Deborah Mattinson Column: ‘Labour must never forget who it’s fighting for’

Focus groups can be depressing. For me, the worst in decades were after Labour’s shattering defeat in 2019. Researching my book ‘Beyond the Red Wall’, I listened to voters in Accrington, Stoke on Trent and Darlington. Many were life-long Labour supporters from what they described as ‘Labour families’. All had voted Tory this time. They explained that the Labour party on offer was no longer ‘their’ Labour. 

Hard truths

Instead, they described a party that had moved away from its working-class roots in favour of sophisticated urbanite graduates who, they believed, looked down their noses at people like them. For these voters, it was not so much that they had left the party as that the party had left them. They felt misunderstood, patronised and judged.  And they were right.

Two years later Keir Starmer asked me to be his Director of Strategy. We were twelve points behind in the polls. We had just put in a lacklustre performance at the local elections and lost the safe seat of Hartlepool to the triumphant Tories in a by-election. The party’s plan had been to unite Labour’s coalition of target voters, finding common ground between its traditional working class vote and young, progressive city dwellers. 

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However, it was becoming clear that whatever we were doing simply wasn’t working. At best, our efforts reduced message and policy down to a bland, ‘all things to all people’ proposition that ended up pleasing no-one. At worst, we had allowed ourselves to gravitate towards the parts of the coalition that we felt most comfortable with and simply ignored the rest.

Hero voters

When I started, top of my to-do list was commissioning a large poll to segment the electorate and identify the voters that we had to win back to win. Its findings were clear. While Labour’s broad coalition included progressives, green leaners and ‘die hard’ Labour loyalists, the most electorally important group by some distance were voters who had voted Tory in 2019 – sometimes in 2015 and 2010 too. They were economically precarious, likely to have voted Brexit and much less likely to be graduates. They populated Red Wall constituencies but could be found all round the country. 

In fact, these had been the significant voters in every election that I had worked on since 1987, voting for Thatcher, Major, Blair, and Johnson. Whoever won them over went on to win. An MRP (a statistical modelling technique that breaks down polling to make constituency level estimates) conducted early the following year confirmed this. When we looked in detail at the seats we needed for a majority, this group of voters dominated.

A striking characteristic was their economic vulnerability. One of the questions we started using to identify them in polls was ‘if you needed £300 to replace a fridge or washing machine could you find the money without taking out a loan?’ Almost half could not. Unsurprisingly, they felt our economy was not working for them and their families. 

They were patriotic, family orientated and often socially conservative. Many had voted Labour in the past. We named the group to ensure they stayed ‘front of mind’ and to encourage the tight discipline and focus we needed. The name we chose was ‘hero voters’ to remind us that they deserved to be respected and needed to be told again and again that they were our priority. 

Keir Starmer, with his proud working-class roots was well placed to be the hero voters’ champion – our strategy voiced the things he cared about most and wanted for his family – and for everyone’s family – safe and secure communities, opportunity for their kids and respect for working people. It was this strategy that guided us over the next three years, as we systematically set about winning back favourability. It was this strategy that helped us win 411 seats on a 35% vote share.

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In some ways nothing has changed since then. Our hero voters still feel that life is tougher than ever – this discontentment is evident in many other democracies, too. And in other ways everything has changed. The Tory party is in disarray, its leader is invisible, barely recognisable to voters. The two mainstream parties collectively poll less than 40% – eight years ago they were polling more than twice that. Reform is the government’s main opposition, clearly in the lead and edging up to the late ‘20’s in poll ratings. 

Current MRP analysis suggests that if Reform can win a vote share of just 26% they can achieve 271 seats with Labour in second place on 178. And Labour has bled voters to Reform; voters who feel more strongly than ever that government is failing them and that the change they voted for is slow to materialise. Beleaguered and dismayed by rising prices and run down public services many conclude they have little to lose and can afford to take a risk. 

Moral purpose

At this point of inflection, it is vital that we learn the right lessons from the recent Caerphilly by election, which, I think, demonstrates very clearly that the progressive anti Reform vote will vote tactically to keep Farage out – in this case, even if that means voting for a Plaid Cymru candidate previously rejected multiple times. 

Nationwide polling analysed by YouGov bears this out, suggesting that the gloomy headlines may be misleading as more people than ever before are prepared to vote tactically. It found that 57% of all Lib Dem voters and 46% of Green would give up their first preference and back Labour if they were in a seat that Reform looked likely to win. In fact, in straight Labour vs Reform seats, the Reform lead is reduced to just 2% when tactical anti-Reform voting is factored in.

I believe we need to redouble our efforts and show commitment to those disaffected hero voters now. There is a lot at stake. Without this singlemindedness, the message we send to voters will be that we are no longer the party that understands, believes in and fights for Britain’s working class. 

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This is not just about winning elections – important though that this. Focus on the working-class voters that Labour was created to serve should be what drives this government and gives it its moral purpose. Clear-headedness about who we are delivering for and, on that basis, the priorities we set and the trade-offs we are prepared to make should underpin every decision; streamlining and enabling better targeting of increasingly scarce resources. 

If we fail, we risk further eroding trust in government, confirming the worst fears of the voters who feel most neglected and overlooked, and opening the door for Farage’s empty promises. 

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