‘How We Win In 2029’

Friday 8th May, my eyes open at 5:48am. The morning after the polling day before, and I immediately reach for my phone to check the results. Get up, turn on Sky News, scroll through Twitter. My irrepressible sense of optimism brutally crashing with reality as each result is announced. We are losing seats to the left and to the right across the country.

But here’s the thing, as hard as those results were, we can still build a country true to our values and win in 2029. We can win again by ending the affordability-driven angst and unite the whole nation in strength against the racism of Farage.

Why we lost 

 You know why we lost. You’ve heard it time and time again on the doorstep. Over the years, you’ve seen frustration turn to anger, and you see it beamed through your screen. We lost this year’s local elections for the same reasons we lost last year’s local elections, including in my own constituency. It is the same reason Britain chose to leave the EU. It is, ironically, the same reason we won in 2024.

READ MORE: ‘Who is Labour for?’

That reason is affordability. The affordability crisis, building for decades and then exploding in recent years, has broken out into fury. And into that space, feeding and building on that anger, the racists and finance-bro plutocrats have united in an unholy alliance to blame “those people over there”. Concerns over immigration are, partly, borne from concerns over affordability.

What defines our defectors, to both the Greens and Reform, is (un)affordability. These defectors are finding life unaffordable and see no way that life will become affordable either. Roughly speaking, non-graduates in post-industrial areas like Barnsley are leaving us for Reform and young (graduate) renters in places like Bow are going to the Greens. Non-graduates see no way they can get a decent job, young people can’t afford housing, and all our defectors are finding energy bills too high and wages too low. 

We need to win both sets of defectors back. While it is true we are losing more voters to the left (and to undecided) than to the right, Reform defectors count double in constituencies where they are our main opponents.  

Our economic response  

 To win them back, we have to both make life affordable again and bring both sides together with a unifying political story of what it means to be British.

You know that working hard doesn’t work. There aren’t enough good jobs for people, too little housebuilding has driven up rents, and our fossil fuel-based economy means our energy bills are too high.

In the short-term, we can help make life more affordable with direct energy bill reductions funded by wealth-based taxes. These energy bill reductions have a double benefit. They make life affordable directly, but they also get inflation down – this means lower inflation-linked debt interest payments and more space for the Bank of England to cut interest rates.

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But affordability is about more than just short-term relief. We also need to create good jobs across the country and get costs down for good. We do this by creating the conditions for businesses to thrive, by investing in better transport infrastructure and devolving powers so local areas can better control their destiny. It also means the government stepping in to create good jobs in construction, healthcare, and the clean economy, just as we’re doing with social housebuilding and our Warm Homes Plan. When we invest in the clean economy, we don’t just get costs down, we build up economies in the Midlands and North that have been suffering for too long.

How to pay for this is crucial. Extra borrowing is not the right decision at this point – especially when it will make it even harder for the Bank of England to cut rates in the coming months. Instead, we have to pay for this through taxing wealth and not work – as we have with private jets, dividends, and mansions. The good political news here is that our Reform and Green defectors want economic populism. It worked for FDR, it worked for Attlee, and it can work for us too.  

Our political response 

 More than this, we also need a political answer – a project that can unite our nation and party. 

 Our project – Common Endeavour – is one of strength from unity, based on the foundational values of both our party and our country. Our party’s foundational values, from Clause IV, are this – that by our common endeavour, we can guarantee for each of us a good life. Britain’s foundational values were forged in the Second World War, where people who looked and sounded different came together to defeat fascism. And today, our different communities come together to forge one British nation, and our everyday culture evolves with us. Where we can go for a pint, queue politely, and cheer on our football teams as united nations. 

 Our project is consciously defined as both Labour and British. It can win back both our Green and Reform defectors. We consciously define ourselves against the unholy alliance of finance-bro plutocrats like Harborne and the racism of Reform. Both want to divide us so they can get what they want – tax cuts for the super-rich and divisive ethnonationalism. We should remember that Reform-curious voters do not share the same views as the core Reform voters.  

Uniting the country 

 Most important of all is strength and optimism. We can only change this country and give the British people a reason to vote for us, if we show them the strength that is founded in each of us standing together and doing well. Like FDR before us, in hard times we use optimism and strength to create the world we want.

We are in government for the first time in 14 years. With courage, compassion and conviction we can meet this moment and transform this nation. By the strength of our common endeavour, we will build a nation true to our values, make life affordable for all, and win the next election. Let’s end post-polling day doomscrolling for good.

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