Rebuilding the Red Wall?

DANNY LEACH / PEMBROKE, PPE

The so-called red wall is a frustrating concept for many reasons. Arguably, some areas of the North have been Labour heartlands for the last 30/60/90 years (delete as appropriate), but the “Red Wall” is a completely ahistorical concept, invented by politicos in 2019. It did not exist as a political idea before that time, and the closest analogue is the Democratic “Blue Wall” across the North-Eastern USA.

Aside from the fact that on any electoral map, these seats form a pathetic “wall”, it feels like the term now links seats which just happen to vote Labour and aren’t in city centres. Many of these haven’t always been Labour, such as Batley and Spen, which has been Labour since 1997, but which was a marginal Tory seat before that. Others went Tory in previous landslides, such as 1983 or 1959.

For a long time, they have been seats with the demographics of marginal seats, but more Labour voting patterns. Now it seems like they are simply standard marginals, maybe it’s time to drop this overused and under-understood term.

DOAA SHABBIR / LMH, PPE

After the 2019 election, Sky News’ Beth Rigby commented that the ‘red wall’ was not “wobbling”, but “obliterated”. Labour lost 20% of its 2017 general election support in ‘red wall’ seats - northern constituencies historically won by Labour. This phenomenon was consolidated by Labour’s loss of the 2021 Hartlepool by-election. Leaked party documents suggest this shift in support dates back to the Blair era. Between 1997 and 2015, Labour’s vote share fell by 25% in Hartlepool, 23% in Bolsover and 24% in Sedgefield. Despite their large share of national votes in 2017, Labour lost six long-term Red Wall seats and many more became marginal. Across 41 northern seats, the Tory vote increased from 29% in 2015 to 42% in 2017.

Internal documents from Labour’s head of research investigating the reasons for this ‘long retreat’, reveal that voters could not describe ‘what or who Labour stands for’. This seems to go hand-in-hand with voters’ decreased association of Labour with the working class since the Blair era, which Rayson (2021) believes was a major contributor to the decrease in support amongst mostly working-class Northern Communities. Evans (2017) argues that since the development of “New Labour” in the 1990’s, ‘political parties have chosen to not represent … class differences’, both through policy positions and the increasingly bourgeoise profiles of politicians. Austerity at local levels, often administered by the more centrist Labour councillors in the North also created a distrust in Labour- one voter in the region was reported as expressing: “How can I trust Labour to give me free broadband, when they can’t even keep the local library open?” (Booth, 2020). Labour’s recent victory in the Batley and Spen by-election may seem to offer a glimpse of redemption. However, if the party wants to truly reconnect to its former voter base, it needs to vastly re-strengthen its connection and commitment to the working-class in order to be trusted again.

DANIAL HUSSAIN / LMH, PPE

The typical soundbites. ‘Labour needs to reconnect with its heartlands’, ‘Labour has left the working class behind’ and of course ‘Labour has lost its way’. Such rhetoric has been encapsulated into one misguided concept: the red wall, a group of northern, socially conservative, working class constituencies who voted Tory in 2019. Supposedly excessively patriotic, they apparently crave flag waving and equally detest any form of progressive social movements.

Seemingly, the red wall symbolises Labour’s electoral failures, with these soundbites becoming synonymous with criticisms of Labour’s electoral strategy. Indeed, Labour is suffering, a net loss of 60 votes in 2019 suggests as much. Our failures, however, do not lie in losing the red wall, rather it is due to our misrepresentation of the concept, the fact that it is a long term decline and not a sudden loss. The problem with the “red wall” discussion is that it is fraught with assumptions, inaccurate assumptions that must be clarified if we are to be electorally successful. Firstly, the “red wall” is not a socially conservative group. A YouGov poll, of people living in the 51 constituencies where Conservatives won from Labour in 2019, demonstrated that those in the “red wall” were ‘no more socially conservative than Britain as a whole’. For example, 50% of the people agreed that “having a wide variety of different ethnic backgrounds and cultures is part of British culture”, similar to the national sample of 54%. So our current strategy of insincere flag waving, of failing to take a stand on the social issues of our time is simply electorally and morally wrong.

Secondly, we cannot rebuild the “red wall” because it was never ours in the first place. James Kanagasooriam, the analyst who first coined the term “red wall”, thought the red wall was a set of constituencies that should have been Conservative, due to their demographics, but which had consistently voted Labour, largely for historical and cultural reasons. Pollster, Peter Kellner emphasised this view, arguing that “collectivist” voters, ‘people committed to the long-term goals of socialism and solidarity’, had shrunken since the 1970s. Without the trade unions providing community support, and jobs providing security, these seats slowly declined. Yet, now the red wall has become a catch-all term for every marginal northern seat, a gross generalisation of the problems in these constituencies. There was never a distinctive homogenous group of Labour seats, treating it as such will not solve this long term problem. To me, the idea of this red wall serves as an ideological concoction that Labour has abandoned what it stands for. In some ways, this is purely spin, we have not suddenly lost who we are, and the Tories certainly have not become the party to “level up”. However, some of the “red wall” analysis does display the stark reality of Labour’s long term electoral coalition. In order to be the party we were set up to be, in order to be electrically successful, we must be the party of the working class, yet I think for too long we have taken the working class vote for granted.

Brexit, arguably, demonstrated that many of the working class, including those in red wall seats, were disillusioned with the status quo, feeling unrepresented. They were frustrated, feeling labour no longer stood for them. It seems Labour has failed to adapt to the reality of the working class, with Britain’s working class shifting from miners to those on zero-hour contracts, from factory workers to education and hospitality workers.We need to stop saying we have always represented the working class, as that justified why they should vote for us, and rather show how we do, through championing real devolution and direct investment to these underfunded regions.

So to me, the question is not how to rebuild the “red wall”, it is how to rebuild Labour’s electoral coalition. Our loss of these seats is not sudden, for it has been a consistent decline. However, our solution must be swift. Otherwise, red wall or not, it will be difficult to rebuild.