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Rafael Behr
On 9 June 1994 there was a byelection in the east London constituency of
Barking. Labour had held the seat since its creation, in 1945, and that wasn’t
about to change. The Tories needed a sacrificial candidate – the kind of
ambitious rookie who can take a beating as an electoral initiation rite. That
punishment was taken by a 37-year-old Theresa May. She came third, with 1,976
votes.
That contest is hardly ancient history, but it still belongs to a different
epoch. For one thing, “safe” Labour seats were safe back then. It was
unimaginable that within a generation the party would be defending
Stoke-on-Trent Central and Copeland in Cumbria as if they were hyper-marginal:
“on a knife-edge”, as Jeremy Corbyn put it to a meeting of his MPs earlier this
week.
The prospect would have seemed still less plausible with the Tories already in
power for seven years. Laws of the electoral cycle stipulated that byelections
are for oppositions to embarrass governments, not the other way around. Labour
may well hold both of the seats it is defending on Thursday. So low have
expectations sunk that Corbyn’s allies could present such a result as heroic
defiance of the odds.
That analysis would comfort only the most committed disciples of the Labour
leader. MPs who have campaigned in Stoke and Copeland say Corbyn is the most
commonly cited obstacle to voting Labour. Among the older generation, whose
ancestral loyalty forbids allegiance to another party, Corbyn is driving
abstention.
The other common factor is that local issues are overriding national arguments.
In Copeland, Labour’s hopes rest on the inability of the Tory candidate to
guarantee that maternity services at West Cumberland hospital will be protected.
Conservative prospects are invested in Corbyn’s historic anti-nuclear stance,
which is radioactive in a seat where Sellafield is the largest employer.
In Stoke, Ukip might capitalise on decaying Labour support, but Paul Nuttall has
blundered into the contest with a carpetbag full of ignorance and cynicism. He
claimed to be living in the area but the address he gave was vacant. In a radio
interview, he could not name the six towns that form the conurbation he seeks to
represent in parliament. Nuttall’s forced retraction of an old claim to have
lost “close personal friends” in the Hillsborough disaster compounds the
impression that he is a slippery opportunist. He turns up in a seat that voted
strongly for Brexit, but to which he has no prior connection, and hopes that by
piping the standard Ukip tunes he can lead a march away from Labour.
Parachuting a favoured candidate into a winnable seat to advance his career is
the sort of thing other parties used to do all the time and now do much less
because it looks arrogant and complacent. For Labour the problem felt more acute
when there were glaring class discrepancies between the London-based
wunderkinder who sought safe seats as stepping stones to a ministerial job and
the voters they ended up representing. Whatever the citizens of Stoke may think
of their outgoing MP, none imagines that Tristram Hunt’s affection for the
Potteries predated his selection as Labour’s candidate there in 2010.
Canvassing for the remain side in last year’s referendum revealed the scale of
the problem. It was not the weight of Eurosceptic opinion that shocked. Nor was
anti-immigration sentiment a surprise: that had been coming up on the doorstep
for years. What struck canvassers in once-safe Labour seats was a feeling that
the referendum was an opportunity to do something at the ballot box that, for
once, could not be ignored. Elections had come and gone before. Promises had
been made and broken. Every few years, the leaflets would drop through the
letterbox. Maybe someone would knock on the door, but they wouldn’t bother on
some estates. The signal was that voting was a duty the loyal Labour-supporting
masses were expected to do by their party. Brexit felt different. It was the
first time that voting seemed to offer big change – and the proof was the ashen
faces of the people who urged no change. It was, as one Labour MP put it, a way
of saying: “Now you have to listen.”
That sentiment has since been bundled up with a story of economic
dissatisfaction. A conventional wisdom has coalesced around the image of leave
voters congregating in areas that were “left behind”: taken for granted in the
boom years and disproportionately afflicted by the bust. In this account the
victims of globalisation sought shelter behind the Brexit barrier when it was
offered.
It is a story that resonates as an analysis of social and political trends. It
works less well for engagement with actual people. The condition of being “left
behind” has become a convenient affliction projected on to diverse voters by
politicians who need simple answers to complex questions.
May and Corbyn disagree on many things, but they share a glib account of
millions tragically marooned on some remote economic shore, and they both cast
themselves as the saviour sailing to the rescue. Neither seems interested in
consulting on the destination. Ukip, meanwhile, looks at the conditions that led
to Brexit as a resource to be mined – a seam of anger running across the
country, regardless of regional contours, that might be converted into
parliamentary seats.
Those attitudes aren’t much less patronising and lazy than the old habits of
neglect that treated safe seats as stepping stones for career politicians. Party
leaders have taken the referendum result, rewritten it in their own words, and
are now declaiming it back at people.
When the results are in from Copeland and Stoke, they will be interpreted to fit
the national stories May and Corbyn already want to tell about the anger of the
left behind, how it manifests itself, and what to do about it. But no one was
left behind. The same people have always been here. The problem is not enough
people listening.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/22/politicians-love-left-behind-cliche-brexit