Spotlight recently published a couple of articles that were critical of Labour’s poor performance under the centrist leadership of Sir Keir Rodney Starmer. Both articles were generally well received but they also attracted some rather dismissive responses from Labour centrists who made a number of arguments that I’ve decided are important enough to respond to.
ALLEGATION: “Starmer’s more popular than Boris Johnson”
Some Labour centrists felt the need to directly defend Starmer’s leadership, suggesting that while the polling data we presented in the earlier articles showed a decline in people’s voting intentions (centrist believe it to be a temporary glitch, even though we provided over 4 months of data), Starmer was still more popular than Boris Johnson. Unfortunately for Labour centrists, having now checked the latest popularity data, I can confirm that this is far from the case…
ALLEGATION: “Boris is riding high because voter’s think he’s doing a good job handing COVID”
Some Labour centrists also argued that the Tories are doing well at the moment because voters think they’re doing a good job of handling the COVID pandemic and so they’re riding on a wave of optimism. This too is a false and naive assumption, as recent YouGov survey reveals the majority of British voters are far from satisfied…
ALLEGATION: “2019 election results show socialism is dead”
I’ve also had a few Labour centrists try to shift focus from Keir Starmer’s poor performance by attacking the left, arguing that a centrist controlled Labour Party still had a better chance of winning elections than one under socialist leadership. They repeatedly cited Labour’s bad performance in 2019 as if this were an argument for dismissing socialism and socialist policies. They seem completely unwilling to acknowledge the fact that the 2019 election had been framed as a 2nd referendum on Brexit or that Labour centrists, like Starmer, had gone against Labour party policy and were openly campaigned for remaining in the EU.Just as with the first referendum, Labour centrists allied themselves with other remain supporting parties like the LibDems, SNP, Greens and ChangeUKto campaign for remaining in the EU, while the Tories and Brexit Parties campaigned to leave. The fact that the Brexit deadline was looming, focused peoples minds even more on this solitary and divisive issue. Whilst the Tories made almost no gains in vote share, the remain alliance did manage to take close to 2 million votes away from the Labour Party. However, despite this fact, the Labour party still achieved a higher vote share in 2019 than they did in 2015 (under Miliband), 2010 (under Brown) and 2005 (under Blair), i.e. when the party was under centrist control…
ALLEGATION: “Corbyn lost the ‘red wall’, which also proves socialism is dead”
Another argument was that Corbyn had lost some imaginary ‘red wall’ of Labour voters. However, nobody seemed to be able to give me an accurate description of what constituted the ‘red wall’ so I decided to do my own research into this. I thought it might be an idea to look at how the political map had changed in this country over the last 5+ decades…
Certainly, when you look at maps from consecutive general elections you can start to see how votes are redistributed and you notice that the map looked a lot redder in 60’s and early 70’s but by the late 70’s there was a significant shift towards the blue. In fact the Tory blue continued to dominate the map throughout the 80’s and 90’s, including while Neil Kinnock was leader. It wasn’t until 1997 when the map would show a significant shift to more red seats. This lasted for a couple of terms, however, by 2005 we had already started to see a drop off in the red vote and by 2010 we had lost whole swathes of areas to the Tories. What a lot of folks don’t appreciate is that by 2010, Labour had lost close to 5 million voters and this was while the party was under centrist control. The map got even bluer in 2015 and, infact, we only started to see a shift back to red in 2017 when the party was under Socialist leadership.
Unfortunately, for Labour centrists, the excuses are now wearing thin as Labour is continuing to perform badly under Starmer’s centrist leadership and the rest of the party membership will no doubt now also be concerned that the party has just 3yrs to deal with internal party factionalism, appoint new leadership and start winning over the hearts and minds of British voters.
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