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LABOUR HUB EDITORS

‘Mapping the Hope’: What next?

Mike Phipps reflects on a day of debate and what the left needs to do now.

JULY 17, 2024

‘Mapping the Hope’, a day-long series of political discussions organised by Lewes CLP on Saturday, was the first grassroots Party gathering to analyse the 2024 general election results. Coming from a long pedigree of events hosted by this local Party, it did not disappoint and the venue was full to capacity.

Rather than stage a left wing echo chamber, the organisers prefer to invite speakers from a broader political spectrum. The morning session showcased Tim Bale, who has written extensively about the Conservative Party, and Christabel Cooper, Research Director at Labour Together.

Tories at the crossroads

Bale addressed the central dilemma facing the Tory Party – whether it should seek to return to the centre ground or move further towards the radical right and focus on the latter’s talking points – not just the ‘war on woke’ and hostility to immigration, but also opposition to Net Zero. If the Tories continue to let their grassroots members have the final say on choosing the party’s leader, they may well shift further to the right. Currently the party is evenly split on whether to merge with Reform UK.

Christabel Cooper crunched through the most salient numbers from this month’s general election, remarking on Labour’s small share of the vote and the low turnout – particularly marked in constituencies with large numbers of young people, ethnic minorities and people who don’t own their own home – all traditional Labour-inclined voters.

One could also mention that an estimated 400,000 people were denied the right to vote because they lacked the relevant identification. The last Tory government introduced this restrictive policy and Labour proposes, with some modifications, to retain it.

Cooper acknowledged that there was considerable evidence of last-minute switching from Labour to the Greens, in view of the widely predicted landslide, and that Labour now has fewer hard-core loyalist voters and more transactional voters, who expect to benefit from a Labour government and will turn away from it if they don’t.

Prepare to be disappointed

Echoing NEC member Mish Rahman’s observation that there are now no  more safe seats, she argued that because many more constituencies are now marginal, Labour will need a strategy to win back votes lost on its left to Independents and Greens. That’s welcome – particularly as Labour’s election strategy seemed to legitimise the concerns of Tory voters, while delegitimising those of the left. But how this can be done without re-empowering the Party’s grassroots looks more difficult to achieve.

One participant said to applause that their CLP had actually asked the leadership team not  to come to their constituency, specifically in order to minimise the electoral threat posed by forces to the left of Labour. This was best neutralised by careful engagement with members in the local community.

Dealing with the threat of Reform also looks problematic. If the Labour apparatus looks at the problem purely from an electoral standpoint, it may simply not bother. Reform came second to Labour in 89 constituencies while the Tories came second to Labour in over 200 seats. So allowing Farage’s crew to continue to split the right wing vote may look like a short-term way forward. However, given the wider threat of far right ideas in Britain and beyond, particularly in shaping the overall political conversation, this would be a foolhardy approach. It also means that Labour would continue to turn its back on some its former voters in the most desperately poor areas of the UK.

If Labour now relies more on floating voters than its hard-core supporters, that suggests it will do more to please the former than the latter. Faithful activists like those who attended this event should prepare to be disappointed, suggested Cooper.

Build alliances

There were different workshops in the afternoon. I attended one with Emma Burnell, founder of the political communications consultancy Political Human. She described herself as “soft left”, although that may be a rather generous epithet for someone who wrote a Guardian piece a few years ago headlined “Rachel Reeves was right – Labour must reduce people’s reliance on benefits”.

Her breezy optimism – that Labour’s 34% of the vote was not too bad in the context of an emerging multiparty system and that not being overwhelmingly popular at the start of its term might be an advantage – seemed at odds with the scale of the task facing the new government and the expectation that it must start delivering quickly if it is to restore political trust. But her emphasis on looking for what we have in common, rather than what divides us,  was welcome, particularly if it means an end to the period of unparalleled factionalism that the Party leadership has lately inflicted on the grassroots.

The final plenary showcased another politically broad platform including Peter Lamb, the new Labour MP for Crawley, which despite its location in the prosperous south has one of the lowest levels of social  mobility in the country, and Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, whose priorities for the new government included the return of Sure Start and and ending the two child benefit cap.

It’s hard to day how permanent some of these goals will be but the left would be unwise not to act on such laudable sentiments and build the widest possible campaigns, as is already underway with the demand to scrap the two child benefit cap.

The left should take heart from the successful campaign to keep Diane Abbott as Labour’s candidate and recognise that when it builds broad coalitions around popular issues it can win the argument. With rumours circulating that Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner could lose control of the New Deal for Working People initiative to the more employer-friendly Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, we are presented with another issue on which the left needs to be  part of a broad campaign alongside the trade unions.

Equally, the Labour left needs to recognise that hundreds of thousands of voters supported platforms to the left of the Party, including some Independents and Greens. What unites the successful candidates – Jeremy Corbyn and the elected Independents, especially – is they all have  deep roots in the communities they represent. These people are our natural allies and, issue by issue, we need to find ways of campaigning alongside them, showing in practice that the Labour left can play a central role in challenging the government and holding it to account.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Inset photo: Final plenary. From left to right: Christine Bayliss, Labour Party PPC ,Bexhill and Battle, 2024; Peter Lamb, Labour MP for Crawley; Chair, Mark Perryman, Lewes CLP, Events Organiser; Polly Toynbee, columnist, the Guardian; Simon Weller, assistant general secretary, ASLEF and TUC General Council member. c/o Labour Hub.