There is a puzzle at the heart of the Labour Party’s performance in the 2019 general election – one that has left their activists confused, angry and uncertain. Their individual policies are popular, but they are definitely not. Many of their ideas are indeed met with favour among voters, commanding forbidding or even overwhelming majorities in their favour. But they have just been on the end of their worst electoral thumping, at least in seat terms, since before the Second World War. How can this apparent contradiction be explained?

It is a pressing question, because Labour still believes that the actual plans in its manifesto went down well. All of the candidates for leader have been very cautious about condemning the proposals that Jeremy Corbyn put before the electorate. Frontrunner Sir Keir Starmer has talked of the need not to “oversteer” away from Corbyn’s agenda. Corbyn’s handpicked successor, Rebecca Long-Bailey, has highlighted that Labour’s “Green Industrial Revolution” or “Green New Deal” is still at the heart of its programme and argued that the party need only repackage its politics as personal and aspirational to gain a new hearing.

It is a dangerous delusion that a list of outcomes that everyone wants makes for a policy package people will actually vote for

This is a dangerous delusion and it is based on a misconception that hurt Labour more than almost anything else during the short campaign of December 2019: that a list of outcomes that everyone wants makes for a policy package people will actually vote for. If they carry on in this vein, and don’t start to see why their fire sale of fairly naked bribes didn’t work last year, they will likely be on the end of another beating when the polling booths open again in 2024.

Many of Labour’s ideas were and are popular, one reason why it is so easy for Labour politicians and activists to retreat back into their comfort zone. Nationalising the railways, water and the electricity industry; increasing taxes on the better off; giving workers more of a say on companies’ boards: all of them return majorities when pollsters ask about them. Last November, the polling company YouGov showed that 56 per cent of voters are in favour of nationalising the railways (only 22 per cent were against); an even higher 64 per cent liked the idea of raising income tax for very high earners, while a mere 20 per cent opposed the idea.

© Alberto Pezzali/AP/Shutterstock

All this rather ignores the huge elephant in the room: Labour have made very little progress in their share of the vote in a whole decade since they were ejected from office, after 13 years and following a huge financial crisis. Many public services are in crisis; earnings have stagnated. Any opposition, let alone a Labour one committed to more spending and higher wages, should be thriving. Yet the Conservatives and their leader have just trounced them. Seen from that perspective, polling leads on single issues actually mean very little.

The first reason for this apparent contradiction has to do with policies as an overall package rather than a shopping list. It is all very well going out to the country with episodic, isolated ideas that electors might find attractive, quite another telling a story and constructing an emotional and intellectual narrative that might convince them. By the end of the 2019 campaign, many voters simply switched off from Labour’s blizzard of pledges: only 18 per cent told YouGov they thought the Corbyn agenda “realistic”.

Sceptical voters who might have warmed to two or three of these promises alone thought Labour’s policies taken as a whole looked too good to be true

Labour’s frenzied bidding war for public affection simply grew too energetic for their own good. Free university tuition. Free medical prescriptions. Free childcare for two-year olds. Free school meals. Free hospital parking. Free TV licenses. Free broadband internet. Sceptical voters who might have warmed to two or three of these promises alone thought Labour’s policies taken as a whole looked too good to be true. One woman told a focus group organised by the Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft that when she heard about free broadband, she “laughed at that one and moved on”. Other less-than-convincing pledges emerged after the manifesto went to the printers: it was apparently going to cost £58 billon to compensate the so-called Waspi pensioners – women in their sixties who missed out on years of the state pension – and Labour apparently had absolutely no idea how it was going to meet that pledge.

The second critical point to make about any policy offer is that they depend not only on their own overall coherence, but on the credibility of the people making them. Here, Labour seems to have almost no idea what makes for a plausible and respected leader. Corbyn was at one point the most unpopular leader of the opposition in recorded polling history, touching a fairly shocking -60 in one long-established and well-respected Ipsos Mori polling series. Although his numbers improved a little as the campaign wore on, and he was able to mount a strong case against “Tory austerity”, they never threatened to rise as they had during the 2017 campaign.

It was not just Corbyn: Labour’s top team made a conscious decision during the election to promote only the most loyal Corbynites who might be expected to run the party after the likely defeat, and it cost them dearly. Sending out a Richard Burgon or a Rebecca Long-Bailey is simply not as likely to persuade the public as deploying bigger hitters who are more experienced. This is not so much a question of left versus right, more a matter of basic competence and believability. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell, a far more assured and convincing media performer, could only make so many trips to the television and radio studios.

Labour’s entire image is broken. It seems determined to speak to itself, to the fascinations and prejudices of its activists, rather than the voters

Labour’s entire image is broken. It seems determined to speak to itself, to the fascinations and prejudices of its activists, rather than the voters and to put the spotlight on spokespeople who meet with favour among party members. A full 54 per cent of the electorate told Ipsos Mori that they held an “unfavourable” view of the party immediately after the election, against “only” 40 per cent for the Conservatives – the parties’ net scores were -1 for the Tories against an eye-watering -27 for Labour. It’s very hard to come back from the breaking of a brand: consider Gerald Ratner, who famously brought down his own company, as an object lesson.

Overall, there is no paradox between Labour’s popular policies and their crushing electoral defeat. Yes, voters will buy individual elements of the Labour vision. An incoming Labour government could nationalise the trains and raise taxes on the rich while gaining support and rising in the polls. But if they insist on promising the earth as well, all at once, and putting vastly disliked politicians before the public, no one will believe that those policies will work, that the money will be spent well or that there is any coherent point at all to Labour’s actions.

The party can stick with these policies all they want: they will be enacting none of them if they don’t start to pick a decent leadership team and decide which of their ideas to prioritise. Voters have sent them a message. Time will tell whether they have received it or not.

Glen O’Hara is professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of a series of books and articles on modern Britain, including From Dreams To Disillusionment: Economic And Social Planning In 1960s Britain (2006) and The Politics Of Water In Post-War Britain (2017).

Read more

It’s a long road back for Labour from a wreckage of its own making

Dumped and deserted: what happens to the MPs who lose or walk away

Why is Jess Phillips so hated by the Labour left?\