Labour is Learning the Wrong Lessons

Centre-left incumbents are staying in power by aggressively pushing back on populists, not by aping them

A cartoon of Mark Carney shouting at Donald Trump and Keir Starmer hiding.

Political labels are funny things. For example, this was a very good week for ‘Liberals’. It was also a very bad week for ‘Liberals’.

In the happy corner we have Canada’s Liberal Party, who returned to power, despite looking dead and buried a few months ago, before ‘Governor’ Justin Trudeau had been replaced by ‘Governor of the Bank of England’ Mark Carney, and before Donald Trump had decided to set Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s entire campaign strategy on fire.

Another set of happy Liberals are Britain’s Liberal Democrats, who performed well in the local elections, increasing their number of councillors by almost 150 - roughly doubling their existing number up for election - and taking over three councils, the bucolic counties of Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Shropshire.

In the glum corner, we now have Australia’s Liberal Party who flunked an eminently winnable Australian election, where the incumbent Labour Party, led by Anthony Albanese, managed to greatly expand their seat share.

And joining them in the vale of tears are ‘liberal’ members of Britain’s Labour and Conservative Parties who witnessed the populist right Reform UK win an enormous haul of almost 650 local councillors and seven councils in the local elections. This has produced continued demands to ape Reform’s anti-immigrant, DOGE-lite policies, much to the chagrin of more liberal members of Britain’s traditional major parties.

‘Liberal’ is a funny word, isn’t it? In those examples above, it includes not only the most centrist people on planet earth - Mark Carney and Ed Davey - but also left-leaning social liberals (many members of the Canadian Liberal party and many in Britain’s Labour Party) and right-wingers - the Australian Liberal party (who are not really very ‘liberal’ in the common usage of the word) and the few hold-out Thatcherite/Osbornite economic liberals in the UK Conservatives. You know, I think someone made a radio show about this.

In any case, it’s been an interesting week for the continued battle between the forces of nationalist right-leaning populism and cosmopolitan left-leaning liberalism.

So, which way liberal man?

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A month or so back, I wrote a piece that got a decent amount of traction (coverage here in the FT and here in the New York Times) on whether we had reached ‘peak populism’. So how is my hunch holding up? Well, as the dear departed Meatloaf once said: “two out of three ain’t bad”.

In the English-speaking world, the forces of populism have suffered a few big defeats recently. And there is basically one simple reason - Donald J Trump.

Obviously this was most pronounced in Canada - Carney’s aggressive ‘Elbows Out’ campaign was centred completely on standing up to Trump, with barely a conciliatory whisper. This was hemlock for Poilievre who was unable to reverse ferret away from a few years of Make Canada Great Again style rhetoric against ‘woke’ and ‘globalists’.

I guess in Canada sometimes blowing a dog whistle just gets you murdered by a pack of wolves.

The Trump connection was less pronounced in Australia but still pretty visible. Peter Dutton, the Liberal Party leader, had a policy platform that was very Trump-inflected - all about kicking out asylum-seekers and slashing government jobs. Indeed on the latter, his shadow minister for ‘government efficiency’, Jacinda Price was caught wearing a MAGA cap and saying ‘Make Australia Great Again’ at a rally before trying to claim that it was the media who were obsessed with Trump. As Nayib Bukele might say, ‘oopsie’.

Janan Ganesh had a good column where he argued that liberals have long needed a ‘mean’ leader who could fight back rather than getting sucked into Obama era ‘when they go low, we go high’ pablum. And Carney is his key example. But you can also see this in Albanese, who while no attack dog, definitely went hard after Dutton - here’s a typical line: “He has made a career of promoting division, punching down on vulnerable people, seeking to divide the community, engaging in culture wars.” Or “Peter Dutton seems to think that bluster and yelling and interrupting and being rude is strength, it's not.” It’s hardly Trump-style nicknames but it’s pretty robust stuff.

Even Democrats, who had it seems hoped to deal with Trump 2.0 by hiding in a cave breathing into a paper bag, have started to realise that punching bullies back is their best move. J B Pritzker - the billionaire Governor of Illinois who has somehow become memed online as the Great Khan of the Midwest - has been particularly spiky. Here’s an excerpt from his New Hampshire speech this week:

“Autistic kids and adults who are loving contributors to our society don’t deserve to be stigmatized by a weird nepo baby who once stashed a dead bear in the backseat of his car.

“Our military servicemembers don’t deserve to be told by a washed up Fox TV commentator, who drank too much and committed sexual assault before being appointed Secretary of Defense, that they can’t serve this country simply because they’re Black or gay or a woman.

“And If it sounds like I’m becoming contemptuous of Donald Trump and the people that he has elevated, it’s because… I am. You should be too. They are an affront to every value this country was founded upon.”

Yeh, that’ll do it.

Democrats such as Pritzker have found their angry voice because Trump seems to be flailing, at least in the court of public opinion… well no actually also in the courts themselves too. Trump is losing court cases on immigration, on DOGE, on his targeting of law firms. And of course he has decided to go after the institution with perhaps the most prestigious and well-resourced law school in the country - Harvard. The Department of Justice is so thinly stretched across so many different cases, most of which the administration are going to lose badly, that one wonders how much longer they can keep going on this.

Some readers might scoff and say that the Trump administration will simply ignore the courts because they are engaged in an authoritarian takeover. And perhaps that is what some members of the administration might like to happen. But it is no simple thing to successfully deconstruct democracy when you are unpopular.

And Trump is very unpopular. He has the worst approval rating after 100 days of any President in the history of opinion polling, including his chief rival, himself. While this has steadied a little over the last week, as there has been a bit of recovery in the markets, I suspect it will get worse for him. Much worse.

G. Elliot Morris, in his excellent new Substack, argues that we might expect Trump to dip from a minus 9 approval rating today to around minus thirty by the midterms, if Trump’s approval follows the past patterns of previous presidents (including himself). That would put Trump on an appoval rating of something like 35 approve, 65 disapprove. Which is very bad - about as bad as Joe Biden ever got to, even in his worst days.

I well recall a similar story with a certain George W Bush, since I had the pleasure of living in America through both of his terms in office. He was re-elected with a pretty similar victory to Trump in 2024 - Bush had a smaller electoral college margin than Trump but did substantially better in the popular vote (50.7% Bush, 48.3% Kerry). At the time of his inauguration in January 2005, Bush had approval ratings in the high fifties. But policy overreach (talking about privatising Social Security) and incompetence (Hurricane Katrina) meant that by the end of the year his approval ratings had dipped under forty and began their sad descent to the high twenties by early 2008 (before the financial crisis had even hit).

Trump is his own thing. That is very much for sure. But I strongly suspect he is not immune to the costs of governing, nor to the public response to perceived incompetence. ‘Liberation day’ is Trump’s ‘Mission Accomplished’. The threat of authoritarianism is clearly not over - I expect lots of lashing out. But I do think, and I don’t think I’m alone in this, that American democracy’s immune system has finally kicked in. And not before time.

So, all in all, great news for liberals from the English speaking world, right?

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Well…

Over in the UK, we have been making plans for Nigel.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK did extremely well in the local elections. There is just no gainsaying this and no point in pretending that there is some important qualification to be made. The British electorate are mad as hell and they are not going to take it. Labour is now experiencing the full fury that decimated the Conservatives last summer. And while the Greens and Lib Dems have benefited to some degree, the main winner of this disillusionment is Reform UK.

I have written a whole streak of concerned Substack posts about Labour’s period in government - that they played things too safe and gloomy at the start, that their red lines on tax and Europe made their position weaker than it needed to be, that they lacked confidence and courage to engage in major reforms, that they have no theory of growth, that they have become too entranced by the idea of disruption rather than just doing what their voters asked of them. Told you so…

But I was hardly alone in diagnosing disaster for Labour, so no great praise for me. Their approval has collapsed and in vote intention polls they are hovering around 25%, which is terrible for an incumbent. The only good news for them is the Conservatives are polling lower, usually around 20%. The bad news of course is that Reform are also polling around 25%. From a Labour perspective, the good news is that the right is split. The bad news is everyone hates them.

The local elections were in a Götterdämmerung. For Labour, yes, in that they lost two thirds of the councillors they had up (dropping from around three hundred to a hundred). But even more so for the Conservatives. Remember them? Funny lot in dark blue. Used to be very important and try and kill each other. Like the Borgias. Anyway, whoever they are, they contrived to lose every council they held and 635 councillors.

When the BBC came up with their predicted national vote shares, which is tricky business because not every council stands, they came up with something like Reform 30, Labour 20, Liberal Democrats 17, Conservatives 15, and Greens 11. Last year, during the locals, I analysed what the predicted national share (L35, C26, LD 20, R10, G7) would mean at a General Election using my nifty election app. It came up with a hung parliament. We did not, I should note, end up with a Hung Parliament.

So we need to be careful here. People do not vote in locals the way they vote in nationals. Nor do these simple translations account for tactical voting, which becomes very important in Westminster elections (and was clearly hugely important in the recent Canadian elections in killing the NDP and BQ to the benefit of the Liberals). Fortunately my app lets you move people around.

In particular, it permits you to see what happens when people in the centre-left block vote for the candidate among their parties who did best in a particular constituency last time. I usually set this to 30% when I want to check tactical voting since that is the best estimate I’ve been able to come across from the British experience. But if you think differently, please feel free to play around with the app.

On the right, my app allows you to move Reform voters into the Conservative block. It does not do the opposite because in the past, it was Conservatives squeezing Reform. I think it’s entirely plausible that I should now adapt the app to allow this to go both ways. But I haven’t because that’s a lot of work for now. So my advice if you want to do this is to simply move the predicted totals for Conservatives and Reform up and down accordingly.

OK, so what do we get when we plug in the BBC’s national estimates and apply Uniform National Swing (and I am keeping SNP and PC roughly the same as 2024, which yes is probably not quite right - but again, knock yourselves out on the app if you disagree).

Well, we get a majority for Reform in Westminster, that’s what we get.

Yikes. I, for one, welcome our new turquoise overlords.

We can compare this FPTP outcome to what would happen in a PR system. Now, we see how FPTP can actually advantage Reform as they get to thirty percent of the vote, in a similar way to how Labour managed to get over 400 seats from a pretty paltry popular vote in 2024. Our electoral system is a total sicko.

Let’s also imagine exactly how this PR outcome would go down. Reform plus the Conservatives would still be about 36 seats short of a majority (even taking into account Sinn Fein and the Speaker not voting). The DUP does not have 36 seats. So either we have a totally mad progressive coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP and Plaid (322 seats) plus maybe an independent or two. Or it’s a Reform-Conservative minority coalition.

As nice as I have been about PR in the past, I’m sorry but that makes Weimar Germany look strong and stable.

Let’s get back to the FPTP outcome with a Reform majority government. What would it look like? This…

I am delighted that several journalists have picked up on my line that Reform are strong in the Danelaw. Yes. But this is more like the period in which England actually had a Danish king. Nigel Farage as Cnut.

It would leave the Lib Dems dominant in Wessex, to continue my Anglo-Saxon Chronicles theme. So we could have Edward the Unready. Or Edward Ironsides. I dunno, take your pick.

Labour would be holding out in their urban fortresses of London, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Leeds, and Glasgow. Plaid and the SNP would hold the Celtic fringes.

Wait… I forgot someone. Oh yes, the Conservatives. Lucky them, they keep East Grinstead, Harrow, Richmond, Rutland, and Windsor. Like some emigre nobles hiding out in their mansions, hoping for the hoi polloi to calm down and get back to the fields.

So, that’s a thing that could happen, I suppose. But I suspect we will not in fact see PM Nigel Farage and his Reform majority in 2029. Indeed, Anna Gross at the FT keeps kindly/slyly asking me for my updated probability of PM Nige, which I now have as 10 to 20%, which to be fair to him is much higher than I previously have had it.

Why do I think we are relatively unlikely to see PMNF? Two things. First I just cannot believe that the Conservative Party really will lay down and die. That’s like getting to the end of a horror movie and thinking that the axe-wielding antagonist really did just get knocked over by a car and killed and won’t be splitting the head open of the secondary protagonist in a jump cut five seconds later.

But also, I think that voters on the left will vote tactically to try to keep Reform out. And if they do, they can. Here’s the result of the thirty percent tactical voting on the left model I mentioned earlier. Now Labour are still - just - the largest party. There is a very clear Lib-Lab coalition, though that gets them to 336 seats - a manageable majority. Obviously Reform would be His Majesty’s Opposition. This seems more plausible than the scenario above, though again it assumes the Conservative Party won’t rise from the dead miraculously as they inevitably will.

But wait, I have done something dangerous here. I have assumed that the left-alliance is functional. Now we know from 2024 and indeed from this year’s local elections that the Lib-Lab implicit coalition is real. Both parties very efficiently reduce their vote when the other is in the lead. There is a ‘coupon election’ of sorts. But what about the Greens?

Green voters may be harder to persuade. Certainly Labour miserably failed to squeeze them in the Runcorn by-election which Reform won by six votes (while 2300 people voted Green). Here’s what happens if no Greens vote tactically (based on national vote share from locals) but Libs and Labs do. It’s not good for Labour. Indeed, it’s hard to see this produce anything other than a Reform minority government.

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So, if Reform really are able to continue polling at thirty percent, it’s going to be a very tough ride for Britain’s two traditional major parties. Labour could continue in power but it will need them either to push their own vote share up or to ally effectively with both the Lib Dems and the Greens.

For the Conservatives, it’s existential. It’s just really, really bad. I compared Labour and the Conservatives the other day to two other big clubs fallen on hard times: Manchester United and Tottenham. Their meeting in the Europa League final has some of the pathos of current Prime Ministers Questions - two nearly extinct megafauna in a doomed fight to the death while teethy new predators smile on at the sidelines. And Kemi Badenoch has a touch of the Ange Postecoglus - clearly a dead leader walking, keeping to the same lines, because ‘it’s just who we are, mate’.

I don’t know what I would really advise Badenoch because I just don’t see a way back for her. I can absolutely see the Conservative Party choosing the keener, ruthlessly ambitious but… uh not entirely charming, Robert Jenrick to replace her. Do I see him winning an election with the British Public as a whole, though? Not really.

I suspect the Conservatives would do much better to try and do another Boris, albeit without the penchant for suicidally terrible decision-making. There is, after all, an affable, somewhat socially-conservative but doesn’t scare the liberals, hail fellow well met, previous holder of two of the four key roles of state out there. They just decided - like the mad bastards they are - not to put James Cleverly in their final two last time. A decision that may kill them all.

What about Labour? Well as many readers of this blog will know, the lesson Labour seem to be taking is to try to beat Reform by mimicking them. With about all the grace of a malfunctioning Large Language Model.

Various people associated with Blue Labour - a socially-conservative wing of the party dominated by figures with a brashness that rather outweighs their electoral achievements - have been demanding a war on woke, on immigrants, on lefty liberals and so forth. Their chief voice appears to be Lord Maurice Glasman, who is recommending closing half of British universities to turn them into vocational schools to train the military. I look forward to Glasman, a senior lecturer of Political Theory at London Metropolitan University, lending his subtlety to his new role educating Britain’s drone operators and sappers.

Glasman has been joined by Jonathan Hinder - a graduate of my fine university - noting how he wouldn’t be disappointed if a bunch of British universities went bankrupt, with a delightful insouciance that I am sure will be appreciated by staff made redundant. And by Jo White, MP for Bassetlaw, who thinks the government should stop “pussyfooting around’ and “take a leaf out of President Trump’s book”: a very bold choice indeed to include the words “pussy” and “Trump” in one’s political advice to the leadership.

You can perhaps read through my subtext here to intuit that I don’t think this is a great idea. For one thing, the Reform voters that Blue Labour (and it seems the PM’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney) want to attract, have really quite different preferences on practically everything, not just to Labour voters but to voters for all of other parties. It is as if Labour are trying to expand the bird enclosure of a zoo by adding a colony of bats.

It makes more sense, if you look at my graphs above, to try and keep Lib Dem and especially Green voters happy to vote tactically for you. Then you can keep power even with just twenty percent of the vote. If you can’t keep them then you have to go head to head with a party whose voters really really hate you, and therefore who I suspect you will find harder to peel off.

I think part of the reason Blue Labour has the strategy they do is that, like Reform voters, they also dislike much of the Labour Party and its voting base, which has done the sinful thing of no longer being a bunch of white working class men in caps.

But most social democratic parties around the world have voting coalitions that mix traditional working classes, with low income service workers (many female) and upscale workers in creative, social, or public industries. Who are also attracted to the Greens and Lib Dems. If you insult these people enough, don’t be surprised if they won’t in fact turn up and vote for you in 2029.

What will keep Labour in power - the only thing that will keep them in power - is improving people’s lives. Basically making life less shit - as Dylan Difford succinctly puts it. Spending your time on messaging that you are kind of like Reform really, if you squint, is a waste of energy, resources, and integrity.

As the political scientist Rob Ford says, Labour’s current strategy is “Farage is right, don’t vote for him”. And there are two problems with this plan. First, Farage is not in fact right. And second, if you tell people he is, they will definitely think they should vote for him.

The lesson Labour can learn from Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese is that voters want you to show a little fight. To pick an enemy and explain why voters should vote for you and against them. If you are not going to go straight after Nigel Farage but are going to keep saying “well, he has a point but please vote for us anyway,” you are going to fail and you will deserve to have failed.

Bill Clinton famously said that the American people would prefer to vote for someone who was “strong and wrong” rather than “weak and right”. The danger for Labour is that they will just appear to be “weak and wrong”. And I don’t suspect the British public will be any more forgiving of that than are our friends in America.