It isn’t easy to try to turn around the fortunes of a political party. Especially when you are busy making daily decisions about running the country, you’ve done badly in a by-election and have local government elections still to come.
It is even harder when there is a reluctance to properly analyse what has gone wrong and to be willing to reset the objectives rather than simply trying to relaunch the marketing strategy.
Trust is desperately easy to lose and extraordinarily hard to win back. These days, there aren’t great banks of voters who are loyal to a party through thick and thin. Cynicism is a much more prevalent attitude among voters.
That means some of the misjudgements of the current government have done damage to their reputation that is going to be exceptionally hard to repair. After years of attacking Tory corruption and sleaze, it should have been obvious that it was a bad idea to accept designer clothes or tickets to events. Even the slightest hint of low standards was a dangerous free gift to those who want us to believe all politicians are the same.
Not accepting gifts is one of the most basic rules of public life and it should have been a central instinct of political survival to avoid any tiny risk of behaving like the last lot.
Labour’s flawed premise
The central problem for the government is, however, not just that it made a few policy mistakes or quickly destroyed any feel-good factor about being new and different. It is that the intellectual underpinning of what it has been trying to do is flawed.
The McSweeney machine seemed convinced that what Britain wanted was a return to the good old days of the Blair government. Even before the new government took office, it was very efficient at getting rid of almost anyone who wanted to be a Labour candidate who had a more radical vision for what the party should be. It was not so efficient when it came to distancing the party from its past mistakes committed when in power.
Anyone trying to forge a fresh connection with an electorate that was hoping for change would not have turned to Mandelson as a close associate. After twice being caught breaking rules, he held a reputation for sleaze and double-dealing which was never going to enhance the credibility of the new team. Yet he was welcomed with open arms as Starmer enthused about the appointment and told us that, to people like him, Mandelson was just Peter.
Misreading the public appetite
This wasn’t a simple misjudgement of a man’s character. It was a misreading of what approach should be taken to governing. The world has changed radically since the days of the Blair government, and that government didn’t leave the public with a good taste in its mouth.
It left office with a reputation for lying in order to drag the country into a very bad war. It left, fairly or unfairly, with an association in the mind of the public with the 2008 financial crisis. Much of the good that was done by that government has been buried under the weight of a reputation for being more interested in the trappings of power than in the principles of the Labour movement.
Too many communities emerged from the long years of a Labour government believing they were more run down than when they started, and then got even more dumped on by the austerity politics typical of the Conservatives.
Labour membership surge under Corbyn
The contrast between a leadership that seemed to be made up of professional politicians and a membership base that was genuinely interested in reviving local communities is the prime reason that Corbyn got elected leader of the party. It is also what inspired the surge in new membership for Labour. Many of those loyal foot soldiers were later willing to stick with Starmer’s leadership before the election. Their hope was that after the precious vase of a new government was carried safely to Downing Street, some of the radical ideas of the Corbyn era would be delivered with a little more competence and clarity than he displayed.
What is happening now is that large numbers of those hopeful people who believed that the new government would be different from Blair’s version of Labour are leaving the party in droves and membership is dropping like a stone. The wider support among the public in opinion polls has similarly plummeted. It is going to be incredibly difficult to change that unless the analysis of what the government is trying to achieve changes, and there are radical policy shifts and a more inclusive approach.
Policies that fail to connect with the public
At the heart of the international policy failures has been the assumption that the best way to deal with Donald Trump was to flatter his ego with a second State visit. At the heart of the domestic policy failure is the negative sentiment in those neglected communities that so many members and voters want to see transformed.
Urban regeneration used to be front and centre of everything Labour stood for. This time around, it is not coming across loud and clear as a central passion. The impression of many is that the aim is to cover green fields with executive houses, not to uplift the backstreets of Bradford.
Those who are still loyal to Labour will no doubt point to some genuine attempts to help those communities. Those who are flocking to Reform UK Limited or the Greens are not convinced by Labour and won’t be until the drive to fix those communities is the focus of almost everything the government is doing.
Too many sections of the public are not convinced that the government is working to protect their best interests. That is particularly true of young people struggling to pay sky-high student loan interest and looking at house prices that are out of reach for anyone who has an average job and no family money to back them up.
Labour needs to change
A relaunch needs to involve policies that convince two key groups of voters: middle-income young people who are looking for more hope, and working-class communities who don’t currently believe the party is fighting for them. A change of leader won’t achieve that if there isn’t a change of policy.
It remains open to question whether the Labour Party is capable of making the necessary transition. While it is still captured by those who admire the political thinking of the Mandelson–Blair era, further decline is more likely than a recovery of popularity.
