Demography is not destiny – Keir Starmer can win if he gets the politics right

The Labour Together inquest into Labour’s defeat in 2019 fails the test of explaining how the party very nearly won in 2017

There is one big thing missing from the latest inquest into Labour’s election defeat: politics. The report, from a group called Labour Together that includes Ed Miliband, tells the party what it already knows: it fought a badly organised campaign last year and faces a “mountain to climb” at the next election.

The report tiptoes around the causes of defeat. “The roots of our 2019 loss stretch back over the last two decades,” it says, referring to “political alienation, demographic change and cultural shifts”. This is bunk. Demography is not destiny; elections are choices, shaped by parties and leaders.

If we go back two decades, as invited to by the report’s authors, that takes us to 1999, which is an interesting starting point. This is the infuriating Corbynite trick of taking the biggest peacetime election win for granted and then complaining that Tony Blair led the party downhill after that.

But the roots of last year’s defeat don’t even stretch back one decade, to 2009, when Labour could have ditched Gordon Brown, and David Miliband or Alan Johnson could then have won more votes in the 2010 election. As it was, 2010 resulted in a hung parliament. There was nothing preordained about it, nothing in the “roots” that said Labour had to lose – and it almost didn’t. The same applies to the 2017 election.

I have a simple test of any analysis of Labour’s 2019 defeat, which is: can you explain how Labour very nearly won in 2017? It is a test that the Labour Together report fails. It implies that the tides of demography and culture have been running against the party since the Middle Ages, and that the foundations of the red-wall seats of the north, midlands and north Wales were already rotten.

In that case, how did Labour come within 10 seats of making Jeremy Corbyn prime minister in 2017? This is a question that is sometimes met with disbelief, partly because I had undertaken not to mention the previous leader’s name, but mostly because people, and especially Blairites, misremember the election before last.

However, I will have to reverse my policy of pretending that the last five years of Labour history simply didn’t happen. Comforting as it may seem for those of us who were opposed to Corbyn and everything he stood for, it is unhealthy to join in what will soon be the common amnesia about that period. It was a shameful interlude, and it may be that in a few years’ time no one will remember being part of it.

But it is important to remember it precisely because it was shameful. We need to remember that Corbyn suggested Israel shouldn’t exist; that he called Hamas friends; that he refused to condemn the IRA; and that he praised George Lansbury for advocating disarmament during the Second World War.

It is also important to remember it precisely because Corbyn came so close to winning. Of course he was a long way from a majority Labour government, but if Theresa May had lost another 10 seats or so, she and the DUP could not have governed. I do not believe that more than two or three Labour MPs would have voted to keep her in No 10 rather than allow Corbyn to cross the threshold.

So what does the Labour Together report say about coming so close to victory? “The 2017 result masked continuing underlying voter trends in Labour’s historic voter coalition.” It is a bit like saying Marcus Rashford is a really good footballer, but he’s not getting any younger, you know.

What is missing from the Labour Together report is politics. Labour did well in 2017 because Corbyn caught the moment. He offered idealism and change: more money for schools and a chance to stop Brexit. Theresa May turned out to be frit and useless during the campaign, and promised to take old people’s homes away from them.

All the demographic factors that are supposed to be against Labour now were for it then. Its voters were more middle-class than ever; it won Canterbury and Kensington; and yet the party held the working-class red-wall seats.

All that had changed by 2019. To be fair, the report does say that Corbyn by then was irrecoverably unpopular, facing both ways on Brexit and making incredible spending promises. But what it does not say is that he supported Jo Swinson in making the biggest mistake of all, which was to allow the election to happen in the first place.

The events of 25-28 October last year remain one of the great mysteries of modern British politics. Swinson’s decision that weekend to back an early election was pivotal, but Nicola Sturgeon, who appeared to be in favour of it before she was against it, and Corbyn, who was against it before he was for it, played their supporting roles.

What will decide the next election will not be some pseudo-sociology about class dealignment or changing culture. It will be politics. Will the Conservatives be ruthless enough to get Boris Johnson out and put Rishi Sunak in? Will they look like an incompetent shower who handled coronavirus and the ensuing recession badly? Will Starmer inspire confidence that he would do a better job?

The new Labour leader has certainly made a good start. More significant than any retrospective analysis was the news this week that three Jewish peers, David Triesman, Parry Mitchell and Leslie Turnberg, have rejoined the party.

If the politics is right, the demography will take care of itself. We had all that nonsense about social change eroding Labour’s support in the 1950s, because the working classes were buying fridges. We had it again in the 1980s, because they were buying their own homes. Now we are having it a third time because the Tories are giving them Brexit and 50,000 more nurses for the NHS.

There is nothing inevitable about any of it. Labour can win, but it has to get the politics right.