Can things get any worse for Keir Starmer? Yes appears to be the answer, if the latest YouGov poll is anything to go on.
Source - The Spectator 16/04/21
While the Tories have surged ahead to 43 per cent, support for Labour has tumbled down to 29 per cent. It's important not to blow a single poll out of proportion, but nonetheless these numbers make for grim reading for the Labour leader. That 14 per cent lead for the Conservatives is the largest since mid-May 2020, when the recently elected Starmer was still digging his party out of the polling abyss of the Corbyn period. A year on – and coming weeks before a crucial set of local elections and a by-election – it shows all too clearly that Starmer has so far failed to rescue Labour.
To make matters worse, Labour appears to be leaking voters in every direction: to the Tories, the Lib Dems – whose vote Starmer managed to cannibalise early in his leadership – and the Greens, who are probably a receptacle for a certain kind of young, hard-left voter. Starmer has tried to be all things to all people, but that strategy has its own particular kind of danger: you can end up being nothing to anyone.
While we are some way away from a general election – and as the last year has shown, anything can happen in politics – a look at Labour's key target seats makes it obvious that Starmer has a mountain to climb if he is to beat Boris.
All but one of the top twenty constituencies in which Labour came second by the slightest margin in 2019 is currently held by the Tories. All need to be taken back if Labour is to stand a chance at the next election.
Among this ‘target twenty’ you have formerly safe Labour seats, mostly in the north and midlands of England, such as Stoke-on-Trent Central and Blyth Valley. Both constituencies had been Labour since the 1950s and were amongst the safest Labour seats in the country in the not too recent past. The majorities in 1997 were 19,924 and 17,736 respectfully. Now, of course, those thumping majorities have evaporated. It's Starmer's job to win them back. It hardly goes without saying that a 14 point polling gap makes it hard to see how he does that.
As well as the Red Wall, Starmer needs to woo wealthy urban seats like Kensington – which used to be solidly Conservative but have been leaning towards Labour for a while (Labour even took the seat in 2017 before losing it again) – and Chipping Barnet, which the Tories retained by a narrow margin at the last two elections.
There are also genuine long-term marginals, like the two Bury seats and Dewsbury; seats that are bellwether constituencies, swinging towards whichever ever of the two main parties that wins.
How do you even begin to come up with a strategy that targets all of these very different sets of voters? Labour must appeal to them all to have any hope of winning. And that’s before we even mention Scotland.
Yet if Starmer has been trying to woo voters in all those seats, the miserable YouGov numbers show what happens when a politician fails in that task: in trying to make all of those groups of voters happy, you risk making none of them want to vote for you. The Tories can afford to lose a few more urban seats to Labour if they continue to gain votes across the north and the midlands. Labour cannot afford to lose voters in any direction and, in fact, need to gain them across the board. The polling is telling us that the strategy hasn’t worked, at least yet.
But what could Starmer have done differently in his first year as leader that would have made a difference? That’s the crucial question. Could he have pushed harder on patriotism? If so, that might have meant Labour lost even more young voters to the Greens as a result. Could he have opposed the Brexit deal? If doing so stopped some flow back to the Lib Dems, it would have made winning back those Red Wall seats even more difficult.
In other words, Labour are in an almost impossible electoral bind at present. Whatever direction they go in, they lose some of the voters they need.
To summarise: one poll shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Yet polling trends over time do tell us something. Starmer seems to have peaked at the end of 2020, when uncertainty about the Covid crisis and a looming no-deal Brexit conspired to help Labour look like a reasonable alternative. Since then, we’ve had the Brexit deal, the vaccine rollout and the roadmap out of restrictions – and the Tory polling numbers have steadily gone up.
Unless Boris bungles spectacularly – which, admittedly, is a prospect never worth ruling out – it's increasingly hard to see how Labour can come back. Starmer's electoral coalition has fractured. Can it be put back together again? The Labour leader's fate rests upon the answer to that question.
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