‘Don’t Panic! Labour’s response to Caerphilly should be more resilliant’

Labour’s defeat in the Caerphilly Senedd by-election was another wake-up call that we are losing our connection to our historic core vote in working class post-industrial communities. As an MP in a demographically very similar English seat with a mining heritage, North Durham, I saw a similar shock result in May’s Durham County Council loss to Reform.

This isn’t a new development. Whereas in previous bad periods for the party like the 1980s we could rely on holding with hefty majorities almost any seat with a mining history, the Brexit referendum marked a breakpoint where we can no longer just assume such areas will vote Labour. In 2019, the loss of the “Red Wall” to Boris Johnson affected not just three of the six seats in County Durham, but also saw a Tory breakthrough in Wales, where they gained six seats.

READ MORE: ‘Labour will be wiped out without reset’: reaction to historic Caerphilly defeat

Post-industrial “Red Wall” Britain didn’t suddenly become politically volatile after or because Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, it’s automatic deep allegiance to Labour ended at least a decade ago and was eroding long before that. In the modern world there just aren’t places where you can take voters for granted, every vote, everywhere, has to be fought for.

The upside to the Caerphilly result is that it showed Reform can be beaten by widespread tactical voting in this kind of seat. Farage is a “marmite” politician. Perhaps a third of the country think he will save it if he becomes PM, but two thirds think he will destroy it, and will vote for the party they think is best placed to stop that. That should give every Labour MP facing Reform as their main opponent cause for hope.

The downside is that it wasn’t Labour that people voted for tactically, it was Plaid Cymru. Once the single seat-specific poll had been published in Caerphilly, showing we were not the main way to stop Reform, we were toast.

In most of the UK, it will be more obvious in the next General Election that incumbent Labour MPs are the best place to put a “X” to stop Reform. Despite their relatively good poll ratings, the Greens, for instance, are not a presence on the ground in the kind of areas where Labour is defending against Reform. The Lib Dems’ targeting strategy is focused on further gains in well-healed areas from the Tories, not getting into three-way fights with Labour. 

We are losing votes both to our left and to our right, and we need to address both flanks, but we should be careful not to read the Plaid win as meaning we can assume that Labour votes are not going direct to Reform, or that we can ignore public concern about issues Reform are winning support over such as illegal immigration.

Welsh Labour has run a strategy of triangulation to their left for a long time now – the “Clear Red Water” between them and the party at a UK level proclaimed by Mark Drakeford and his successors. Undoubtedly some of the loss in Caerphilly was down to the unpopularity of the UK government, but a Welsh Labour stance to the left didn’t mitigate that or see off Plaid.  It may have been cancelled out by Wales specific problems around post-Drakeford leadership infighting, poorly performing devolved health and education provision, and anti-car policies such as the 20mph speed limit.

In Caerphilly, turnout went up by nearly 5,000 from the previous Senedd election in 2021. The Reform vote went up by about 11,500. So even if every single previous non-voter went Reform and not Plaid, along with every single one of the 4,500 votes the Tories lost, that still means a minimum of 2,000 votes must have gone direct from Labour to Reform. That fits with national opinion polling and what Labour MPs in Red Wall seats are finding on the doorstep when we canvass.

At a UK level, we have clearly made a small number of unpopular mistakes like means testing Winter Fuel Allowance at too low an income level. But our overall record is one that should appeal to any progressive voter if we proudly tell them about it. We’ve drawn a line under austerity by spending £50 billion more than the Tories planned to, increased the minimum wage, nationalised rail and steel, brought in an unprecedented range of new employment rights and renters rights, and are targeting hundreds of the most deprived communities with £20 million each in Pride in Place funding.

We need to understand that the kind of working-class voters in Caerphilly or County Durham who are voting Reform haven’t suddenly becomes Thatcherites. They want “leftwing” measures to reindustrialise and regenerate their left-behind communities just as much as they want illegal immigration, crime and antisocial behaviour tackled. I doubt there is very much to choose between the political priorities of voters across a seat like Caerphilly, whether they landed up voting Reform, Plaid Cymru or Labour. That’s certainly the case in my North Durham seat where almost everyone, whether they are Reform or still Labour, raises the same concerns – illegal immigration, antisocial behaviour, rundown high streets, poor transport links, cost of living pressures and lack of well-paid jobs.

It’s just common sense that people want to reverse the decline most of the country has experienced economically and in terms of its social fabric during the 14 years of Coalition and Tory rule.

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Caring about illegal immigration is part of that, not some alternative worldview that only racists hold. It’s caring about the failing of a basic state function. Voters have as much right to care if our borders are visibly not being controlled; our town centres are plagued by antisocial behaviour and shoplifting;  our prisons overcrowded; or that our armed forces have dwindled in size and ability to deter Russia, as they do about crumbling school buildings or overlong NHS waiting lists. These are all products of a 14-year Tory run-down of the British state, and all policy problems that Labour, as a social democratic party, should want to address.

A lurch to the left, if that means pretending illegal immigration isn’t a problem, might warm the hearts of middle-class party activists, but it will say to working class voters in our old industrial heartlands who are screaming at us to take their concerns seriously that we just aren’t listening. A party that doesn’t want to address a huge public policy failure like the small boat crossings wouldn’t deserve to be anywhere near power.

We need a little more resilience and to be a little bit less panicky as a party. We absolutely have to listen to voters’ impatience for change. But governments do lose by-elections, council and devolved parliament elections and go on to win the next General Election. The nature of governing is that you are taking choices that won’t always be popular in the moment, but should be the right thing to do. That means that when you go back and face the whole electorate after four or five years, you win because you have visibly made people’s lives better. The Tories need to be a lot more worried about losing votes and seats while they are in opposition, which is when they should be making hay!

There will be siren voices looking at a Plaid Cymru win and rehearsing old arguments about a progressive alliance with the nationalists, Your Party, Greens and Lib Dems. This is a non-starter because none of those parties want an alliance with us, some of them ideologically detest us, all of them dream of replacing us or at least stealing a few seats off us. 

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The only progressive alliance that can actually win a General Election already exists – it’s the Labour Party, and we need to take a bit more pride in what we have already achieved after only 16 months in power, and think about what each of us can contribute to making what could be up to another 44 months such a success that we win a second term and our midterm traumas are a footnote in history.

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