Beyond Brexit: Labour’s Structural Problems
| Author | Paula Surridge |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905820911741 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
16POLITICAL INSIGHT•MARCH 2020
Beyond
Brexit:
Labour’s
Structural
Problems
Brexit or Corbyn, the question
posed after the 2017 election
to explain the unexpected
improvement in the Labour
party’s fortunes during the election
campaign has returned to the lips of
political commentators now seeking
to explain the collapse of the Labour
‘heartlands’ in 2019.
Having lost a fourth election in succession
(albeit with three of them much closer
together than is usual) it is understandable
that the Labour party should begin to ask
searching questions about its programme,
leadership and image among voters. That
they went into the election with a leader with
the lowest ratings of any opposition leader
since IPSOS-Mori began measuring them in
1977 certainly cannot have helped. Likewise,
YouGov found during the campaign that 65
per cent of the electorate thought that the
party’s position on Brexit was unclear.
But there are also deeper issues of
restructuring that had been evident in
election results which predate both Corbyn’s
leadership and the EU referendum result.
Each of these are better seen as accelerants
rather than the sparks that lit the bonre.
Brexit or Corbyn?
Mellon et al (2018) posed this ‘Brexit or
Corbyn’ question to address the surprising
rise of Labour during the 2017 campaign,
concluding that the 2017 election could
Labour’s disastrous 2019 General Election performance was often
blamed on situational factors. But looking at data over the last decade
Paula Surridge finds that Labour has been squeezed by a fundamental
realignment in British politics that poses major questions for the
party’s future direction.
be understood as both a ‘Brexit election’
and a campaign about party leadership.
However, Jennings and Stoker (2017) point
to a longer term ‘tilting’ of the political
axis between 2005 and 2017, arguing that
there has been a ‘geographical bifurcation’
in British politics, with Labour becoming
stronger in the more cosmopolitan
areas, but critically this was not a new
phenomenon in 2017 and therefore was
not wholly attributable to Brexit.
The initial period of analysis after a general
election is marked as much by the analyses
we can’t yet conduct as by those we can. We
cannot know why individual electors voted
the way they did, nor say with any precision
how votes owed between dierent parties
and, critically, non-voting. It is possible though,
to consider how types of places have changed
in the outcomes they delivered for the parties
in recent elections. While being mindful of
the pitfalls of the ecological fallacy, data at
the level of constituencies allows us to frame
questions over a longer period than survey
©Press Association
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