Labour looks at strategy as well as tactics in face of Green threat
Labour remains at odds over the Green challenge as the clock ticks down to election day on 7 May. Our political editor Ailbhe Rea has written the politics column this week on the internal debate about the Greens within Labour. She reveals that Labour’s attack lines against the Greens were still being finalised in the hours before the party launched its local elections campaign last week (which is perhaps why, as I noted at the time, those lines were so muddled).
Ailbhe also writes about the behind-the-scenes work in Labour to take on the Greens, from Anna Turley, the party chair, holding heated sessions with Labour MPs to discuss their anti-Green strategy to deputy leader Lucy Powell delivering a post-mortem of the Gorton and Denton by-election that optimistically says protest voters could still come back to Labour.
A lot of this is about tactics but it’s dawning for some in Labour that a wholesale reassessment of electoral strategy might be required. And so the party is having another argument about who its most important voters are. Labour’s liberal right and the soft left are starting to unite in their concern that the party’s leadership is in denial about who these voters are and that this is a reason for the Green surge. The argument goes: too many at the top of Labour believe the key voters to win over are an idealised white working class who mix economically left-wing with socially right-wing views – essentially the people who made up the most important bit of Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in 2019 – and so the party is pitching to these people. Every time it does so – with policies like the Shabana Mahmood’s radical immigration reforms – it seems to lose support among the white professional, managerial classes as well as the ethnic minority working class people who are now actually key to Labour’s survival as a major party.
It’s a sobering critique, if it’s correct. We are partly in the history wars now. Your answer to who Labour’s most important voters are is largely determined by what you think they did in the 2024 election: did they actually vote Labour in droves? Or did a lot of them either stay at home because they were disenchanted with the Conservatives or vote Reform to punish the Tories?
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[Further reading: The silent coup]
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