Lisa Nandy and Jess Phillips are offering Labour a miracle diet — it won’t work As with losing weight, there are no easy shortcuts to winning again

During elections, I gain weight. There is a simple reason for this: I end up working later, staying in odd hotels across the country, eating fast food and doing less. When an election is over, I have two ways to get back to a healthy size: I can eat less or I can exercise more. If I am feeling particularly disciplined, I can do both of those things.

Labour’s big problem in last month’s ballot election was that in 2015, Labour Party members elected Jeremy Corbyn, who added votes to the Labour tent among social liberals, university graduates, ethnic minorities and the young (particularly women), but drove them away among social conservatives, voters without degrees and the old (particularly men). Coincidentally, what these two groups have in common is that the first group was more likely than not to have voted Remain, and the second group was more likely than not to have voted Leave.

In 2017, that worked pretty well, because Labour ran on a pro-Brexit platform, but gained votes among Remain voters because of Corbyn’s credibility among Remain voters on other issues. But by 2019, for a variety of reasons, Corbyn had lost credibility among Remainers, who make up the majority of Labour’s voters. To keep them on board, he had to adopt a position backing a second referendum. This further aggravated the voters that he was already struggling with. Either may have defeated the Labour Party, but the two together knackered it. Labour got its lowest share of seats since 1935 and the Conservatives have a majority of 80.

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Just as I had three options to lose weight, Labour also has three options to recover: it can try to improve its standing among Remain voters yet further, it can try to regain and expand the number of Leave voters who back it, or it can do both.

Getting more Remainers to support Labour means appealing to the Remain voters who backed the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats in 2019. As the University of Bristol’s Paula Surridge has consistently shown, what separates these voters from the Remainers who backed Labour is that they are not as left wing on economics as the ones Labour won, but they are aligned with them on social issues. A coalition built on these voters would win seats such as Wycombe, currently held by the devout Brexiteer Steve Baker, or Reading West, held by the Cabinet minister Alok Sharma.

Regaining ground among Leavers means appealing to the Leave voters that Labour lost not only 2019, but the voters that the party has been steadily losing since 2005. While there is a gap between these voters and Labour’s existing coalition on economic issues, it is not as large: Labour could keep its current economic position but it would have to change its position and tone on at least one, perhaps both, immigration and crime, backing control over the level of immigration to the UK (no more free movement of people), and matching Priti Patel’s rhetoric on crime. It would win seats such as Wakefield or Redcar, lost in 2019, and seats like Stafford, which Labour lost in 2010.

Those are the choices that Labour faces if it wants to win power. The favourites in the party’s leadership race, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Sir Keir Starmer, both know this, but in different ways they are reluctant to explicitly reveal their hands.

We can draw an inference here and there. Note how Long-Bailey broke with Corbyn by pledging to use the UK’s nuclear deterrent, suggesting that she may also pivot on issues of crime and immigration, or how Sir Keir has carefully avoided committing himself to all of the party’s economic policies, suggesting that he might do the same on economic questions. But neither candidate is willing to frighten the horses by explicitly saying what they think Labour’s path to power is.

There are, however, two candidates – Jess Phillips and Lisa Nandy – who are explicit about Labour’s path back to office. The reality, though, is that they are offering the political equivalent of a miracle diet, in which you can snack all day, eat what you like and do no exercise so long as you buy a strange crystal necklace. It is superficially tempting but ultimately doomed: you do not lose weight by wearing crystals, you just get funny looks.

Phillips’s crystal necklace is that she would be a different type of leader, a Labour answer to Boris Johnson. Her authenticity would, as her slogan runs, allow her to “speak truth” and thereby “win power”.

There is just one problem: voters do not particularly like Boris Johnson’s unorthodox behaviour. Leave voters valued his commitment to Brexit, but all voters are uneasy about his private life and his standing on the world stage. The Prime Minister himself is aware of this, and is taking pains to straighten himself up.

‘You do not lose weight by wearing crystals, you just get funny looks’

Thus far, Phillips’s speaking truth seems to mean committing to yet further spending commitments on top of Labour’s existing manifesto: to increase income tax for everyone while making sure that no one has to sell their own home to pay for social care is one. That makes it hard to add more Remain voters to the pile.

Leaving the door open to backing rejoining the EU later down the line makes it hard to add Leavers, too.

Nandy’s offer is more dangerous because it is more superficially plausible. Her diagnosis is that Labour lost because it grew out of touch with people who live in towns, and that it can win by rebuilding its coalition by listening to voters and devolving power.

There are a couple of problems here: the Labour Party did not lose touch with towns. It lost support among elderly voters and socially conservative voters everywhere – but because these voters are more likely to live in towns, their defection only cost Labour seats in towns. But the same types of voters saw Labour losing support in Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North constituency, just as it lost support in Wakefield and Redcar.

Seeing the issue these voters had as primarily being about the condition of towns allows the Labour Party to sidestep the issue of how it wins again while kidding itself that it is taking drastic solutions to fix the problem: to avoid talking about crime and immigration, questions that it finds uncomfortable, under the belief it can talk about buses and local government reform, issues that it finds appealing.

It is the same political offer made by Ed Miliband in 2015 and Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 – to tell voters that while they might think the problem is immigration, the real problem is public services – and there is no reason to think that changing the narrator will change how the novel ends on a third re-read.

But it may be that Phillips and Nandy know full well that you have to make a decision: and that like Sir Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey, they are simply trying to avoid confronting the membership with that choice.

Stephen Bush is the political editor at ‘New Statesman’ magazine