There were two fat failures for the Labour party in the European referendum. One was the inability to mobilise the support of Labour supporters to vote for the party’s policy to remain in the European Union. The other was the inability to articulate the fears and concerns of voters who would normally look to Labour for their chance of a better life.
This was painfully visible in Northampton, a town where we have to be able to win to form a government.
A phone canvass of Labour voters in the weeks running up to the referendum showed that on the eve of poll 45 per cent supported remain, 40 per cent leave and 15 per cent were still undecided: on the day it seemed most of the undecideds broke for leave.
Among many phone conversations one stood out. An older man who said he was voting out because he could not get a GP’s appointment because of all the immigrants. And he did not believe the line that things would get worse if we left the EU. ‘My grandson is in a zero hours job, he can’t get anywhere to live and I can’t get a GP appointment. So tell me how things could get any worse?’
As if Labour’s entire historic mission has not been about providing jobs, homes and healthcare. And yet our lack of credibility on these core policies produced a backlash against us in this referendum which was so critical to the future not just of our party, but our nation.
And then we showed a continuing inability to speak to the concerns of the bedrock vote of middle England. During polling day I monitored a polling station near my home on the east side of Northampton. It was a new mobile unit set up in the car park of one of those newtown estates where there is usually a low turnout in what should be a strong Labour area. The estate, long neglected by the local council, had been badly hit by the cash starving of local services over the past six years.
All day there was a steady stream of voters at the polling station, and in the evening, a queue of cars formed to get into the carpark with people determined to vote. Middle England taking revenge by voting leave. And us as a party unable to convince that there was a better way to solve their justifiable grievances than by crashing the entire country.
It is almost exactly a year since some of us who were key seat candidates wrote about our experiences in the 2015 general election. We analysed our failure to win credibility with English voters concerned about their national identity, the incursions into our vote by the United Kingdom Independence party, the need for a coherent narrative and, crucially, the need for good leadership.
Since then we have seen that on local issues we are sometimes trusted in local and police and crime commissioner elections and in the big city mayoral elections most notably London. But we could not win trust last week on the big one, the future of the country. The price of our failure is immense and will last for many years.
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It is a bit late to blame Jeremy for the decades of neglect under Labour administrations. If anything Jeremy has exposed the inadequacies that we need to address.
Jeremy Corbyn may have the initials J.C. But he is not omnipresent. It was more a failure of certain members of the Northampton Labour movement who spend more time fighting the party leadership than fighting the Tory party.
“An older man who said he was voting out because he could not get a GP’s appointment because of all the immigrants.” Was he challenged on this? Asked which GP? Asked which surgery told him told him this?
Sally, I know you and many others worked hard to persuade our voters to remain, but the town and county was plastered with Leave Posters. The protest vote was “Leave” and our core vote has much to protest about. We failed because we were not allowed to get our message across. We know that we would be better working within the EU than without, but our supporters are being screwed despite the EU. The lie that resounded was that they would be better off out and it played on the fears and experiences of the marginalised and disenfranchised. We did not fail the British people. The British people were lied to and the media played the lie out loud.
We need to recognise that our biggest battle is and will remain the British media.
We’ve had more media coverage over Jexit than we ever had over Brexit!
The labour party has been betraying the British working people, especially the English (am I allowed to mention the E word?) for generations. Traditional Labour supporters are being screwed because of the EU, not despite it.
With the precious public services we worked so hard to preserve being steadily crushed by sheer weight of numbers, it would be interesting to hear Mr Corbyn’s justification for his belief in unlimited immigration.