Labour and 2023: A SWOT Analysis

What are going to be the opportunities and threats for Labour in 2023? And how will their internal strengths and weaknesses play into these?

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In this post I am going to look at the key areas that I think will be at the forefront of politics in 2023. Their root causes and the ways in which Labour will be threatened by them and can find opportunities within them.

Austerity is back

Labour has had a good 2022. Largely - but not wholly - because the Tories have had a really, really bad year. This year has exposed a decade of decay. The Tories may want to blame the effects of Covid, the Ukraine war and Liz Truss. And these all played their part. But the truth is that the reasons the former two hit our country harder than most other developed nations don’t lie with Liz Truss. They lie with David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity and the vast paring back of state capacity that left us vulnerable and exposed when shocks inevitably happened.

Austerity was not centrism no matter how wrapped up it was in nice suits and moderate language. No matter how much it came with talk of green policy (dismissed by Cameron himself as crap) or genuinely progressive policy like gay marriage. Austerity was an international outlier and an extreme vision of a vastly smaller state than the UK was set up for. Nothing was put in its place and when the UK found it needed the state as never before, it was not there. It was not ready and it was not robust. It had been sliced and diced and chipped away at. That is the true and lasting scandal of the Tory years. It will outlive Johnson’s appalling approach to norms and Truss’s kamikaze divebombing of the very market economy her tax cuts were supposed to appeal to.

In 2023, Labour will not be fighting Johnson and his flaunting of the very norms that we need to run a coherent government - no matter what policies they implement. Instead they will be fighting the politics that allowed Johnson to flourish. Johnson was - ironically - offering a more leftist economic platform than Cameron or May did and that Sunak and Hunt are returning to. But he did so with Tory flourishes and a disregard for any of the actual instruments that would have allowed him to deliver a coherent platform. So now the Tories are going back to sing the only song they know. The mournful cold gruel of austerity. Cuts Cuts Cuts is the chorus. But the state has already been cut to the bone.

However, austerty still has many champions among those who consider themselves centrists. People with large platforms who genuinely believe that the 2010 - 2015 government was one of sensible moderation and that the cuts to public services were reasonable and necessary. These people were horrified by Johnson and Truss, by Brexit and by government failures over Covid, but have never really come to a reckoning with what got us to this situation in the first place. These siren voices see the calm managerial style of Sunak as a balm and are all too unwilling to look under the hood of what his solutions will mean for an ever more stagnating economy.

Labour have to keep making the case for a sensible alternative that will reshape not just our economy, but the way we think and talk about that economy in lasting ways. What they can’t do - and what is sending a very small, but very vocal minority crazy on Twitter - is make this seem radical. It might be quite radical, but it absolutely cannot feel it. It has to feel reassuring. The only way to beat the faux centrists is to do so at their own game. It will only be by embedding social democratic choices as the natural and competent response to the state we find ourselves in that Labour will be able to embed real change properly.

Sounding radical did for Corbyn and it did for Truss. But when I talk to Tories - even those who self describe as centrists - they don’t think what Truss got wrong was the policy - just the presentation. If we are, indeed, living in an era of vibes, then Labour can lean into that by making genuine and lasting changes on seem like changes we can all agree on. The natural way of government.

Sunak the accountant

Sunak will not be as easy to run against as Truss would have been. He is seen by the country as a whole as more competent (hard not to be) and is still credited with the success of the furlough scheme.

Sunak is a weak PM though and Stamer can keep hammering him on those terms. He is captured by a party with several fractous factions all of whom are pulling in different directions which is making it impossible for him to pass anything of any substance. Meanwhile the substantive problems pile up. He might be trusted as chief beancounter - but he does not seem to have the ability to present a vision of a UK that is substantially different to ‘what we have now, but with the bleeding a little staunched’.

Starmer will be asked more and more about his alternative. His conference speech was pretty bloody good in this regard. But so much has happened since then, and it is not enough to simply have said this once. There needs to be a sense as we move towards the next election of Labour’s policy ideas in the key areas of education, health, the lived economy. What will it feel like to be a citizen of Starmer’s Britain after five years. What will it mean for your kids? Your elderly parents? Your neighbourhood? How can this sense be expressed simply in words that filter through to ordinary people that they can get hold of? What are the 10 word phrases and what are the substantive policies that will deliver them.

Labour has a lot more policy than is generally understood in the narrative. Why is that? What isn’t cutting through and why? A renewed sense not just of the replacement of Tory drift and division but of Labour purpose must be communicated and well over the coming year. The public must be able to tell you why they want to vote Labour - not just why they don’t want to vote Tory.

Grasp the nettle on sex and gender

Nicola Sturgeon is a terrible first minister of Scotland. Under her leadership so much has gone wrong. The scandal of Scotland’s drug deaths - for example - is undereported and misunderstood. Educational attainment levels are shockingly bad and they simply don’t seem to care.

But Nicola Sturgeon is a very, very effective leader of the nationalist movement in Scotland. Everything she does is seen only through that singular lens and she is incredibly good at making divisions between the Tory-led UK Government and the Scottish Parliament work for her politically. If she can cause massive problems for the Labour Party along the way, all the better.

Scotland’s ‘all in’ approach to the reform of the GRA is a perfect example of this. Sturgon has pushed through legislation that will impact on the UK wide Equality Act. The government will pretty much have to respond and are likely to do so by clarifying the provisions around access to single sex spaces.

So far, Stamer and UK Labour have said absolutely nothing on this. It’s an issue that has riven the Labour Party and caused such harm to so many - not least myself - that you can absolutely see why. But this can’t continue.

Leadership is hard. But here Starmer is going to have to show it. Labour needs to find a position that will not please the most shouty (on both sides) but will find itself where the majority of the public is and wants us to be. Not because I think that #LabourLosingWomen is a particularly real electoral threat, but because fence-sitting is Starmer’s biggest weakness in the eyes of the public. If Labour want to clear the ‘barnacles from the boat’ and focus on the areas they think they can win, they need to stop every interview with a senior politician being derailed every time they are asked “what is a woman” or “can a woman have a penis”. The time for prevarication is over.

There are plenty of nuanced ways through this. We need to start from the position that those who fight for trans rights don’t do so because they are misogynists and those who fight for womens’ rights don’t do so because they are bigots. We need to start from an understanding that the EHRC were created and appointed to look after the provision of the Equality Act and we should be listening to them in protecting it. But also from a sense that there is a real and genuine fear among trans people that they are being made into a political football by the right (partly because both left and right import too much of their politics from the US).

The voices of women have been really stupidly silenced by the Party for too long. Not allowing Labour Women’s Declaration to have a stall at conference made what would have been a small issue a really big one. These are women (disclosure - I am a signatory) with a perfectly legitimate and reasonable argument about the areas where the physical differences between male and female bodies matter sometimes and when that is the case - such as in positions of safeguarding in hospitals and prisons or fairness in competition - that should recognised. It is legitimate to disagree with this point of view. but this should not be considered a view so far out of the mainstream that it is unworthy of being made from the conference halls - alongside the promotion of the tax haven of Gibraltar or the essential work of Cats for Corbyn.

Labour have tried to duck this debate for too long. They may come to a position I disagree with, but they will not get free of being asked about it until they have an answer. And anyone in Starmer’s team who think they will have never read a newspaper or met a journalist. They hunt in packs. They scent weakness like blood. They will not let this go.

Make a choice and argue for it. That choice shouldn’t be on either of the extreme ends of the debate. It will upset those who are. But a choice that lands squarely and with clarity will put this argument to bed and allow Labour to talk about other things without Keir Starmer ever having to say penis again. Something I strongly suspect he would welcome.

Manage Immigration. But really

There is an opportunity for change unlike any we have seen since 2016 to really reform how we manage our asylum and immigration systems to make them work. The Tories have essentially spent years - from Theresa May to Suella Braverman spouting increasingly ugly rhetoric that has never, ever matched their ability to deliver on it. The public simply do not believe them any more.

They closed safe and legal routes to seek asylum and the only thing that has done has driven up the profits of the vile trafiking gangs and the corresponding numbers of those who are putting their lives at risk trying to cross the English channel in small boats.

Labour has to set out the terms by which we will manage an immigration and asylum system. This will not be popular with some, but these rules do not (and should not) have to be draconian. But there do have to be rules. Once they exist, we should do everything we absolutely can to allow these to be followed safely and legally. That means safe and legal routes that will break the model of profiteering pirates. That means an understanding in countries where we will be unlikely to offer easy access to asylum (Albania is the current high profile case, but this changes and we find a new country to demonise every few years. Such policy should be based on values - not nationalities).

We need to catch up with the public in where they are post-Brexit on immigration. They are not looking for any government to reduce these numbers to the tens of thousands any more( (if they ever were). They do not count students. They are pretty happy to see people come here to staff the NHS and pick fruit. It is the image of the boats that worry them - partly because it feels so uncontrolled.

Controling migration routes is not right wing nor is it the same thing as arbitrarily deciding on target numbers without an understanding of the ebb and flow of people we need - desperately need and who need us desperately. It is the state acting as it should both to protect its own borders and ensure the safety of those trying to enter them.

Labour can and should be challenging the government over this absolutely shambolic failure while also offering a positive alternative vision for a better managed system that works for those desperately seeking asylum and those communities that will take them in.

Education, Education, Childcare

Labour has made childcare a central part of its plan for growth, considering it a key element of the infrastructure we will need to grow the economy. This is completely right, but it is not an argument the public have heard much about yet. Universal free, high quality childcare will be the absolute best thing Labour can do to improve the life chances of all.

Labour will have tough choices to make about where it spends money. In education, however much some may disagree, I am afraid that the socialist choice here is a no brainer - and it is never going to be to prioritise university. The more money we -put into kids at as an early an age as possible, the better life chances they will have. If, one day, we get to do other things - great. But the priority has to be under fives, primary and secondary education of a standard and calibre that will allow our children to grow up to be as robust thinkers and doers as a modern, happy, fulfilled country should be demanding.

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2023 is probably not going to be as easy for Labour as 2022 was. The Tories will continue their slow implosion and their ongoing ungovernability, but they will not do so in quite such dramatic fashion. Meanwhile Labour will be truly under the spotlight as they are increasingly seen to be moving towards government. They will need to find a way to combine a steady ship with a become of hope. And that mangled metaphor shows just how treacherous a journey the party still has ahead of it.

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I run a political and communications consultancy called Political Human. Please get in touch if you are looking for political or media consultancy advice, strategic communication and campaign planning, ghostwriting, copywriting, editing, training or coaching.

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What I’ve been up to

My weekly podcast House of Comments has returned with a new co-host in the lovely Charlotte Henry. You can find all past, present and future episodes here - please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

Our most recent episode was a look back at the year that was 2022. Good Lord. I also contributed my thoughts on the year the Tories died for Midatlantic.

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