The road to Downing Street will only be secured by winning back Conservative swing voters
With Labour’s leadership contest now firmly underway, those vying for the top job would do well to sit down and read a sober analysis of the mountain that the party has to climb to get back into government in 2020.
Prepared by Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabian Society, ‘The mountain to climb: Labour’s 2020 challenge’ outlines the scale of the task facing the party.
Firstly, on the basis that the Conservatives proceed with plans to cut the number of seats in the Commons, based on the 2013 boundary review, Harrop concludes that Labour would need to pick up an additional 106 seats in order to gain a majority of one. (N.B for ease of comparison the report has ‘scaled-up these projections, to assume the new House of Commons retains 650 constituencies’.)
When looking at seats by order of majority, seat 106 would be taking back Gordon Brown’s former constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. Somewhat soberly, however, the analysis adds:
“This estimate could be over-optimistic for Labour, as the new boundary review which will commence this December could prove even less favourable than the last one (particularly because it will be expected to equalise the number of electors on the basis of the new electoral roll, following the introduction of individual registration). So 106 gains is the minimum that might be needed for victory, compared to the 68 that Labour needed for a majority this year.”
Secondly, Labour’s 35 per cent strategy during the General Election campaign is well and truly shredded. According to Harrop, to form a majority government of one Labour would need a universal swing of 9.5 percentage points as opposed to the 4.6 point swing that was required this year. This would mean Labour needing to secure around 40 per cent of the vote share. The report notes:
“In 2005 Labour won a 66 seat majority with 35 per cent of the vote, while now it may well need 40 per cent to have any majority at all. By contrast, after the boundary changes, the Conservatives will be able to retain their majority with around 36 per cent of the vote.”
But all of this is predicated on an improvement in fortunes across the UK as a whole. If Scottish Labour were to make no inroads into the SNP at all, with all 106 seats needed having to be picked up in England, Labour would need a swing of around 11.5 percentage points in key marginal seats.
Thirdly, the road to Downing Street will only be secured by winning back Conservative swing voters. As the report notes, the opportunities to pick up Lib Dem, Green and disgruntled UKIP voters are limited. As it explains, unlike in 2015, ‘there appear to be few opportunities to benefit from the misfortunes’.
Whilst the number crunching suggests that eliminating a Conservative majority to achieve a hung Parliament looks ‘relatively achievable…the task of winning a UK Labour majority will be very difficult’.
Based on this report, ‘very difficult’ looks to be at the more optimistic end of the language that could be used to describe Labour’s predicament.
Ed Jacobs is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
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30 Responses to “New analysis points to scale of Labour’s challenge”
Ian
Fabians Say Go Right Shock.
Enough of this disingenuous horseshit already. Labour have been losing votes since 2001. The more rightwards they moved, the more votes they lost. The answer to Labour’s predicament is so obvious, all this wailing and gnashing of teeth and faux soul-searching is pathetic.
Besides, to win Tory voters you need Tory policies, if you have Tory policies you become another Tory party thus rendering Labour a flaccid irrelevance; we already have one Tory party and one other Tory imitator.
You have to wonder why Blue Labour types are in politics in the first place if they’re willing to sell their ideals down the river just to gain power and do nothing socially useful with it, assuming the modern crop of careerist PPEs ave any ideals to speak of. If they’re going to behave like Conservatives in government – and they definitely will with Tory policies – then why not just leave the Conservatives to it and do something more constructive with their time, like using their Oxbridge connections to get overpaid jobs at the BBC or something else that requires minimal talent and even fewer scruples than politics?
If all Labour want to do is govern, from the right or left, whichever is expedient, then these people need to step aside. Power for its own sake is nothing more than a self-serving career move. Grabbing power under the banner of the Labour Party only to behave like Tories is downright dishonest. People have certain expectations of Labour and acting like Conservatives shouldn’t be one of them.
I don’t know why Blue/New Labour people joined the party in the first place, from what they say they are Conservative to their nasty little cores. They don’t stand for Labour values, no matter how much they might protest, and so they should cross the floor of the house and fight by-elections against actual Labour people who, unlike Umunna, Burnham and the rest, believe in what Labour stands for.
See what happens then.
Torybushhug
The SNP have the plucky outsiders, anti London, grievence factor to tap into, not things available to Labour. Also the scots are a tiny population and socialist leaning. Even ordinary Svots talk in that curious on message sound bite middle managerial manner. The English are quite different and dislike puritans and auto-bot narratives.
Labour personalities all sound like hectoring know it all puritans and family abstract to boot. Can’t see them doing well in England for many a year. The English are not so easily taken in by abstract middle managerial lefty diatribes.
Torybushhug
Labour won on a tiny 8.6m votes in 2005 compared to the Tories well over 11 m this time.
Since 1974 no labour leader other than Blair has won power. I hope you lurch to the left and talk amongst yourselves for milenia as the left always ruins BritIain aside from the NHS which the Tories supported in 1945 anyway.
Torybushhug
Something that perplexes us righties is why you true lefties stick with Labour instead of starting or backing your own UKIP style ground up movement? Are you afraid or just rubbish at people’s movements?
Get an army of white van men embracing your cultural enrichment argument, happy to compete with self employed Bulgarians that work for halve price for people just like you.
BTW Labours decline since 2001 is down to people’s personal experience of mass welfare culture ( the DM caught up with real world public experience years later) and mass immigration. One day you will peak under the cover and find reality.
Ian
First point is down to blind faith and tribalism, probably. And re Labour’s decline; it has nothing to do with welfare culture because that doesn’t really exist, the the Tories have managed to convince many it does. Immigration will be one issue but that’s another misdirection. Labour under Blair and Brown never addressed the concerns of their cor supporters, they even seemed embarrassed by having provincial beer-drinkers among their supporters (remember how uncomfortable His Tonyness was drinking a pint in photo ops?). Wages stagnated and declined under Labour just as they have under the current shower, social mobility declined, identity politics was a replacement for left wing politics; identity politics isn’y an entirely bad thing but Labour’s version was deeply middle class, more about getting more women and ethnic minorities in the boardroom than dealing with broader inequality. All Labour wanted to do was redistribute the inequality in a more representative fashion…
I’ve gone off on one again. Oops.