Working class and young people are ditching Labour. 'Aping Reform' won't bring them back

After Labour’s drubbing at the May local elections, prime minister Keir Starmer was defiant.

“I’m not going to navel-gaze or turn inward,” he wrote in the Times.

But a degree of self-reflection may be in order. Not just for the prime minister, a preeminent left-wing think tank has said, but for the entirety of the “progressive left”.

According to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), progressives must “reinvent or die”, as swathes of working-class voters and young people turn to the populist right.

Coming from the think tank that shaped Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’, it could make concerning reading for the government.

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Since the 1980s, the share of votes in Western Europe and North America for centre-left parties has fallen by more than a quarter (from 33% to 24%), the IPPR found, while the share for populist parties increased two and half times (from 12% to 30%).

The exodus is driven by the working class. Those in working-class jobs make up only 7% of the British left’s voter coalition today, down from 40% in 1980. Across Europe, they make up 10% of the left’s coalition, down from 30%.

“This has given populist right parties an opening to steal the left’s historical claim to being for the many, not the few,” the report authors found.

“They are mobilising people around an alternative vision of the common good at astonishing pace, contesting not only what is ‘good’ but who counts as ‘common’.”

Young people – traditionally a bastion of leftist politics – are drifting to the right, too. This trend has been replicated all over Europe.

More than one in five young people (age 18-30) in France are voting for populist radical right parties, the IPPR found, while in Italy 70% of young people supported populist parties in the 2010s.

In Britain, young men are increasingly likely to resist immigration, resent changing social norms and vote for conservative candidates.

The spectre of Reform haunts Labour. What can the progressive left do about it?

How can the left counter Reform?

Starmer was elected on a mandate for change. But the self-proclaimed “sensible” politician has frustrated progressives, sidelining ambitious policy in favour of fiscal stability.

Labour’s first 11 months in office have seen the party backtrack on green pledges, maintain the two-child benefit cap, and cut winter fuel payments.

This final decision was recently reversed, a decision advocates described as “long overdue.”

For voters, the report warns, this kind of policy feels like more of the same.

The IPPR – which gave us David Miliband and birthed Tony Blair’s policy platform – has been broadly sympathetic to Starmer. But bold, ambitious policy is desperately needed, this report suggests.

“Progressives are losing ground not only in the battle of votes but the battle of ideas against the populist radical right,” said Dr Parth Patel, associate director at IPPR.

“They are stealing the left’s claim as the go-to people to change society. Progressive parties are seen as defenders of the status quo instead of vehicles of change.”

The problem, Dr Patel continues, is that “the progressive engine of ideas seems to have run out of steam”.

“When leaders don’t appear to have new ideas, they reach back for old ones, or imitate their opponents. That will not work at a moment of great change and challenge.”

Labour’s recent policy overtures – such as hardline immigration reforms – seem to be directed at Reform voters. According to YougGv polling out this week, nearly half of Britons (48%) believe that the government are trying to win Reform voters over.

But it’s not going to work. The same polling suggests that just 4% of those who backed Reform UK last year are considering voting Labour.

“While its’s undoubtedly the case that Labour is facing many of the same socio-economic and political challenges as its social democratic counterparts in Europe, there’s a danger – as we saw when Starmer made his big immigration announcement – of it jumping to the conclusion that the only way it can beat Reform is by becoming more like it,” Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, told the Big Issue. 

“Not only would that be a betrayal of its progressive principles, it’s unlikely to work. Much better to focus on delivering what its manifesto promised – change. But that change has to be tangible and, ideally, inspirational if it’s to prevent the spread of apathy and disillusion that we see in all too many parts of the electorate – young and old.”

The report says the same thing: “aping the right” is not the answer.

“We know the narrative arc of the politics of grievance,” writes David Miliband in the report forward. “It channels rage. The ‘ideas’ it provides offer conservation in the form of nostalgia, and change in the form of blowing up the system. But there is no such thing as a better yesterday, and revolutions consume their own children.”

Miliband ran the No 10 policy unit in Blair’s first term in office. But the report admits that ‘blue Labour’s’ days are done.

Since Labour last took power, shareholder payouts as a proportion of profits have tripled in the biggest British firms and the share of working households in poverty has increased 27% meanwhile half of 18 to 34-year olds now live with their parents, up 30% since 2003.

Miliband called for policies encouraging “a virtuous circle of social, political and economic renewal”.

“That is what happened after Labour was elected in 1945 and 1997, and what is needed again. The policies of those periods are time-bound; no one is suggesting those policies should be regurgitated. But the lessons in how new ideas can power new politics are important.”

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