Labour’s win rested on fixing our broken society
4 min read
As Keir Starmer prepares for his first Labour Party Conference as Prime Minister, it is easy to feel Labour’s victory was a long time ago. Yet it was long needed and a long time coming.
When writing Labour Together’s latest report, How Labour Won, it was remarkable how familiar the data and stories seemed to be. Voters having to cut back on everything just to pay the bills. Frustration at how little worked in the country anymore. In a word, weariness.
Before I joined Labour Together, I worked at Citizens Advice, where I’d see that reality every week. People getting to the end of the month and having to choose which bills to pay and which to fall behind on. By the time I left, over half of the people Citizens Advice helped with debt troubles were in the red.
That hardship had simple causes. Energy and housing are much more expensive here than in peer nations. When you include petrol, these are the largest line items in most people’s budgets. People have barely had a pay rise in the past 14 years. In Labour Together’s post election polling, people cited the cost of living as the most important issue facing the country. This is one of the Conservatives’ most enduring failures.
The problems that came up again and again during the election were not new, even if they had been made more severe in the past two years.
The Conservatives simply did not choose to build. The basic problems of the country: we do not build enough houses, generate enough electricity at a cheap price, or create transport links that enable regional economies to grow. At its base: we do not build. Rather than fix these problems when private and government borrowing was cheap, successive Conservative governments left them to fester.
They were a result of decisions made years ago and repeated by successive Conservative governments - whether David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and - thankfully - finally, Rishi Sunak.
Despite the changing cast of Tory characters on the telly, voters’ lives hadn’t changed. The hollow lens with which George Osborne approached economics had a long tail. When Covid-19 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia sent energy prices spiralling, voters were faced with energy bills they couldn’t afford, sky high bills and an NHS where 1 in 8 were left waiting for an operation.
Labour won because it articulated a vision that put voters’ priorities first
One voter, Jack, told us: “They [Tories] were concerned with bettering their own careers as opposed to bettering the lives of people in the country.” That became a repeated refrain. When asked how to describe the Conservatives in one word, many simply weren’t fit to print. “Liars”, “Useless” and “Corrupt” dominate. By the end, they seemed like they had given up on governing altogether.
Is it any wonder that 6.8 million people voted for the Conservatives this time, down from 14 million in 2019?
Labour won because it articulated a vision that put voters’ priorities first.
Recovering from its worst defeat since 1935 required Labour to convince voters it could be trusted - not only the public finances, but that it would grow the economy in a way the Tories couldn’t. That is not because abstracted economic statistics like GDP are what matters to voters. They aren’t. It is because that is how we make the unaffordable essentials of people’s lives affordable once more, so they can live lives of their choosing, without worrying about whether they can keep a roof over their heads.
The Tories hoped this election would be fought on tax. But it was literal bread and butter issues that mattered most, alongside voters knowing that it is only Labour that can be trusted to fix the NHS.
Labour convinced voters that it had changed, that it would prioritise economic competence and that it would focus on their priorities.
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