I still
think it’s a bit early to offer a full account of what happened last
Thursday. Ballot papers don’t generally offer us more than a cross in a box
from which to determine the reasons why a voter cast their vote as they did –
and the small minority who adorn their ballot papers with more detailed expressions
of opinion, some of whom share their vocabulary of obscenities with the Council
staff counting the votes, generally add very little to the sum total of human
knowledge.
Understanding
the reasons behind an election result therefore requires further research. Exit
polls can tell us a fair bit about why people tell us they voted as they did,
and I intend to study those further – but I don’t think that we can be guided
only by what people say about why they do what they do in any case. In a sense
that simply pushes the question back to another question – why do people feel
as they do?
I will spend a
bit more time thinking about this generally, but there are some things that can
be said specifically.
I am fairly
certain that some of the explanations being offered for Labour’s very poor
performance last Thursday can safely be discounted. These are all those
explanations for our 2019 defeat which plainly cannot also account for the
result of the 2017 General Election.
A very fine
example of such a failed attempt to explain our election defeat is available
from Labourlist, and is offered by veteran Labour right-winger Luke Akehurst.
Luke thinks it is “obvious” why we lost, he quotes his own (as he thinks) wise
words from 2015 and says that our Party has been “indulging in a dangerous
delusion for four years”. Basically, Luke (whilst expressing his horror and
anger at a Tory victory) seems almost relieved that his understanding of the
world has been confirmed by a defeat at the polls for a socialist programme.
I tried a
little experiment with Luke’s article online. I searched for “2017” in his
article. It wasn’t there.
Now that’s very
odd, because, during the four years of our “dangerous delusion” (in his words)
Labour had lost another General Election, whilst scoring our highest vote share
since 2001 and our highest number of votes since 1997.
In 2017 we had
the same Leader whose unpopularity is being blamed for the result in 2019.
In 2017 we had
the same socialist policies which centrists are now decrying as responsible for
our failure.
We cannot
simply attribute the result in 2019 (which was still better, in terms of vote
share, than in 2015 or 2010) to the identity of the Leader or the socialist
politics of our manifesto unless we can also explain why these factors did not
apply in 2017.
I can only
conclude that comrade Akehurst has been asleep since 2015 and therefore missed
what happened two years ago (perhaps he ran away and hid, blaming himself for
having argued that Corbyn should be on the ballot paper in the first
leadership election?) He is auditioning, perhaps, for the role of Rip Van
Winkle of the self-proclaimed “centre-left” (who generally come across as a bit
more centre than left…)
For those who
were here two years ago, whether from the right or left, we need to avoid
attributing the 2019 result to factors which, whilst present two years ago, did
not produce the same effect.
The Blairites
screeching their hatred for Corbyn and socialism at every opportunity (of which
the media gives them quite a few) are not doing a good job of understanding or
explaining what happened last week.
Neither,
however, are those good comrades on the left who want to blame the media’s
hostility to Jeremy Corbyn for our defeat. That same
hostility was expressed, with the same force, in 2017 as 2019. If we could
get 40% of the popular vote in the teeth of such media vilification, we cannot
use that same media vilification to explain why we got 32.1% in 2019.
As I
said a little while ago, any explanation of our 2019 election result which
is persuasive needs also to be capable of explaining the 2017 result. Mr
Akehurst, and all those rightwing Labour MPs on the telly, must try harder to
understand what has happened.
And so must we
all.