Within walking distance of Liverpool’s conference centre, where Labour will gather shortly to celebrate its landslide victory, are 16,000 reasons why the party should be nervous about the next election.
The conference is taking place in the city’s Riverside constituency. Its MP, Kim Johnson, has a majority of almost 15,000. Her victory passed unnoticed on the election night TV shows. However, there is something significant about what happened there. Labour’s vote collapsed, from 36,097 in 2019 to 20,039 this year. The question is, why did 16,000 supporters desert the party locally—and, given that it still won the seat comfortably, does it matter?
Riverside was not alone. It was one of 42 seats where the party’s support fell by more than 10,000. While Keir Starmer was gliding towards his landslide majority across Britain, former Labour voters deserted the party in dozens of seats in remarkable numbers. Labour was able to shrug this off this time. Next time it might not be so lucky.
The party is, of course, acutely aware of places where independent and minor-party candidates attracted Muslim voters who used to back Labour. This caused Labour to lose six seats—and to see large majorities cut to less than 2,000 in another five. However, such results, though painful, were not unusual. Labour’s support fell sharply in many more seats where arguments about Gaza played little or no part.
The party’s narrative since the election is that it designed a specific strategy for its campaign, and executed it to perfection. It targeted the voters in needed in the constituencies it had to win. If 16,000 votes went missing in ultra-safe seats, so what? Far better to win 2,000 extra votes in each of its eight target seats. That’s the point of our first-past-the-post voting system. Not all votes are equal: some count for more than others. The efficient distribution of votes matters more than the total number. This year Labour (and the Liberal Democrats) played the system especially well. Labour more than doubled its number of MPs, despite winning half a million fewer votes than five years ago. The Lib Dems have 72 MPs, despite attracting 600,000 fewer votes than Reform, which has only five.
That is a perfectly sensible way to look at what happened on 4th July. It is not, however, the whole story. Labour’s landslide owed a great deal to Reform’s success at taking votes from the Conservatives. Thanks to the divisions on the right, Labour captured 56 Conservative seats despite winning fewer votes in those seats than it did in 2019. As many as 144 Labour MPs would not now be in parliament had all the Tory and Reform voters lined up behind a single candidate.
All this tells us why Labour should be concerned about the 16,000 missing voters in Liverpool Riverside. They are not a different tribe whose behaviour can safely be ignored. Rather, they can be found everywhere. More of them live in safe Labour seats, but plenty of them live in the seats that decide elections. And enough of them deserted the party this year all over the country to explain why its performance was not as stellar as the headlines said.
Two bits of evidence indicate why Riverside, like other ultra-safe Labour seats, was not totally different from the rest of the country. It was an extreme example of a general phenomenon. Its turnout was just 45 per cent, down from 61 per cent in 2019. Huge numbers of previous Labour voters stayed at home. Others switched to the Greens (in Riverside their support jumped from less than 1,000 to more than 5,000.) But abstentions, and defections to the Greens, were not confined to safe Labour seats. Turnout fell, and Green support rose, almost everywhere. In the seats that Labour gained, turnout was down seven points, from 67 to 60 per cent.
That is not all. Shortly after the election, an analysis presented to cabinet ministers showed that one in nine voters who had backed the Tories in 2019 switched to Labour in 2024. In Labour’s target seats that rose to one in four. It was an impressive achievement—but leads to the second piece of evidence and a more worrying conclusion.
Overall, Labour’s total vote fell by more than 5,000 votes on average in seats the party held, but rose by more almost 1,400 in the 182 seats that Labour gained from the Tories. However, applying the figures given to the cabinet, 6,600 voters on average switched from Tory to Labour in these seats. This means that without these switchers, Labour would have typically LOST more than 5,000 votes in the seats that produced its landslide victory.
Of course, the figures vary a fair amount from seat to seat. The loss of Labour votes in Riverside was well above that in its target seats. The point, however, is that the drift away from Labour was not confined to expendable voters in safe Labour seats. It happened all over the country.
Labour is not alone in suffering from the modern affliction of weakening loyalties. Recent decades have seen the erosion of traditional class-based loyalties on both left and right, and with it a collapse in the number of voters identifying strongly with any of the political parties. One consequence has been the wild slumps in support at recent elections: in 2015 Labour in Scotland and the Lib Dems across Britain; this year the SNP and the Conservatives. Future swings could be just as sharp. If Labour struggles to retain its 2019 supporters when the appetite to kick the Tories out is so great, how will it manage if and when Keir Starmer’s government enters choppy waters?
Polls since the election underline its problem—and its contrast with what happened in 1997. Three months after the 1997 victory, almost 60 per cent said they would vote Labour; today it’s around 30 per cent. Blair’s satisfaction rating was plus 59. Starmer’s is minus 14.
What, then, is to be done?
Based on Labour’s recent campaign, I imagine that its strategists would brush the question aside and say something like this: “Fear not. We shall start to turn the economy round. The Tories cannot regain their credibility in a single parliament. We will pour resources into the seats we need to defend. Instead of ‘kick the Tories out,’ our message next time will be ‘keep the Tories out.’ We will know which voters we need to reach, and how to reach them. We are not that bothered if our majority slips further in places like Riverside. They won’t determine the result of the election.”
Such a plan might work—but it might not. Either way, it puts Labour’s longer-term future at risk. It is essentially a transactional approach to electioneering, tailored to the specific circumstances of each election, not a strategy for laying the foundations for long-term loyalty. This year the costs of that approach were outweighed by the scale of the Conservative collapse.
Next time could be different. A revived Tory party that sees off Reform could cost Labour its majority, even if it wins exactly the same number of votes in every constituency as it did this year. To be sure of victory, Labour must win back the past voters that deserted it this time.
The conclusion should be clear. Next time, Labour will need to repeat this year’s brilliant campaign to get out the right votes in the right places. But that is not all it must do. It also needs to reconstruct its electoral base: millions of voters who identify with Labour’s values, support its ambitions, and want to join its journey into the future. Plainly, the Conservatives face an even larger version of the same problem. Their base has collapsed in much of Britain. They would surely have won a gold medal had the Olympics offered the sport of synchronised sinking.
At root, neither Labour nor the Tories have come fully to terms with the decline in class loyalties. They have continued—implicitly if not deliberately—to base their electoral strategy on an out-of-date assumption that they had a significant core vote that they could rely on. Elections were won and lost according to the choices made by the minority of voters who lived between those two big blocks.
Starting in the late 1950s (Conservatives) and early 1960s (Labour) they used increasingly sophisticated methods to research what these in-between voters wanted. Not surprisingly they came up with similar discoveries, often converted from dry statistics into digestible stereotypes—Worcester Woman, Mondeo Man and so on. What would secure their votes? Millions of pounds worth of polling data and focus group reports shaped the parties’ tactics. But the basic message seldom changed much. Swing voters distrusted ideology. They wanted an honest government that would take practical measures to solve everyday problems, keep their promises and boost prosperity. Above all, they valued competence.
All that remains true. The problem is that this approach is no longer enough to retain the loyalties of core voters: the very people that both parties used to take for granted. To rebuild a durable electoral base, as both main parties now need to do, they need to reach beyond the conventional swing voters. Competence and economic growth are vital not enough. To rebuild their base, Tory and Labour need competence with a cause. What view of society makes them distinct? If they didn’t exist, why would they need to be invented?
Life would be easier if Starmer’s government enjoyed as benign a financial inheritance as Blair’s. Promoting cherished causes is easy when the Treasury is flush with cash. But tough times generate their own opportunities. It is when money is short that a government reveals its true priorities: the things it chooses to do not because it has plenty of money but despite the fact it doesn’t. What message will Rachel Reeves send in her October budget to struggling families and shivering pensioners; to patients waiting months for an operation, and women who fear going out at night?
Just as much as the Conservatives following their crushing defeat, Labour needs a distinctive cause that will retain loyalties when the going gets rough: voters who will flock to the polling stations because of their enthusiasm for that cause, regardless of whether they have been targeted by a professional party machine. That does not mean Labour moving to the left or the Tories to the right. Crude ideologies messed up the 20th century; let them rest in peace. Rather, it means painting a future that works but also makes the heart beat faster.
One hundred years ago, the South African-born poet Roy Campbell joined the bohemian Bloomsbury Group in London. In time he became frustrated by the contrast between the group’s radical views of life, love and art, and the timidity of its politics. His response was to write a short poem that applies just as much to Labour today:
You praise the firm restraint with which they write—
I'm with you there, of course:
They use the snaffle and the curb all right,
But where’s the bloody horse?
