Who can help Starmer win back Labour votes in the north?

Recent polls have made grim reading for the party leader, writes Sean O’Grady

Starmer with Rebecca Long-Bailey and John McDonnell, two prominent figures of the left (Getty)

To adapt a phrase, it would seem that some in the Labour Party believe that Keir Starmer’s difficulty is the left’s opportunity. While a Corbynite resurrection is unlikely, a poor election showing in Hartlepool and across the country – by what you might term Starmerite Labour – contains its own silvery-red lining.

The reports are that the left – represented in parliament by the likes of Jon Trickett, Ian Lavery and Richard Burgon in the Campaign Group – is giving Starmer another year to make progress or make way for someone else. Already Burgon has urged the leader to include a “big” figure from the left in the shadow cabinet (whoever could he mean?), and there have been various coded threats about the way Starmer has been running things.

Key concerns include the reversal of a Corbyn-era pledge to hike corporation tax (with Covid as the reason/cover); a suspicion that Starmer and Jonathan Ashworth’s “constructive criticism” over Covid leaves Labour looking weak and pointless; frustration at internal party disputes; and resentment about the way the drive to eradicate antisemitism has been handled, which is to say with sincerity and commitment. After all, the failure of Jeremy Corbyn to unconditionally welcome the Equality and Human Rights Commission report into Labour’s antisemitism problem has led to the former leader now sitting as an independent MP. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the once future leader, also left the front bench after an argument with the leader around antisemitism.

With Unite leader Len McCluskey soon to retire and Diane Abbott promoting her memoirs, that just leaves John McDonnell, the thinking socialist’s Jeremy Corbyn, as the most prominent figure on the left, and one who no longer holds much political ambition. The left as a force has all but disappeared, its strange death almost unremarked and unmourned: something to do with the events of December 2019, perhaps.

So there isn’t much sign of an alternative leader to Starmer on the left, and, given the scale of the London MP’s win in the leadership election not much more than a year ago, little chance of any leadership challenge for the foreseeable future, and probably not until after the next general election. For now, Starmer has no serious rivals on the left, or, for that matter, on the centre or right. He does, though, have plenty of ambitious folk around him who think they know where the party should be going, which is almost as bad.

For Starmer’s main challenge will emerge from what used to be called the “soft left”, and in particular from his mostly loyal deputy, Angela “I’m fiery, I’m ginger and I’m northern” Rayner. Rayner, who has confined herself mainly to internal party organisation and lobbing insults at “Tory scum”, recently remarked that: “We don’t have an authoritative voice in that room yet. People are still annoyed, at times they say, ‘Well, so what would you do, then? It’s alright for you to say that.’ There’s still a lot of anger and resentment for the Labour Party for those voters that we need to win back because they feel we let them down.”

Funnily enough, she thinks Keir needs to be more authentically Keir, the human rights London lawyer, and leave the northern stuff to the likes of her, no doubt, and the shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy.

Could a bigger role for Lisa Nandy help Labour win back northern votes? (Getty)

Talking of which, the post-election focus within Labour will probably fall on the shadow cabinet reshuffle and the key role of shadow chancellor. After all, if Labour is to reconcile so many of its policy dilemmas and find some eye-catching pedals that will propel it back into contention for power, an awful lot of that will have to come from the economic policy.

Sadly, for whatever reason, the hard-working and eminently reasonable Anneliese Dodds hasn’t been able to punch through, as the phrase goes, and, fairly or not, may have to make way for someone like, well, Lisa Nandy, MP for Wigan. Where the ex-MEP Dodds is an ardent Europhile, Nandy was always more pragmatic about Brexit, and, moreover, realistic about what Labour needs to do in its old northern and midlands heartlands, and among voters everywhere who feel left behind and let down by “metropolitan” Labour.

Nandy might make a better job of working out where Labour would “build back better”. She is, like Rayner, a counterweight both to Starmer and the legacy of Corbyn and, for that matter, the leadership of Ed Miliband (the man who lost Scotland). For this wing of the party, the soft left, the arrival of the notably non-northern, vaguely centrist Rachel Reeves as shadow chancellor would be something of a disappointment. She is not the answer to the question: “What do they want in Wigan?”

It is doubtful that any of these personalities would actually want Starmer’s job in a hurry, or realistically think they’ve got what it takes to win the next election for Labour. The psephological trends are against them, so is history, so are the culture wars, so are the nascent divisions in rejoining Europe, so is Johnson, unaccountably popular despite everything. The best they can hope for is that Starmer does what Neil Kinnock and John Smith did after the defeats of the past, and he lays some foundations for (their) future progress. It will inevitably take time, and not even socialism can produce more of that.