Phil Edwards explores six possible reasons for the current Labour leadership’s politics, strategy and behaviour. A Labour Hub long read.

The Labour Party’s account on X tweeted 21 times in the first week of September. Five tweets are positive: one about how the government’s “delivering”, plus a four-tweet thread about support for families. One tweet attacks the Tories for their record on asylum-seekers; one attacks the Greens for being anti-NATO.

The other fourteen – two-thirds of the total – are attacking Nigel Farage; not on policy grounds, but for being “unpatriotic” and for being “all complaints, no answers”. There’s even a link to a website from which you can download a fake ‘Reform manifesto’, highlighting gaps and contradictions in what Farage and other Reform representatives have said (the document’s called “no-idea.pdf”). Would a Reform government round up and intern immigrant women and children, or just the men? Would they send British prisoners serving life sentences to El Salvador, or just to Estonia? We don’t know! Silly old Nigel, he doesn’t seem to know either!

The idea seems to be that Reform-leaning voters, having been suckered into downloading what purports to be a leaked copy of Reform’s manifesto, will read several pages of ‘well they say this now, but they saidthis before’ and decide not to risk voting for them. This seems, frankly, unlikely. Catching people out in changing their answers is a favourite pastime for lobby journalists, but for most of us it’s not that big a deal. And what the document rather conspicuously fails to do is highlight the horrors of the policies Farage is (probably quite deliberately) being vague about. It ends with “20 Questions for Reform”, all of which are requests for clarification on what Reform would do and how they would do it.

I initially thought this stuff was crying out for parody (where would they even get all that Zyklon-B?), but on reflection it’s quite bad enough as it is. Apparently the Labour Party would have no problem with a plan to intern undocumented migrants, just as long as it was detailed and fully costed.

Why are they like this? When Farage proposed deporting Afghan refugees into the arms of the Taliban, why was it left to the Greens to point out what an appalling proposal this was? Why does Labour keep responding to far-right provocations with ‘yes-and’ answers – ‘yes, people don’t like asylum hotels, and Labour are going to shut them down’; ‘yes, we love the flag too, it brings us all together’. We’ll shut them down by speeding up the asylum process, you understand. The flag brings us all together – not just white people, do you see? Oh, you’ve stopped listening. Never mind.

Labour is handing the ideological agenda to Reform UK. Why? Why is Zack Polanski the only prominent British politician to say publicly that Britain needs immigration, that asylum seekers are a small minority of migrants and that most of them have a valid claim to, well, asylum? Why is Labour at best vitiating its fightback against Reform UK with excessive caution – at worst, tacitly endorsing Reform UK and hoping to win on ‘competency’ points? It’s certainly not because it’s working – Labour’s polling has dropped 13% since the 2024 election, and that’s from a level of 34%. The leadership includes people who like to be known as pragmatic, even cynical, in their ruthless focus on building Labour support – but if they were half of that they would have changed course months ago. Whatever the strategy is, they must really believe in it.

But what is it? Here are six possibilities.

1. This Is What They’re Like

Q: Why is Labour in government so disappointing?
A: Why were you expecting anything better?

It’s a strong argument. From April 2020 to July 2024, Keir Starmer suggested clearly and repeatedly that he would be leading a right-wing government. It was frequently argued that this was tactical: it was the price Labour had to pay to win back voters who had deserted Labour in 2019, or to avoid being monstered by the Tory press, or to win Tory seats, or…

Whatever the specifics, the rationale was the same: trim to the right tactically, win the election, govern strategically from the left! But there was – and is – very little evidence of the reforming centre-left agenda which the right-wing tactics would supposedly make possible. It’s much simpler to conclude that a right-wing government always was the goal: that the summit of Starmer’s ambition was a government that cut public spending, cracked down on disorder and wrapped itself in the Union Jack – like British governments generally do – but with him in Number Ten.

So that’s Answer 1: they’re being generally very right-wing because they are generally very right-wing.

There’s obviously a lot in this, at least as far as the classic Conservative / Labour right agenda is concerned – national security and economic growth first, everything else second. The government’s proposals to gut environmental protection laws, for example, fit right into this template. But the kind of nationalistic fervour we’re seeing now, with street-level mobilisation against immigrants in general and refugees in particular, has never been mainstream. Both Labour and the Tories have a long record of opposing this kind of politics and denouncing those who try to exploit it, both outside and inside their own parties. What’s changed?

2. No One Driving

One explanation is non-political, resting on the state of the Labour leadership – in particular, its unusual dedication to top-down managerial control. The effects of this culture are amplified by a lack of experience of senior-level responsibility among the people involved, and in some cases a lack of capacity for flexible and independent thought. Unless Keir Starmer (or someone speaking authoritatively for him) has spoken, Labour’s comms people literally don’t know what to say – and they either don’t feel able to fill in off their own bat or don’t dare. Hence the recent non-response to Farage: nobody had said that Labour wouldn’t send Afghan refugees back to the Taliban, after all, so the only safe option was to say nothing.

Answer 2: they’re not saying anything to oppose the right because they aren’t saying anything at all.

Again, I think there’s a lot in this; I wish I didn’t, because it suggests that the Labour leadership is in a deeply unhealthy state, in need of renewal for capacity-building as well as cultural reasons. But it can’t be a complete explanation. To see why not, suppose that, with Starmer temporarily unavailable, Labour were asked to respond to a statement by Jeremy Corbyn advocating that Britain leave NATO. Do we really think that ‘Labour sources’ would say nothing in response, or reply with banalities about what it would all cost?

There’s no possibility of Labour endorsing anything coming from Corbyn, and nothing to be lost by shooting it down in flames. But apparently this isn’t the case for Nigel Farage. Why not?

3. Drifting, Drifting (just not drifting left)

Another problem with the Labour leadership’s evident lack of capacity for government is that it deprives the government of any overall direction – and in the absence of direction, governments are liable to drift. But not, necessarily, in just any direction. Prominent members of the current Labour leadership spent anything up to four years working to undermine the then leadership of the Party. The experience will have hammered home something which was already a fairly strong element of Labour right culture: hatred of the left.

Crucially, this is a hatred of both the left as people and the left as a tendency. Labour’s leaked report – documenting the culture among Labour’s permanent staff in the Corbyn years – is informative. A Labour staffer could be labelled a ‘Trot’, not because he’d voted for Corbyn in the 2015 leadership election, but because he hadn’t voted for Liz Kendall.

In a group united by hatred of the left, you don’t ever want to be the furthest-left person – in the group, in the room, in the conversation. More to the point, you don’t want to give anyone any reason for saying you’re further left than they are. But this means that ‘going left’ is taboo, in any situation – talking about policy very much included. So, in policy terms, having gone right once, you’re likely to go right again – and to go further right. If any movement to the left is precluded, even directionless drift and random responses to events will translate into a slow but steady march to the right.

Answer 3: they’re going right because they can’t go left.

If this is the case, the Labour Party’s basically a lost cause. But it’s not a complete explanation: the march rightwards is going further and faster – and more enthusiastically – in some areas than others. Specifically, the areas most strongly associated with Reform UK.

4. Split the Vote, Win the Vote (or: re-fighting the last election)

During the last election campaign we heard a lot about ‘hero voters’, the bizarre and frankly rather distasteful label for (2019) Tory voters who were prepared to vote Labour in Conservative seats. Targeting these voters led to Labour seats – and Labour voters – being neglected, resulting in some safe seats becoming considerably less safe or even being lost; this was spun after the fact as ‘vote efficiency’, as if positively repelling voters in Islington and Leicester had always been part of the plan.

But in any case, those ‘hero voter’ Labour gains from the Tories – even without the losses to independents – wouldn’t have been anywhere near enough to win the election. If the Tories had only lost votes to Labour, only 20 to 30 of Labour’s gains from the Tories in England would still have changed hands; something similar but less extreme applies to the Lib Dems. In other words, if ‘hero voters’ had been the story of the 2024 election, Labour would have made 55-60 net gains (most of them outside England); the Lib Dems would have made 30-odd gains instead of 64, and the Tories only around 50 losses. This would have put Labour in the mid-260s in terms of seats and taken the Tories down to the 300s, leaving them as the largest single party but without a majority – 2017 all over again, eh?

In reality, Labour made 211 net gains and the Tories 251 losses: something else was working harder. Two things, in fact: Tory losses to abstention and to Reform UK. The Tory vote was down overall by seven million, only half of which went to Reform UK; most of the remainder, we can be reasonably confident, stayed at home (there were some Tory-Labour switchers, but not very many in the scheme of things; Labour’s total vote was actually slightly down on 2019). A few Tory seats were lost to Reform, but their effect was nugatory, particularly given Reform UK’s indifference to Parliament.

The split in the right vote – and its weakness as a whole (the lowest since 2005) – enabled Labour to get a landslide out of what was also a very low vote. In many cases, Labour made gains while taking fewer votes than they had taken in the same constituency in 2019. (Hyndburn 2019: Labour vote 41.5%, down 12% since 2017; Labour loss. Hyndburn 2024: Labour vote 33.5%, down 8% since 2019; Labour gain. Work that one out.)

So, like the emergence of the ‘efficient vote’ line, I wonder if Labour’s reluctance to attack Reform UK during the election campaign was a tactical response to feedback on how the campaign was going. And I wonder if, given the undeniable fact that the 2024 election resulted in a Labour landslide, it’s now received wisdom in leadership circles that that’s how you beat the Tories: not by poaching right-leaning voters from them, but by creating the conditions for Reform UK to do so, ensuring that the right vote stays split.

Answer 4: they’re not risking boosting Reform UK and its agenda, they’re deliberately boosting them.

This would be an appalling strategy for Labour to adopt – not so much unscrupulous as immoral, and self-defeating for Labour in any but the shortest possible term.

But if this is the approach being adopted by the leadership, it’s surely time for a reassessment. Standing back (at best) while Reform UK made inroads into Tory territory might have won one election, but it’s not going to win another. Apart from anything else, the conditions have changed – thanks in part to this strategy from Labour. The right vote is steadily regaining strength and steadily becoming less split – and more dominated by Farage.

Is that really what the Labour leadership want? Or do they still think Labour could retrieve the situation by moving further right?

5. In Search of Lost Heartlands (or: re-fighting the last election but one)

In 2019, Labour lost 60 seats, 48 of them in England. In 2017 Labour made 27 gains in England (36 total) but also six losses. Yes, there were losses – and all of them in places that were Labour strongholds (Copeland), industrial heartlands (Mansfield) or at any rate definitely up north somewhere (Walsall). This is presumably why, in the run-up to the 2024 election, Keir Starmer talked repeatedly about winning back the voters Labour had lost “over the last two elections” (despite having previously said that Corbyn’s legacy was something to build on.)

The myth of the Red Wall (TINRW) purported to explain what had happened: the 2019 election had supposedly been lost by a surge of previously-loyal Labour voters to the Tories, their ‘social conservatism’ overcoming their waning class loyalties (and presumably those six losses in 2017 had led the way). It’s true that Labour lost a lot of seats in 2019, many of them in surprising places – or at least, what look like surprising places when viewed from London and without looking too closely at their electoral history. And it is true that there are some previously-solid Labour constituencies where Labour lost particularly heavily – 17 of them by my count; a less right-on Labour Party might, perhaps, have held those seats. But the numbers alone say that this was a small part of the story of 2019. The Tories only needed nine seats for an absolute majority; a Labour strategy that saved those ‘Red Wall’ seats, and lost the other 43, would still have led to a crushing defeat.

I think the ‘Red Wall’ myth flourished not only because it helped pin the defeat on Jeremy Corbyn, but because it played into a belief that’s endemic on the right of the party: that Labour voters are fundamentally right-wing. Real Labour voters, that is; traditional Labour voters, ‘our people’. Not so much on the ‘bosses and workers’ front or on schools and the NHS and the old age pension, but… well, everything else, anti-social behaviour, immigration, human rights. For Labour to lose sixty seats while led by someone who challenged this world view – not only by speaking out on those supposedly taboo subjects but by maintaining that ordinary working people were actually with him – was a dream come true. (Nightmare, I mean. Obviously.)

How to get those losses back? If there was a group of issues on which long-time Labour voters were likely to lean right, it could make sense to tiptoe around those areas, while attacking the Tories on everything else and promoting Labour policies as a positive alternative. But this could only work while three conditions held: the list of ‘culture war’ issues was reasonably short; the Tory Party was on the same side of the ‘culture war’ as Labour; and the Tories dominated the right. Unfortunately, the first of these conditions ceased to apply a long time ago – anything can be a ‘culture war’ issue, and many things now are. The second was already fraying under Thatcher, and disintegrated completely under Johnson.

So Labour under Starmer shifted to a strategy of trying to own the right pole of those divisive issues – raising the flag, supporting our troops. In the name of appealing to former Labour voters, this handed the ideological agenda to the Tories, pre-emptively neutering Labour’s attacks on them, or confining them to issues of competence and delivery.

But there was worse to come. The idea, remember, wasn’t that long-time Labour voters held centre-right views – if they did they’d just vote Tory. The assumption was always that ‘our people’ held far-right views – views that weren’t being expressed anywhere on the mainstream political spectrum. Until they were. An organised, articulate, seemingly popular far-right party is Kryptonite to this kind of Labour right mentality: Labour can’t mount any kind of ideological challenge to it, because it’s where our people are. Our voters aren’t on the Left – 2019 proved that (actually we always knew that). So if they’ve deserted us, we can’t go left to get them – we’ll have to go right. How far right? However far it takes!

Answer 5: they’re moving on to Reform UK territory because they think the right is where the (real, traditional) Labour voters are.

Or is it more cynical than that?

6. Taking Rainy Fascist Island (By Strategy) (or: re-fighting the last election but two)

If you talk to anyone on the Labour left about the 2017 election, you’ll be reminded that Labour made 30 net gains – the best performance for a Labour opposition since 1997 – and increased their vote share by 9%, taking 3 million more votes than in 2015. If you talk to anyone on the Labour right about the 2017 election, on the other hand, you’ll be reminded that Labour didn’t actually win. If you can find anyone else who remembers that election, they’ll probably mention the Tories’ appalling campaign – the dementia tax, the coughing fit, the letters falling off the wall…

What nobody usually mentions, due to it not really suiting anyone’s agenda, is that on some measures the Tories in 2017 did extremely well. The Conservative Party in 2017 took 13.6 million votes, 42.3% of the vote – up from 11.3 million and 36.9% in 2015. This was the party’s highest vote since 1987 and its highest vote share since 1983; indeed, 13.6 million was more votes than Labour took in 1997, the year of Tony Blair’s landslide victory. The question of why this huge rise in votes didn’t translate into seat gains has a twin, the question of why Labour’s 40% and 12.9 million votes didn’t translate into a Labour victory (compare 2024: 33.7%, 9.7 million, 211 net gains). Labour were too strong for the Tories not to make losses, but the Tories were too strong for Labour to win.

So there’s another thing that nobody ever says about 2017: the problem with Corbynism wasn’t that it was unpopular; the problem was that it was polarising. Attracting 3 million voters to Labour ought to have been enough – but it won’t be if you’re also motivating two million more people to vote Tory. I wonder if that’s what’s going on now: if Labour strategists have quietly – and belatedly – learnt the real lesson of 2017, particularly when compared to 1997 (when Labour’s vote was up two million compared to 1992, but the Tory vote was down 4.5 million).

To win from opposition Labour need to encourage their supporters but also discourage the right’s – don’t make them think they’re in a battle with the left, make them think it doesn’t make much odds whether they vote or not. New Labour did this by emphasising all the common ground they had with Conservatism, and the extent to which they’d made a break with ‘old’ Labour values. Now, however, the right is dominated by Reform UK, so repeating those formulae (support for business, no opposition to NATO, etc) will only do half a job. Like it or not, depolarising the next election is going to mean Labour talking the same language as Farage – and reassuring his followers that they’ve got nothing to lose by voting Labour, or by staying at home.

Answer 6: they’re moving on to Reform UK territory because Reform UK now dominate the right, and that’s the only way to avoid the next election being fought as a left-right battle which the left is bound to lose.

Answers 5 and 6 both suggest that Labour is deliberately adopting Reform UK’s agenda, either in search of their lost (‘culturally conservative’) voters or in a bid to make the next election less polarised and hence easier for Labour to dominate. So, will it work?

Firstly, what kind of question is that? Will it work for Labour to repeat far-right talking points and adopt the far right’s policy agenda? Never mind whether it would work, it’s a truly terrible idea. Secondly, no, it can’t possibly work. Farage supporters don’t have a list of policy priorities, they have a list of grievances, things that aren’t good enough – and a leader who amplifies those grievances and suggests new ones. You can’t reassure people when they don’t want reassurance – least of all when you personally are one of the things they’re aggrieved about.

If Labour did move on to Farage’s turf, all that would happen would be that Farage would promptly outflank them on the right, while the likes of Rupert Lowe and Ant Middleton scrambled to outflank him. The Labour leadership’s apparent confidence that the Party can annexe the Reform UK agenda without Farage simply shifting further right makes them seem bizarrely naïve, if not downright stupid.

But none of this is as important as the point I started with. If this strategy failed, it would be a terrible idea and put Labour in a really bad place – whereas if it worked, it would be a terrible idea and put Labour in a really bad place.

Why Are They Like This?

Reviewing the candidate answers above, I think it’s true that the government is run by right-wingers (answer 1). People like Reeves, Streeting and Kendall have never made any secret of their priorities; as for Keir Starmer, while it’s certainly not true that he’s never claimed to be left-wing, since being elected leader of the Party he’s made very few concessions to the left. I also think it’s true that the larger government and Labour Party apparats are characterised by control-freakery and populated by people happy to be subjected to it (answer 2), and that making their bones fighting the left has left them incapable of giving a left-wing answer to a right-wing challenge (answer 3), even when that’s what’s needed.

All of that would give us a borderline-incompetent government, obsessed with Labour right shibboleths such as NATO and free enterprise, quick to denounce any attack from the left but strangely wooden in responding to the right. But if we’re specifically looking at how the government chases Reform UK to the (far) right, we need some more factors.

The remaining possibilities are rather less flattering. I think Labour strategists did see the rise in the Reform UK vote during the 2024 election campaign and broadly welcome it, on the grounds that it would drive the Tory vote down (as indeed it did). I think it’s also more than possible that this strategy is still basically in place (answer 4), either on the grounds that Reform UK, being more extreme than the Tories, are easier for Labour to fight, or just because nobody’s told them to stop it yet (see also answer 2). This reckless cynicism and electoral opportunism, in the face of resurgent fascism, would be quite unforgivable.

I also think that the Labour right do tend to think of the core Labour vote as white working-class reactionaries, who need to be appeased from time to time by throwing them a bone on issues like immigration. This would lead logically to reading the 2019 result exclusively through the Red Wall myth – and reading the rise of the Reform UK vote since the 2024 election as evidence that Labour’s core voters have deserted them (again!), and need to be courted by ever more concessions on the issues Reform UK has made its own (answer 5).

Believing that your own voters have repugnant views, and not challenging them, is a bad look (see the comments here on Labour seats with substantial BNP votes in 2005 and 2010); pandering to those views opportunistically is even worse. But turning pandering to racists into strategy – dragging the Labour Party onto extreme right territory, in the face of very strong evidence that a winning left-wing coalition is possible – is truly disgusting. Nor is it any less disgusting if it’s done out of electoralist calculation (answer 6).

Whether any one, or more, of answers 4-6 is plausible – and which one(s) – really depends on just how low your estimation of the current Labour leadership is. I recently learned that Peter Mandelson “has reportedly remained a mentor and friend to [Morgan] McSweeney” – something I don’t recall ever being ‘reported’ before, even when the spotlight was turned on McSweeney – so mine is very low indeed.

But I still haven’t answered the question: why are they like this? Promoting the worst enemy of your party and its supporters so as to damage the second worst enemy (answer 4), abandoning established policies and fundamental principles to gain votes (answer 5) or adopting far-right policies so as to defeat a far-Right party (answer 6): they all have something in common. What they have in common is cynicism: a cynically instrumental approach to politics, and to political policies and programmes, and to political ideologies.

This is a damning judgment in itself – if that’s your attitude to politics, what the hell are you doing in politics? It’s also incredibly dangerous.

In this post from 2020 I argued that different Labour leaderships have articulated different ideologies, and combinations of ideologies; in the case of Jeremy Corbyn, the key ideologies were “an ideology of human equality, of every person (anywhere in the world) mattering as much as any other; and an ideology of constructive empowerment, of mobilising people to make the world a better place.”

Starmer, I suggested, was flirting with “something close to the diametric opposite of the ideologies Labour upheld under Corbyn… yes to patriotism, tradition, the armed forces and support for pensioners; no to internationalism, cultural innovation, human rights lawyers and hand-outs for scroungers.”

I went on to argue that Starmer might not want to own or promote that discourse, just to mimic it and borrow some of its appeal for his own political project – but that what he wanted didn’t really matter.

One final, perversely optimistic note: what I didn’t anticipate at the time was how unpopular such a Labour Party would be; when I wrote that post Labour were averaging 39% in the polls (Conservatives 40%, Reform UK 2%). After the 2024 election I wrote a post-mortem concluding presciently:

“I fear that we’re heading for a Britain with three main parties, all of them wrapped in flags and all of them competing for the votes of people who remember proper binmen. And Labour probably won’t even be the biggest one.”

But even then Labour were averaging 33% in the polls (Conservatives 22%, Reform UK 19%). Labour’s seven-day polling average hit 20.3% at the end of August, and hasn’t recovered much since. 20.3% is the lowest seven-day average since June 2019, when three polls in a row put Labour on 19% or 20%; this was the time of the last Euro elections, with the Brexit Party and the Lib Dems both riding high. Other than that brief and anomalous episode, Labour’s polling performance has never been as bad as this; not under Corbyn, not under Michael Foot. Whatever it is they’re selling, people aren’t buying.

A change of course is surely going to come – even if it’s not under the current leadership.

Phil Edwards is a Visiting Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University. This is a slightly edited version of his blog post which first appeared here.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/54718893193/. Creator: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Str | Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Str Copyright: Crown copyright. Licensed under the Open Government Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Deed