Aleks Eror
One of the more peculiar aspects of contemporary British politics is that the Labour Party, whose membership is overwhelmingly against Brexit, is led by Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong euroskeptic who has been steadfast in his commitment to Britain leaving the European Union. Even more peculiarly, this doesn’t seem to have dented his popularity at all. Labour members still idolize him, brandishing slogans to “love Corbyn, hate Brexit,” even though he has promised that Brexit would still go ahead under a Labour government.
There are those who believe that Corbyn supports Brexit out of ideological reasons—namely an opposition to EU rules on state aid that might constrain his ability to pursue a stridently left-wing economic agenda and neuter two of his 2017 election manifesto proposals: to establish a state investment bank and state-funded regional energy suppliers. But it’s more likely that his commitment to leaving the EU is driven by electoral arithmetic. Roughly 61 percent of the constituencies won by Labour in the 2017 general election—when the Conservative Party lost its majority in Parliament and Labour gained 30 seats with 40 percent of the vote, its highest share since 2001—are estimated to have voted for Leave in the Brexit referendum a year earlier. By contrast, 65 percent of voters who backed Labour in the previous general election in 2015, when the party was trounced by the Conservatives and lost 26 seats, voted for Remain.
This internal division is further complicated by the fact that Labour’s electoral coalition is made up largely of metropolitan voters, based in affluent, Remain-backing cities like London, Manchester and Liverpool, and a working-class vote spread across smaller, post-industrial towns that voted Leave. Although the former outnumber the latter, they’re concentrated in parliamentary constituencies with large majorities. Therefore, small town voters hold more sway under Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, where the winning candidate takes all, even if they win their seat by a single vote.
First-past-the-post forces Britain’s political parties to prioritize marginal seats with small majorities over those where their support is strongest. In the case of Brexit, it appears that Corbyn has decided to abandon his most devoted followers out of fear of alienating provincial Leavers. Labour currently holds 29 of the 30 safest parliamentary seats in the entire country. These seats are overwhelmingly concentrated in densely populated cities, London most of all, that returned large majorities for Remain in 2016. Labour’s lead in towns populated by socially conservative, working-class voters that voted out, however, is much smaller.
According to a paper published by the London-based think tank Policy Network, 49 of Labour’s top 100 target seats—the party needs to gain 64 to achieve a parliamentary majority in the next election—are located in English “town” constituencies. The Labour leadership clearly fears that endorsing anti-Brexit policies popular with its metropolitan diehards, like a second referendum, risks repelling the town-dwelling voters that it needs to secure a parliamentary majority. Members of Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet are so terrified by this prospect that several have threatened to resign if the party backs a so-called People’s Vote.
Of course, the reverse is possible as well, but the uncomfortable truth for metropolitan voters is that Labour can afford to shed votes in cities. The party won Liverpool Walton, its safest seat, by 32,551 votes in 2017. By contrast, in Dudley North, a constituency outside Birmingham, where the Leave vote stood at 67.6 percent, a mere 22 votes nudged Labour to victory in the last election. The chances of Labour losing its majority in Walton borders on zero, which certainly isn’t the case in Dudley. And while backing a second referendum might endear the Labour Party to metropolitan voters, they’re not the ones that the party needs to win over. In 2017, the Conservatives edged Labour in 54 seats by a margin of less than 10 percent; 47 of those marginal constituencies voted Leave. Corbyn clearly feels that honoring the Brexit vote is key to defending Labour’s paper-thin majorities in Leave-voting towns and seizing marginal seats currently held by the Tories.
The first-past-the-post system forces voters with opposing values together into a brittle coalition that neuters Labour’s capacity to act as an effective opposition.
But “delivering Brexit” isn’t without its pitfalls. Recent polling by YouGov suggests that the Labour Party could slump to a mere 22 percent of the vote nationally if it supported going ahead with Brexit, falling four points behind the Liberal Democrats into third place. This may sound alarming, but overall vote share doesn’t necessarily translate into parliamentary seats under the first-past-the-post system. In 2015, the euroskeptic U.K. Independence Party finished third with 12.6 percent of the vote, yet it only gained a single seat—55 fewer than the Scottish National Party, which was backed by a mere 4.7 percent of voters.
Further YouGov polling finds that while both Labour and Corbyn are losing support among voters aged 18 to 24—71 percent of whom backed Remain in 2016—these voters aren’t switching to the Conservatives, and only a small number intend to migrate to the Lib Dems. This might be because Labour promises a much softer version of Brexit than the Tories, which still allows the party to capture a significant proportion of the Remain vote. If staying in the EU is no longer an option, pragmatic Remainers will see Labour as the party most committed to limiting the damage of leaving.
Labour’s electoral predicament highlights a much deeper dysfunction in Britain’s political system. It’s often said that Brexit has paralyzed politics in the U.K., but Brexit is only a symptom of that paralysis rather than its cause. The real root of the problem lies in first-past-the-post, which denies truly proportional representation.
The past two decades have seen a major realignment in British politics. It’s widely believed that by accepting Margaret Thatcher’s free-market consensus, Tony Blair’s “New Labour” abandoned working-class voters, who Blair and his allies regarded as unlikely to switch to the Tories in significant numbers. But support for Labour among skilled workers dropped 9 percentage points during Blair’s first two terms as prime minister, between 1997 and 2005. The drop was even greater among unskilled workers, sliding 13 points in the same period. According to a report by the Fabian Society, a London think tank, the 63 most working-class constituencies have swung toward the Conservatives by 3.6 percent since 2005, while cities have moved toward Labour by 5.6 percent.
Labour has increasingly become the party of liberal-minded, university-educated professionals and ethnic minority voters concentrated in metropolitan constituencies, yet it remains electorally dependent on votes from homogenous, working-class towns—particularly since the 2015 general election, when a Scottish National Party landslide decimated Labour in Scotland. The first-past-the-post system forces disparate voters with opposing values together into a brittle, schizophrenic coalition, one that neuters Labour’s capacity to act as an effective opposition. The party’s fear of alienating either side of its coalition is so great that it has largely avoided taking a concrete stand on Brexit at all, aside from demanding permanent Customs Union membership. This means that Labour has helped facilitate Brexit without shaping it in any meaningful way.
Under proportional representation, there would be no need for Labour to pursue such a broken strategy. It would be free to adopt a firm anti-Brexit position that would help it extend its majority in cities, court the 39 percent of Conservatives that backed Remain, and steal votes from the Liberal Democrats. This would allow a much more natural coalition to emerge, one that’s more in line with the changing profile of the Labour vote. But until first-past-the-post is discarded, the party will remain beholden to its Leave minority.
Aleks Eror is a Serbian-born freelance journalist who is currently based in Berlin. His work has been published by the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, Vice and a number of other publications.
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