Roll forward 12 months from now. If you were to vox-pop voters on the street and ask them to name the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, most, I suspect, would not know it.
Many wouldn’t care. In that sense, the outcome of the current election for the position, which will consume the party and much of the media between now and the end of October, won’t matter much at all.
But that doesn’t mean the contest itself is unimportant. While it is true that the role doesn’t carry much constitutional significance – especially given that Number 10 has confirmed David Lammy will remain as Deputy Prime Minister – the six-week campaign may have an influential bearing on Labour’s fortunes in the lead up to the next general election.
That’s because the party is about to bear its soul to the outside world. What does it truly believe? Who does it speak for? How in touch are its representatives in parliament with those who sent them there?
I have been a member of the Labour Party since 1994. I’ve canvassed for it, sat on its committees and attended its conferences. A couple of decades ago – around the time I saw the BNP come from nowhere to win 12 seats on my local council in east London – I began to warn that the party had embraced the creed of cosmopolitan liberalism to such an extent that it was losing touch with its core working-class vote.
We were becoming a party for social activists, student radicals and middle-class progressives living in our fashionable cities and university towns.
If we weren’t careful, we would pay a heavy price electorally. We needed to concentrate less on the causes close to the hearts of people in London and Cambridge, and more on the bread and butter issues that mattered to folk in Mansfield and Hartlepool.
Labour is about to bare its soul to the outside world. Reform's true influence will be revealed — Paul Embery
|Reuters/Getty Images
Few paid any attention. Some argued that I had no right to be in the party at all. But, sure enough, Labour began to haemorrhage the support of millions of once-loyal working-class voters, principally because it no longer spoke their language or shared their priorities. And though it won a large parliamentary majority at the last election, the party still hasn’t won many of them back.
So perhaps when I speak now, the activists who dismissed me previously might like to listen.
The election for Deputy Leader presents us with, if nothing else, an opportunity to show that we are reconnecting with our old heartlands. These communities need to see that Labour understands them.
The election debate must focus laser-like on their priorities: securing economic growth after years of falling real incomes and living standards, regaining control over our borders, reducing NHS waiting lists, tackling the increasing lawlessness on our streets, and addressing the housing crisis.
Anything less than that – for example, an undue focus on, say, Net Zero or LGBT rights or any of the other high-status beliefs peddled by the liberal class – and many of these voters will just roll their eyes and switch off.
That does not mean aping Reform UK, whose small-state, Thatcherite, slash-and-burn economic philosophy risks laying waste to working-class communities, just as it did in the 1980s, and is not what most working-class voters are looking for right now.
It means, instead, using the enormous fiscal capacity of government to deliver economic justice for these voters while reconnecting with them in a cultural sense – by respecting their patriotic and small ‘c’ conservative impulses, their sense of place and belonging, their desire for cultural security, and their concerns over the impact of globalisation and far-reaching demographic change in their communities.
Start talking about these things, and there is a small chance – I pitch it no higher than that – that the working class will start listening again.
As the excellent Red Wall Labour MP Jonathan Hinder said of his constituents on GB News this week: “When you speak to them about inequality, or wanting an industrial strategy to actually make things in the country again, paying workers properly, they’re on board; they are economically left wing. But we’ve drifted so far away from them on some of the cultural issues.”
Labour MPs have seen to it that the names of just two candidates – Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and the recently-sacked Leader of the House Lucy Powell – have cleared the formal threshold for nominations.
That plainly limits the choice. But it doesn’t mean these two candidates cannot be asked the most searching questions about the record of this government and future direction of the party – and in particular whether they believe in challenging existing Treasury orthodoxy, and how Labour might win back millions of once-loyal voters who now look to the political Right for salvation.
Ultimately, nobody beyond a few political anoraks will give a hoot about which candidate wins the Deputy Leader election. But how they win it, and what they argue in order to secure victory, may tell us a lot about the state of the Labour Party today, and whether it has learned any lessons from the many wrong turns it has taken in recent years.