Peter Kellner / Nov 2024
Photo: Shutterstock
A myth about what happened on July 4 is undermining Rachel Reeves’s hopes of boosting Britain’s economy. It is that Labour won the election by winning back thousands of strongly pro-Brexit voters in Red Wall constituencies that had swung to the Conservatives in 2019.
Reeves implicitly admitted the cost of her party’s stance on Europe in her speech last week at the Mansion House. She said: “Our biggest trading partner is the European Union... we must reset our relationship.” However, she insisted that “we will not be reversing Brexit or re-entering the single market or customs union.” To reach her destination she wants the car, but without the engine.
As an economist, Reeves will be acutely aware of the tension between her political stance (no return to the single market or customs union) and economic reality (life outside them is holding Britain back). Her solution is to launch other policies to offset the damage done by Brexit. Her latest is her plan to create public sector pension megafunds, to invest in infrastructure and new technologies.
The point is that she frames these as either/or (new growth policies instead of frictionless trade with the EU). What if she offered both/and: domestic pro-growth policies AND frictionless trade? Then her ambition of the UK becoming the fastest growth country in the G7 might start to make sense. The words “single market” and customs union” need not be uttered, as long as the deal removes the barriers to trade.
It's not economics that block her path, it’s politics: specifically the myth about Labour’s victory four months ago. The rationale for today’s timid approach to Brexit is that Labour’s pro-European stance on the EU in 2019 cost it votes by the bucket-load, especially in the pro-Brexit Red Wall seats it was defending In England’s North and Midlands. Reeves and Keir Starmer argued that way to win them back was to rule out any major changes from the deal that Boris Johnson had negotiated with the EU. Labour promised a “better” deal – but ruled out revisiting the basic principles of Brexit.
Labour’s pro-Europeans disputed this analysis. They (alright, we) argued that the party had suffered in 2019 from (a) having Jeremy Corbyn as its leader, and (b) the long-term decline of traditional industries in the Red Wall areas.
When Labour won back virtually all the Red Wall seats it had lost to the Tories, its strategists claimed that they were right, and that in government the party had to maintain its stance on Brexit in order to retain the voters it had won back.
Let’s check the numbers. This is not straightforward. The House of Commons library’s excellent report on this year’s results shows the change in percentage shares for party in each constituency since 2019, taking account of the boundary changes – but not the change in the number of votes won by each party. Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher converted the seat-by-seat results of the 2019 election into the results on the new boundaries; but this was before this year’s election. To work out the change in numbers, rather than percentages, between 2019 and 2024, I merged their files with those from the House of Commons Library.
What follows is my analysis of the 31 seats in the North and Midlands that Labour lost to the Conservatives in 2019 and regained this year. (There is no official list of Red Wall seats that Labour captured, but this seems as good as any.) If you can restrain yourself from skipping ahead, have a guess: on average, how much did Labour’s vote go up this year in each of these seats?
Go on, have a go.
Did someone say 5,000?
Or 2,000?
Or a measly 1,000?
All wrong.
In 2019, the average Labour vote in these 31 seats was 17,750. This year it was 16,986. The number did not rise at all. It FELL by 764. The party aimed to increase its support in the Red Wall – and missed.
So how did Labour manage to gain all these seats? Simple: the Conservative’s vote collapsed, on average from 22,450 to 10,018. Most of the defectors switched to Reform, whose average support in these seats was 8,426. That is where the pro-Brexit, anti-Tory vote went. Labour’s gains were the fortuitous by-product of this split on the Right.
The low turnout played a part in all this. Labour’s average SHARE of the diminished total vote in these Red Wall seats rose by 3.8 percentage points. A positive number, certainly, but given the hammering Labour received under Corbyn, this was actually rather feeble.
We can go further. Population movements and successive boundary changes hinder precise comparisons with past decades; however, in terms of overall votes, it is clear that in July Labour’s Red Wall popularity slumped to its lowest for at least 40 years – and possibly far longer.
We should not look at these figures in isolation. There are two other big blocks of seats that Labour gained – some lost in 2019, others in earlier elections.
Well away from the Red Wall Labour gained 76 seats from the Conservatives in East Anglia, London, the South East and South West. In these seats, Labour’s average vote ROSE from 15,182 to 17,417 – an increase of 2,235. Given the lower turnout, this meant that Labour’s share rose by a healthy 7.7 percentage points.
The figures for firmly anti-Brexit Scotland are even more dramatic. Labour’s targets this year were SNP seats. It gained 36 of them. Labour’s average vote rose by 7,059, and by 20.5 percentage points.
Figures like these offer circumstantial rather than direct evidence. They suggest, but do not prove, that Labour’s Brexit policy this time did little to help it in the Red Wall and may even have hindered it. Is there other evidence that supports that view?
There is. In 2019, Brexit had yet to take effect. “Get Brexit done” had wide appeal, and not just in Red Wall seats. We have now been outside the EU for more than five years. We can judge results, not just promises. The verdict is clear. There is copious polling evidence that I and others have reported (not least Mark Pack in his indispensable weekly Substack posts), that public opinion has moved on.
- Most voters, including a significant minority of Leave voters, now think Brexit was a mistake
- Most voters want closer links with the EU. The single market is no longer anathema to them.
- Most voters would be happy to admit EU citizens to work in Britain, as long as we keep out those who don’t come to work.
This might help to explain the success of the two avowedly pro-European parties: the Liberal Democrats in their target seats, and the Greens, which ate into Labour’s support and doubled their overall vote. In short, the politics and economics of Brexit no longer point in opposite directions. A bold strategy to remove the barriers to trade could grow both Britain’s economy and Labour’s appeal.
Let’s see if, for once, Reeves has the courage to do something popular.
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