Labour’s election campaign: it was the soft left what (almost) won it

Labour’s strong showing in the general election was built on a partnership between Corbynism and the wider Labour Party: together this added up to a triumph for the soft left. (Recut from an original post, with revised coverage of progressive alliances, and the importance of a Lib Dem revival to split the Tory vote, at the Renewal blog.)

Let us take a moment to marvel at Labour’s general election campaign. Starting out 17 percentage points behind the Conservatives, Labour finished with a gap of a mere 2.4 points. Jeremy Corbyn ended up increasing Labour’s share of the vote more than any leader at any election since Atlee, and reaching a level of national support not recorded since Blair in 2001.

It certainly didn’t feel like this at the beginning of the campaign. On a personal note, within hours of the general election’s being called, I’d heard three different reasons for not voting Labour. One neighbour told me she wasn’t going to vote Labour because it was too close to favouring a hard Brexit. It seemed to make no odds to her that her local MP had defied Jeremy Corbyn’s whip, and voted against the triggering of Article 50. Another friend said she felt she couldn’t vote Labour because her local MP had been part of the PLP “coup” — even though, having joined the party to vote for Jeremy, her side had won. Then, out canvassing that evening, I heard a Labour supporter tell us he couldn’t vote for the party while Corbyn was leader, because of his stance towards the IRA.

So many reasons not to vote Labour, and all from different vantage points of the moral high ground. At last, I thought, we’ve reached the circular firing squad stage of Labour politics. Like a body’s immune system turning on itself, so the left’s commitment to moralised politics was going to be its undoing, rival encodings of political morality seeking out and destroying each other.

But then in a quite remarkable phenomenon, Labour’s divisions — over Brexit, over Corbyn — melted away. Again on a personal note, knocking up on election day I noticed a more emotional affirmation of Labour-voting than I had detected in 2015, 2010, 2005, or 2001 for that matter. The base (in London, at least) was enthused. Labour’s crowd-pleasing manifesto, combined with a Tory campaign that was both inept and which almost went out of its way not to offer hope to anyone, had given people an emotional cause to support.

What actually happened to Labour during that campaign? There were two big developments. The biggest was the manifesto. This may have been designed more as an album of catchy tunes than a set of policies that were all intended to be delivered. But crucially it gave people a reason to vote Labour, and focused on using the state to deliver on bread-and-butter issues they could easily relate to. As Ben Jackson has noted, these were conventional (if bold) social democratic policies, not hard left hobbyhorses. On top of this, the Party then gave people permission to vote Labour, by finally taking presentation seriously again. Talk of deselections was silenced, as was briefing against the leader. Jeremy Corbyn began to play by the rules of electoral politics, sharpening his image, drilling for debates, and tailoring his messages to a mainstream audience — even talking tough on security. Finally, he made good, spectacularly, on his promise to enthuse the youth vote.

One of the biggest concerns voiced (not least, by myself) about Corbyn’s leadership was that it heralded a hard left takeover of the Labour Party, one that would fatally cripple it. There were two main dimensions to these concerns: one, the hard left was morally contemptible in its backing for repressive regimes and armed groups wherever these opposed the West; two, it would alienate voters through its abrasive and divisive class politics — in fact it would positively not want to win elections out of a radically anti-hierarchical suspicion of ‘power’.

Since the election, a number of Corbyn’s critics have said that the second was always their main concern. But in this respect, some have despaired, both at the size of the national vote for a hard left candidate, and at the support which Labour backbenchers have given him in its wake. I part company with them at this point, mainly because I still hold to the analysis which says the hard left is electoral poison. That is to say: Labour did not get to 40 per cent of the vote on the back of a hard left ticket. Most people did not perceive Corbyn, or the party he led, in this way. The manifesto offered people a broadly soft left platform, and this proved popular. That Labour did well at this election does not invalidate the first concern about the hard left; and this also means it did not invalidate the second. Or rather, that there is no need to recoil at Labour’s having done well, out of a sense this meant a mass endorsement of dodgy hard left moral relativism. It didn’t.

What we saw in the campaign was something like a merger between Corbyn and the PLP, in which Corbyn moderated his politics — itself making him, as someone observed, the most spun politician of his generation. But what he retained — and what I, in common with so many, had underestimated — was an ability to connect to large swathes of, mostly young, people who felt radically disenfranchised. For them, this mood music was at least as important as the social democratic policies in the manifesto; and while there’s no sign that Corbynism has any answers for their condition, his empathy with the disaffected itself offers the positive possibility of a bridgehead of new ideas into mainstream politics.

In its Corbynist guise, the Labour Party took over the anti-Tory but non-Labour vote: it became its own Progressive Alliance. Meanwhile, in putting forward that manifesto and beginning to tailor its message for a middle of the road electorate, the Party suddenly saw the rebirth of the principled but pragmatic soft left. A move in step with the times, perhaps, given the relaunch of the Tribune Group of MPs.

Political psychologists stress the importance of warmth and competence as the dimensions in which others are perceived and leaders are judged. Corbyn has now successfully decontaminated the Labour brand on the left (and regardless of what those on the anti-fascist left think about this, for a large constituency of Labour’s vote, this was their experience). Labour once again owns the perceived dimension of warmth. It still needs to work on its competence, and it certainly remains to be seen how much further Labour will improve in this direction post-campaign — as it remains to be seen how bad things get under this Tory minority government, against which it will be judged in comparison. In any case, a soft left framework is precisely that which looks to balance warmth and competence, and, if maintained beyond the recent election, offers Labour — and the country — some cause for hope.

The most important thing now is for those on the soft left to claim this victory as their own and build on it from here on — with a new mindset both mainstream and radical, based on a confidence to apply real imagination in aid of the politically and economically dispossessed.