currie was told that he was under investigation shortly before the election. It was on dubious grounds of an email sent some years before. It looks as if this was cooked up to get somebody out as a contender who was a Corbyn supporter. The candidate was in effect parachuted in as an unknown with little understanding of the area. The result is not surprising.
I think there are two things at work here. Firstly, in a true-blue seat like North Shropshire, disaffected Tory voters find it much easier to vote for the Lib Dems than the Labour party and that was obvious before the election. Secondly, the huge drop in Labour votes can only be down to Keir Starmer and the current leadership of the Labour party. In this, too, disaffected Labour voters found it easier to not vote, vote for the Greens or even vote for the Lib Dems than the Tories.
That the 60% Leave-voting constituency decided to vote for the party which was the most Remain of all, at the last election, is a sign that Brexit is no longer seen as a strength for the Tories (and, conversely, its Remain position less of a weakness for the LIb Dems). We can – tentatively – say that the domination of UK politics by Brexit may be coming to an end.
Of course, people will vote differently in General Elections than they do in by-elections and the seat (and Chesham and Amersham too, likely enough) will revert to the Tories then. But the trends seen will still be present, albeit smaller. Maybe the Labour vote will only drop by 10%, instead of halve. Maybe the Lib Dems will only increase by 10%, instead of double.
What all this will amount to is hard to predict. I mean, under PR, it’d be easy – if the Labour vote dropped by 10%, they’d lose 10% of their MPs, if the Lib Dem vote went up by 10%, they’d gain an extra 10% in MPs. FPTP doesn’t work that way and it’s entirely possible for the two factors above to lead to a stasis or even small gain in Labour MPs (an increase in the Lib Dem vote usually benefits Labour as it takes votes from the Tories). But if this was combined with a drop in Tory MPs and rise in Lib Dem MPs, it might deprive the Tories of power.
The other scenario – also possible under FPTP – is that the Tory loss of votes to the Lib Dems is balanced by a Labour loss of votes to the Greens or to non-voting. Leaving the Tories in power with a slightly reduced majority.
Only under FPTP could a party loses so many votes and stay in power. PR Now!
“‘Quality candidate’ spin can’t replace community involvement and activism…”
“But does Starmer’s Labour want to learn?”
I think there will be many of us, waiting – with bated breath – for an answer to Rosie’s question.
Sadly, there will be many of those waiting, who know the answer, already.
We’re, just, awaiting confirmation.
The Party of the Sleaze vs. the Party of the Smears.
Strange how MSM, especially BBC & Channel 4 have not addressed the Labour Party’s poor turn out, nor analysed reasons why. Criticism of Starmer not allowed?
It’s a bit rich praising the LibDems for not supporting the Tory Covid vote when it is they who enabled the whole Tory disaster to take place.
The comments on Labour are tragically correct.
Paul Seligman (18 Dec., 22.51) has pointed out some weaknesses in the lead article by Rosie Dee. Election buffs may like to dig a bit deeper. Paul is correct that the present Shropshire North or North Shropshire constituency dates from 1983, when the previous Oswestry constituency was extended to include the town of Newport. However from 1997 Newport was removed from the constituency and since then the North Shropshire constituency has had almost exactly the same boundaries as the Oswestry constituency had before 1983. Ever since Labour first stood a candidate for parliament in this area in 1918, only once has the party got fewer votes than in 2021. That was in 1923, when the electorate (which excluded women under 30) was less than 33,000, as compared with the present 82,000.
We are seeing the magic Starmer effect in action. Labour votes just vanish!