I spent the general election campaign travelling the country for LabourList, visiting marginal seats, talking to candidates and knocking doors.
In the north and the south and the midlands, in towns and cities and suburbs and villages, one thing was true everywhere: people absolutely hated politicians and did not believe that anything would improve.
They were giving Labour a go because they weren’t the incumbents, not because of any particular love of the party and its message. Localism, rather than politics, was king.
The single pledge I remember seeing go down best on the doorsteps was Chris Curtis’s commitment to being the first MP for Milton Keynes who was actually from Milton Keynes. Which is good, of course, but it doesn’t particularly speak to the merits of the Labour platform.
The scale of the problem is vast
The party were not ignorant but were perhaps naïve about what is generally called a lack of trust but I think could more accurately be described as a pathological hatred of politicians (the British Social Attitudes Survey, published earlier this month, tells us that a mighty 12% of people trust politicians to act in the national interest).
The Labour manifesto included several commitments designed, specifically, to tackle this issue, which were couched in terms of improving standards in public life, and included a new independent ethics and integrity commission.
“Setting the highest standards in public life is not just about better behaviour or decision making, though it will improve both. It is also central to restoring trust between the public and politics”, the manifesto tells us.
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The sociologist (and contributing editor to Renewal) Sacha Hilhorst has argued, in her work on the state of political authority in Nottinghamshire mining towns, that many people understand the political system entirely through the frame of corruption. Hilhorst’s far more worked out conclusions ring very much true with my experiences knocking doors in new builds across England.
When “corrupt” and “politician” are synonyms, you need more than a new ethics and integrity commission to balance out relations between the people and their alleged representatives.
Despite the fact that we were obviously going to win, last summer’s election campaign felt worse than many others I have been involved with.
The receptions on the doorstep were bad, even from people who would probably vote for us. Bizarre racist conspiracism – on the rise, at least in my doorknocking experience, since the pandemic – was frequent.
Failures of communication
Perhaps I’d heaped too much on the moment, but my memory of the opinion poll coming was not delight at the Labour result, but horror at the predicted 13 Reform MPs. That number had shrunk to four by the morning, but Labour now trails Farage’s party in the polls.
Theirs is a nihilistic, Teflon politics perfectly acclimatised to the seething water temperature of contemporary Britain. My overall assessment of the year of Labour government is decidedly mixed: on the trust issue, however, which is perhaps at the end of it the most important issue of all – what the people who politicians seek to govern think of them – Labour has comprehensively failed.
With own-goals like the clothes donation scandal it has reinforced narratives about politicians on the take. With devastating communications failures around the winter fuel allowance policy (which research from More In Common found to be both the most unpopular but also the most well-known Labour policy) it has lowered its stock with older people who are already more likely to vote Reform (age and education being the two great political predicters).
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Not doing certain things, or doing them differently, would have left us in a better place. Labour is in charge and has agency in this situation. It would not, however, have necessarily left us in a good place.
The way people relate to parties is changing, leaving us, as the IPPR has recently noted, with “common good without common ground”, a situation where “politics and the public sphere have fragmented and polarised”. The way people consume media is changing.
As Will Davies highlights in his really excellent LRB article on politics and TikTok, which he describes as fruit machine meets television, the populist right are ascendent on the site. Nigel Farage has more followers than every other MP combined and the rage bait pull of “yookay” style content will only get stronger as short-form video becomes ever more the medium dujour.
Already, the average British TikTok user spends 42 hours a month watching videos of less than 30 seconds. The future rulers of the void will conquer it with front facing camera.
What comes next?
I don’t want to over-do the Stancilism and make an argument that material improvements governments bring are irrelevant, but there is certainly something to Duncan Weldon’s contention that increasing numbers of voters are post-economic. While deliverism on growth and public services is what Labour has to do – it will, after all, make the country better – the government is unlikely to be rewarded for it.
Reform, meanwhile, can play quite a different game. The commentator Rory Ellwood has made the case that Brexit (specifically the variety sold by Farage) was fundamentally about a desire for disruption of status hierarchies rather than any specific policy agenda; the same case, I think, can be made about Reform, another Farage export.
Sure, we can have an 18 year old run Warwickshire council, because f**k you – better than some crook politician.
Last summer, Chris Curtis did become the first MP for Milton Keynes, from Milton Keynes. There is only so much you can put on having Local Candidates (after all, MPs are more local than they’ve ever been and we like them less than we ever have), but connection through place seems to be one of the few thought through routes to building trust and combatting the anti-politics of Reform.
READ MORE: Poll: Majority of Labour members want party to move to the left
This is certainly the thinking behind initiatives like the Co-operative Party’s “Community Britain” and the “We’re Right Here” campaign, made even more explicit in a recent report co-published by the Co-operative Party and HOPE Not Hate.
It found that while the word people most associate with Britain is “declining” and they don’t think politicians listen to them, they do feel proud and positive about where they live.
But as sympathetic as I am to this work, it strikes me that there are problems of scaleability, both ideologically (local work can improve trust in your MP, or your council, but can it do so for Downing Street?) and logistically (people really hate us now and the change needed is drastic and immediate).
The least bleak conclusion I can draw is that this is all just the nature of governing “between orders” as the IPPR puts it, and that Labour just has to stop antagonising its base and get on with its manifesto, because it can do no other.
Even if it can do this, however, I don’t imagine that the 2029 campaign will feel any better than the 2024 campaign did, and likely significantly worse.
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