Who are you?
There are lessons to be learned from Batley and Spen about Labour's relationship to voters. But will we be brave enough to learn them against our own instincts?
Labour held on in Batley and Spen. There should be much rejoicing. A little over a week ago we were pretty sure Labour were going to lose. A lot of very dedicated activists did a lot of very hard work to make this happen. When the margin is that narrow, your GOTV is essential. Ours was spectacularly good. The Tories - according to Mark Wallace of Conservative Home - was shambolic. While other factors played a role, it is always important to note the importance of a well run, well-staffed and volunteer-empowering campaign (there is a superb pamphlet ‘Marginal Holds’ that I edited about how this was done in Leeds North West that I highly recommend if this is your thing).
When it happened, I didn’t write about the death of Jo Cox - though my boyfriend at the time did beautifully (I am the person alluded to in the intro). I knew Jo. Not well, but enough to feel her loss deeply. watching this byelection descend into vile Galloway-fuelled chaos and hatred (Galloway only has one electoral tactic - whip up enough hatred and drama to get himself on the telly) was painful from a distance. I can’t imagine what it was like for the vast majority of people from Batley and Spen who don’t want to be the byword for division and don’t want to be remembered only for an atrocious murder. I am delighted that in the end Kim Leadbeater’s dignity in the face of such hatred and nastiness was rewarded. She clearly had a personal mandate and managed to appeal to voters who were not always Labour supporters but felt shocked at what had been going on around them and the silence of the Tory candidate on it.
There was complacency from some Labour people at the start of the election. I got into a Twitter spat with a woman who claimed “we would never lose” this seat. But frankly, if it hadn’t been for a combination of factors - many (like the Hancock revelations) out of Labour’s control - we could easily have done. There simply isn’t room for taking the voters for granted anymore and this never should have been a habit we got into. It’s deadly.
So the key is to get to know voters better. But again for far too long, a vastly overcentralised Labour Party has tried to do this through shortcuts - in particular by working through ‘community leaders’ and by voter segmentation (X voter shops at Waitrose and is middle-aged and white. Therefore they want to hear you talk about tackling property crime and shut up about the iniquities of private school).
After the election, a Labour source was quoted as saying Labour had “Basically built a new electoral coalition in six weeks. Lost the conservative Muslim vote over gay rights and Palestine, and won back a lot of 2019 Tory voters.”
Even if I thought it was morally justifiable to talk about a section of the population in such basic, simplistic and ultimately insulting terms (which it obviously isn’t) it would also be spectacularly unhelpful as an ongoing electoral strategy. Nor does the qualifier “conservative” make this OK. They don’t mean Tory, they mean socially conservative and quite apart from the fact that Muslims are as divided along these issues as everyone else is, what on Earth does that have to do with Palestine?
Labour has spent a long and painful time educating members where needed (and sadly it was much needed) that British Jews are neither responsible nor accountable for the actions of the Israeli government. As part of this there has been an acceptance that while there is a vast majority of British Jews who believe Israel has the right to exist, the spectrum of opinion on Netneyahu et al is varied but - especially on the left - quite frequently critical and outright oppositional.
Why then are we making the exact same mistake about British Muslims? Yes, I am sure many of them care about Palestine. But that care being central enough to be their key voting issue is a very different matter. That is probably only true for a minority and for them, it is unlikely that any mainstream, two-state position will do.
I am a feminist. As I get older this is increasingly becoming a larger and larger part of my political identity. It has affected my vote in internal Labour campaigns as a result.
Do I vote along strict feminist lines? No. For a start, how the hell could I? All the parties are almost as useless as each other. But more importantly, my individual trait of being a feminist is part of a much wider set of traits that make me the individual I am. And I vote both as that individual and as part of a societal collective. My vote doesn’t, won’t and can’t be boiled down to an individual block.
There is huge value in parties having far greater representation from marginalised groups. I am a great fan of Labour’s Socialist Societies - which (roughly) break down into two types - those representing different identities (BAME Labour, Labour Women’s Network, LGBT Labour etc) and those representing different specialisms (Environmentalism, Housing, Education etc). The work the former do to ensure representation at all levels is essential to changing society and ensuring a fairer world that reflects in its leadership the diversity of its populations. Representation matters and should be fought for.
But at the moment, that sense of representation all too often tips over into pigeonholing. Sending Muslim MPs to talk to Muslim voters. Women MPs talking about femicide. Gay MPs celebrating the anniversary of the end of the vile Clause 28. None of these are bad things in and of themselves. But they tend to put these identities into boxes. And when that happens they aren’t treated as universal concerns. It matters to me - a straight, white woman - that there is a Parliament that looks like the diverse neighbourhood I live in. It matters to me that the people we elected are the most talented and for that to happen we have to ensure that talent is never repressed due to the colour of someone’s skin, their sex or sexual orientation.
Equally, everyone has the equal right to be an individual. I have just started noodling with my second play (come and see the first this summer!) about a woman with a very evil job that she is fully committed to. I started writing the play about one of her victims, but I found that significantly less interesting. Where is the originality in yet another heroic but doomed revolutionary? What is new to be said about an unyielding goodie?
The interesting thing for me was the humanity of the baddie. Writing this baddie not as a cartoon but as a person. Someone some people love and admire, for whom they feel sympathy. Someone with whom an audience can find their shared humanity even as they are disgusted by their choices.
I wanted to make this person a woman because we see this written in men at times, but women always have to be either totally heroic or wholly evil. But it is the grey areas that give us all our humanity.
What does this have to do with moving away from the segmentation of voters? Well, it is those grey areas that is where the electorate truly lives. Conservatives will surprise you with their vehemently pro-immigration views that come from their understanding of the teaching of their religion. Liberals will disagree for a year and a day about the limits and necessities of borders.
Labour has to stop taking the votes of certain marginalised groups for granted. But that doesn't mean they should start tailoring policies not based on what the right thing to do is, but on what they believe either an imagined block of voters think or the loudest voices of self-appointed community ‘leaders’. Because I promise you, others in their communities will not see them as leaders at all.
Muslim voters aren’t weird aliens. they need safe and secure housing like everyone else; they want their children to attend good schools and come out of them with well-rounded skills; They want their jobs to be secure and their money to stretch to a little holiday. They are like all of us. We should make policy for all of us.
This isn’t to say that policy or politics should be blind to systematic racism and misogyny. It is to say that when creating policies that will truly avail all of us with better lives there will need to be work done to make sure that these balance these inequalities from the start.
But the more we talk about that balancing rather than building that balancing into policy, the less successful we will be at actually having the space to make this difference. The more we tell minority voters that we are targeting policies at them, the more those communities feel separate and the more everyone else feels excluded from policies and politics that will ultimately help everyone.
Labour has to find a way to move out of the clunkiness it injects into every conversation about our differences. And the first way to do that is to remind us all that we have ‘more in common’.
What I’ve been up to
TICKETS FOR NO CURE FOR LOVE ARE NOW ON SALE!
Inspired by the music of Leonard Cohen, this piece examines the truth behind love songs. Can love ever be like that? Would we want it to be? Does love age with us or do we always fall like teenagers?
Join musicians Scott and Rose backstage at the Broadstairs Folk Festival as they try to discover if there is - in fact - a cure for love.
This is a rare show about love, sex and romance between older people. We're jaded, but we still have appetites, hopes, dreams and romantic aspirations. But if we haven't found them yet - are we being realistic about what we want?
*****
On Thursday (before the byelection result) I wrote a piece for the Telegraph about how the changes Labour need to make run much deeper than the leadership. We need to make the voters believe we like and respect them (ideally, by liking and respecting them).
On a very different note, I wrote for the Metro about, well, my sex life now things are opening up again (ooh err missus). Mum & Dad I know you read this newsletter - don’t read this piece!
Reading List
Three pieces that focused on the internal politics of the Labour Party around the byelection - some written before and some after. I agree with bits of all of them and disagree quite a lot with bits of some of them. Sorry, they’re also all blokes!
Rafael Behr - It will take a Labour crisis for Keir Starmer to learn how to speak his mind.
Paul Mason - Labour’s struggles in Batley and Spen show Keir Starmer must change to survive.
Simon Fletcher - Keir Starmer’s Labour desperately needs to stand for something.
Questions, comments and arguments are very welcome. Insults will get you summarily blocked on every platform that no longer hosts Donald Trump. I’m at emmaburnell@gmail.com or on Twitter (far too often) at @EmmaBurnell_.