It’s official: the Labour Party has finally abandoned any pretence of respecting, recognising, and representing its own heartlands.
The party is now throwing millions of patriotic people who backed Brexit, want to slash immigration, fix our borders, and slow demographic change under the bus.
That’s the only conclusion one can draw after watching the direction of the race to replace Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour Party and prime minister of the country.
Because over the weekend, one of the leading contenders to replace Starmer — former Health Secretary Wes Streeting — committed Labour to doing what it’s just spent six years trying to convince people it would never do: rejoin the European Union.
This policy was never in Labour’s manifesto. In fact, at the most recent general election, Labour promised the very opposite. ‘With Labour’, the party proclaimed, ‘Britain will stay outside of the EU ... There will be no return to the single market, the customs union, or freedom of movement.’
But now Wes Streeting, who could become prime minister, has decided in one fell swoop to not only ignore his party’s democratic contract with the people but blow apart the idea that the Labour Party actually respects the people.
And nor is Streeting the only leadership contender to turn his back on the pro-Brexit Labour heartlands. Andy Burnham — another likely successor to replace Starmer — is also known to support rejoining the EU.
In other words, the two leading contenders to replace Keir Starmer are fully committed to tearing up the country’s current constitutional settlement despite having absolutely no democratic mandate to do so, and doing the very opposite of what Labour’s own heartlands voted for.
And it’s not only on the question of Europe where this complete disregard for the people can be seen; it’s also visible on immigration, borders, and the deeper question of democratic legitimacy.
On immigration, Labour again appears incapable of listening to ordinary voters without sneering at them. Angela Rayner, another leadership hopeful, openly berates those in her party who call for immigration controls as ‘un-British’, while praising countries like Spain, which just gave an amnesty to 500,000 illegal migrants.
Much like the man he hopes to replace, Wes Streeting, too, clearly views anybody who favours lowering immigration or leaving the European Convention on Human Rights so we can control our borders as backward, intolerant, or morally suspect.
The final curtain falls on Labour following its calculated betrayal of the heartland - Matt Goodwin
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Astonishingly, Streeting just responded to Labour’s enormous losses to Nigel Farage and Reform across its traditional heartlands at the local elections by casually deriding Reform and its supporters as ‘racist’, ‘Islamophobic’, ‘an existential threat’, and ‘English nationalists’, despite the fact Reform just finished second in Wales, ahead of Labour, and joint second in Scotland, with the same number of seats as Labour.
Bizarrely, like Starmer before him, Streeting also attacked people across non-London England who have been flying the national flag from lampposts as flying ‘a symbol of division, a message that those flags belong to people who look like me’.
Is Wes Streeting really this tin-eared? Does he really think we are still living in the 1970s? Is he not aware, for example, that many politicians with diverse backgrounds now represent Reform?
That one in three black and minority ethnic Brits also voted for Brexit? That close to the same share of minority Brits feel, like their white counterparts, they are becoming ‘a stranger in Britain because of immigration?’
Or that the Unite the Kingdom protest over the weekend was clearly attended by many Brits from minority backgrounds?
Much like Starmer’s bizarre reaction to the Unite the Kingdom rally, which saw the Prime Minister rush to clamp down on the working-classes of this country in a way he did not do with the pro-Hamas, pro-Iran, anti-Semite, and pro-BLM demonstrations, Streeting and many other Labour MPs clearly view the people in their own heartlands as an assortment of morally inferior white nationalists, racists, and thugs.
What all this reflects is how left progressives, from those on the Labour benches and Labour HQ to those working at the BBC or in the universities, have radicalised to such an extent that they are no longer in touch with the country that surrounds them.
Even worse: they no longer appear to have any desire to get in touch with it. It’s the same kind of sneering, moralising politics that drove millions of people in the Labour heartlands to abandon Labour in the first place. And Labour has learned absolutely nothing from it.
It is Gordon Brown criticising Gillian Duffy all over again. It is Emily Thornberry mocking the blue-collar worker who dared to drape a national flag over his house.
It is Times columnist Matthew Parris, in 2014, urging Labour and the Tories to ‘give up’ on the decent people of Clacton because they have ‘nowhere to go’ (shortly before they helped power Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party, then Brexit, then the Brexit Party, and then, again, Farage and Reform).
And now, in only a few weeks, this tension will collide head-on with political reality at a forthcoming parliamentary by-election in the seat of Makerfield, in outer Manchester, which Andy Burnham hopes to use as a springboard into parliament and then, ultimately, Number 10 Downing Street.
This seat is filled to the brim with many of the same people Labour has been insulting for years by ignoring what they think and feel. Fiercely pro-Brexit.
Opposed to mass immigration. Patriotic. Culturally conservative. And where, in the recent local elections, each of the local council wards except one elected Reform councillors.
One person who perhaps understands the sheer scale of this gulf between the Labour Party and these voters is the local Labour MP, Lisa Nandy, who over the weekend warned Wes Streeting and her colleagues not to ‘reopen the Brexit wars’.
Why? Because she knows, I suspect, that this will only end in complete disaster for the Labour Party. Because we’ve seen this movie before.
Back in 2019, much like today, many within the Labour Party and its surrounding circle of supportive academics, pollsters, and journalists convinced themselves into believing that the sure path to victory was by seeking to overturn Brexit through a second referendum.
Encouraged by radicalising progressives within their own ranks, Labour decided the people had simply got Brexit wrong and needed to vote again.
The result? What I warned it would be at the time: the worst defeat for the Labour Party since 1935. A complete and total disaster for the party that reflected how utterly out-of-touch it had become with its heartlands.
Appalled by the prospect of the looming Brexit betrayal, and united by their righteous anger with a political class that refused to take them seriously, millions of voters in Middle England swung instead behind Boris Johnson’s simple but powerful promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’.
Today, too many in Labour appear determined to repeat the same mistake. Only this time, the slogan of Labour’s opponents, Nigel Farage and Reform, will not be ‘Get Brexit Done’.
It will be: ‘Get Immigration Control Done’. ‘Get Fixing the Border Done’. ‘Get Respecting the People Done’. And once again, Labour’s radicalising progressives, who appear terrified of leaving the woke citadels, will be outflanked by the millions of people whose priorities, values, and concerns they have brazenly ignored.
Labour, put simply, has finally given up on its own heartlands. Which is why, no matter who replaces Keir Starmer, the party is on course for yet another heavy defeat.
Turning its back on its heartlands, Labour will now be reduced, by its own fanatical progressive activists, to competing against the Greens and woke liberals in urban cities and university towns, where, similar to the aftermath of 2019, it will discover there are nowhere near enough seats to remain as a serious, viable, national party.
And when it finally gets off the floor to look over its shoulder at its heartlands, from the Red Wall to Wales, it will find they are now held by Nigel Farage and Reform, the vessel millions of exasperated, patriotic Brits are using to exact their revenge on a Labour Party that treats them so badly and which, as they are again being reminded through this Labour leadership contest, views them with such visceral contempt.