A drop of green in an ocean of red

 

A thought experiment: though it will never happen, imagine if Labour were to stand aside in Bristol Central, the Greens' best hope for a second seat? What might it mean for the next five years?

The country is desperate to eject the current government, and largely underwhelmed by what's on offer instead. It's unprecedented for an opposition leader to start an election campaign 20% up in the polls and at -20% in his personal approval rating. Though no-one will say it publicly, Labour's strategy clearly rests not on enthusing new supporters, or even buying them with what they want, but simply on disinfecting the Labour brand enough that people that still don't like them very much will nonetheless hold their noses in order to euthanise a Tory vampire. 

And even I have to admit that Keir Starmer's political ecdysis is working spectacularly. There's almost no doubt about the red landslide that this unenthused electorate is, paradoxically, going to deliver. I spent yesterday evening door-knocking for Labour in one of the most historically Tory wards in the south-west. We were about twenty miles from the emerald vegan citadel of Bristol, and politically on the other side of the moon. A peri-urban village, by the sea, with an overwhelmingly white and relatively elderly population of homeowners, plus a low-income population of semi-permanent caravan park residents. And even here, perhaps 60 percent of those we spoke to said they were voting Labour. There's a doorstep bias, of course. It also helps that the Labour candidate is local, hugely likeable, hasn't spent a decade as an SW1 hack, and seems to be genuinely driven by a desire to be a champion on the national stage for this decrepit and overlooked town. (I'm tempted to say that this is the sort of candidate that under normal conditions perhaps wouldn't get selected by a party machine for a winnable seat. In this election, ordinarily unwinnable seats have unexpectedly become winnable, and a lot of local party activists who would usually be standing just to make up the numbers are going to get unexpectedly elected. If nothing else, therefore, I'll be voting Labour to support the Campaign for Nicer, More Normal MPs). Nonetheless the scale of the Labour vote in this ward is extraordinary. People's motivations aren't really left or right: they're just a phalanx of dismay and anxiety. About the fact that if your husband has a heart attack, there's no longer any night-time A&E within twenty miles in a population of 100,000 people, nor any chance of an ambulance to take him up the M5 to a Bristol hospital; about their grandchildren having rotting teeth because they can't see a dentist; about migrants arriving on boats and filling up hospital beds; about interest rates, and gas prices, and uncertainty that people can't perhaps even put a name to. They don't like Labour, they don't like tax, they don't like Starmer. All they're really voting for is a candidate who might actually go out and lobby for the town in the metropole, and for a party which might end the current government's jaw-dropping carnival of ineptitude and venality.

But what's happening twenty miles north? It's not just exhausted centre-right voters that will be voting Labour in desperation and against their instincts. Amongst greens, trade unionists, public-sector and third-sector workers in my area, WhatsApp conversations seem to be about voting and mobilising for Labour where they can win, and then 'salving their consciences' by spending an afternoon canvassing for the Greens in central Bristol. In four weeks' time, Labour will arrive in power with a party leader who is already disliked by many of those frantically campaigning for him, and who even now takes every opportunity to insult, slander and mock his own base. 

When a young climate protestor was ejected at the launch of the Labour manifesto last week, Starmer couldn't resist the opportunity to convert it into a kick at the left of his own party (with which the protestor, presumably, had no connection): "We gave up on being the party of protest five years ago." (Cue whoops from the faithful in the hall as a slight teenage girl was manhandled out of the building). 

Think about that remark for a moment. It’s an insult to anyone who has ever campaigned beyond Parliament for, well, anything. In other words, most of the volunteers knocking on doors in the rain this week wearing a red rosette. The two million people who marched against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Anyone who joined one of the People’s Vote demonstrations, with which Keir Starmer himself marched.

Maybe these mean bits of theatre are necessary to win. But they're certainly made possible by the fact that Labour knows that they're electorally risk-free: left-wing voters will overwhelmingly hold their noses and vote anyway for a party that openly professes its contempt for them. 

And so, amidst all this unenthusiastic desperation for change - as the Labour Party, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born - imagine if Labour did something unexpected. Signalled, by helping the Greens to a second seat, that it acknowledged the millions of green, socialist, anti-racist people who will help them into power? 

Imagine what an extraordinarily reparative act that would be. After all the factional blood-letting of the last five years. To say: "yes we're tacking to the centre, but there's still a place for alliances with the progressive left". And to gesture at the idea that in properly grown-up, pluralistic politics -- above the playground name-calling that Starmer likes to argue has degraded the political arena -- it wouldn't be so unhelpful to have a marginally larger voice to the left.

We're talking about just one extra seat. (In any remotely representative electoral system the Greens' 7% vote share would net them 45-odd seats). An essentially electorally cost-free act of magnanimity for a Labour Party in pomp, headed for a super-majority. In what historians will come to view as the last UK election before the first major climate tipping-points of the late 2020s, an election in which -- even at this final minute before midnight -- both main political parties are actively campaigning on promises to further shrink spending and resources for already inadequate plans to tackle the basic, growing un-liveability of human life.  

What would such a gesture do for Labour? (Aside from the short-term inoculation it might provide against some of the factional attacks that are going to start even in the first hundred days of a Labour government).

Well: the British political class, and its media, likes to forget that the urban lefty elite that Starmer has to shit-talk in order to win back the red wall is actually quite sizeable. Those whose values the Labour leadership openly dismisses include most of the people who live in our overwhelmingly progressive cities - just the four largest of which are home to a quarter of the population. They include a large proportion of the 20 percent of British people who aren't white. For a party leader whose strategy is ostensibly to make the Labour party the natural party of government - the 'political wing of the British people' - Starmer seems strikingly happy not just to ignore but to to belittle and shame the values of these huge sections of the British population, in the pursuit of power that our electoral system regrettably places in the hands of the old, the propertied, and the white. 

Indeed, on some issues Labour's unclean are the majority, or nearly so. The 58% of British adults who would like to rejoin the EU; the 48% who supported Labour's £28bn green investment plan; the 52% who back tax increases to fund more public spending. Swathes of the population who support positions that Labour's leadership now paints not only as undesirable but as elite and unpatriotic ("working people can't afford another tax rise").

Labour needs this unclean left to win. It needs them to get anything done when they've won. And, sometimes, if you beat people enough, then however much you tell them with a snarl that they haven't got anywhere else to go, eventually they pack their bags and leave anyway. If Manchester, Birmingham, parts of London were to turn green, yellow, or something else, it would be the kiss of death for Starmer's second term. 

And finally: to allow the Greens a clear run at one more seat would be for Labour to decently acknowledge, and express some quiet gratitude, for just how hard the progressive left are pinching their noses. This is a party leadership that re-made their party on the basis of the claim - understandably - that they couldn't tolerate sharing political space with innuendos and allusions in online left discourse that diminished the Holocaust. And now the Labour leadership is asking their left base to vote for them after they actively opposed measures, for months, to bring to an end to what the world court believes may be or may become an actual, ongoing genocide. In the pursuit of a centre-right and transatlantic triangulation. And most of us will. That's how hard the supposedly factional left is pinching their noses.

Of course, Labour will never step aside in Bristol Central, or anywhere else. The mantra beloved of both Labour and the Tories that to be a party of government you have to fight every seat is the electoral version of Britain's crumbling foreign policy insistence on 'sitting at the top table', having an embassy everywhere, keeping our nukes. Meaningless in practice, but essential to the edifice of our self-image.

If you want to diagnose the dysfunction of our politics, it’s not just the spectacle of Reform and the reactive chauvinism of the Tory party. It’s the fact that it is so inconceivable that Labour would give the Greens — who should, in a 'Front Populaire' against the hard right, be an eco-socialist sister party to Labour — a clear run at even one seat they might win. The hypocritical combination of universalism and tribalism that our politics demands from all our political parties, not just from the right.

I will vote Labour at this election. I'll campaign for them. I'll be delighted if they unseat the Tory incumbent in my constituency. But in his obsession with his right flank, I don't think Keir Starmer has thought at all about the friability of support to his left. He shows no indication of having any idea how provisional our votes are. Nor has he measured their indispensability to his own ambitions for the Labour Party. 

Bad Spreadsheets Part II: Horse and Hound edition

So: despite the extraordinary Sturm and Drang over the Tory leadership, the Boris-ing and the coming Brexit rebellions, it seems that the return of two-party politics in the UK has got us stuck in a kind of cold war. Both parties appear to be electorally maxed out at over 40% (let's not forget that on 8 June although Labour got its best vote share since 2001, the Tories got their best vote share since 1992). David Runciman, amongst others, thinks there's "no reason to suppose either party is capable of making big advances from its current position: both may be close to the limits of their appeal." Despite public Tory meltdown, neither side is moving very much. And Labour are still 60-odd seats away from a majority.

If, then, I said I thought we were a whisker away from a progressive government (assuming we can get an election) you'd be forgiven for scepticism. Needless to say, I -- like everyone else -- was wrong about the last election. So why believe me, when six months ago, right before Seven Nation Army and a 10% swing, I was arguing obstreperously that the young simply aren’t numerous enough to propel Labour anywhere close to winning?

But in fact, as the post-election surveying has shown, most pundits' first diagnosis of the Corbynite 'youthquake' was also wrong. Although turnout was up massively amongst under-25s – from around 43% in 2015 to at least 54% in 2017, and perhaps as much as 58% – it seems clear that they weren’t numerous enough to deliver Labour's big gains. [Jan 2018 edit: in fact the authoritative British Election Study now shows under-25 turnout was barely up at all -- the margin of error means it could even have decreased]. Very substantial boosts in Labour support amongst 30-44 year olds were equally if not more important. My piss-poor spreadsheet was wrong not because I overestimated the electoral stranglehold of older voters, but because I hadn’t imagined there could be anywhere near as big a shift in the voting intentions of middle-aged cohorts as there was between April and June this year. The underlying demography, however, is still there. Indeed, it’s extraordinary testimony to the demographic dominance of the elderly electorate that Labour can have a majority in every age cohort under 50, and still be 56 seats down. 

Paradoxially, though, Labour’s reliance on 8 June on a middle-aged swing, rather than massive youth turnout, is good news for the potential power of the youth vote. Because it suggests that, whatever Runciman et al may say, Labour still has some powder dry. Nearly half of Labour's most supportive demographic constituencies still aren't turning out to vote. Meanwhile Tory-dominated age cohorts are already giving it everything they’ve got. Turnout amongst over-55s was pushing 70%. Amongst the Conservatives’ shock troops, the over-70s, it was around 84%, and surely can’t go much higher. 

The middle-aged swing, in other words, gives the under-30s the electoral space to be truly influential. Which in turn suggests a strategy, says my friend Mika Mino. 

Let's assume that age-specific voting intentions stay roughly the same (a heroic assumption, of course, and precisely what everyone was wrong about before; but I find it very hard to believe that under-25s will swing significantly towards the Tories any time soon). In other words, assume that around 62% of under-30s are going to vote Labour again, about 22% will vote Tory again, and that those who didn’t vote this time round have roughly the same voting intentions as those who did (another heroic assumption). 

In that case, maybe just going down to knife-edge marginals and helping register new under-30 voters (and who, left-wing or right-wing, could argue with youth voter registration as a democratic pursuit) would generate enough new Labour votes to tip us over the line next time round? 

Mika has been having a look at how the maths stacks up. At the risk of well-deserved ridicule, I’ve extended the thought by tabulating the numbers for Tory marginals with the slimmest majorities (many thanks to BritainElects.com for spreadsheeting the GE2017 results).

Assume that a working majority, taking into account Sinn Féin empty seats, is still 322, and that we’re after a Lab-SNP-LD-Green pact – currently on 310 seats. Labour therefore needs to win at least another 15-odd seats. And the numbers in the top 15 Tory super-marginals are pretty striking.

The six most-marginal Tory seats each need less than 1000 new under-30 voters, in theory, to fall to Labour. These are not all new Labour voters, remember, just new voters for all parties in that age-range. Across all 15 seats, we need just 21,200 new under-30 voters to come out and vote. That’s about 0.2% of the 18-to-30 population. More people bought Horse and Hound magazine last month. Seriously - we're talking about a number of people smaller than that proportion of the population for whom "Can You Prove You Own Your Horse?" is clickbait.

This is, of course, a reductio ad absurdum. It doesn't take into account age-specific variations in voting intention between constituencies (because we don't have the data, for the most part). And it's built on huge assumptions, at a time when the only rule in British politics is, of course, that all assumptions are wrong. This isn't a static fight. The Tories will seriously up their offer in the next election. There will be many, many other things to be done. Nonetheless -- to completely reverse my previous argument -- it does look like a targeted youth registration drive might be a significant component of bringing a progressive government to power.

If only we could have another election sometime soon.

Which is the thing the Fixed-term Parliaments Act seems to make impossible. That's a subject for my next post. But for now, have a look at these lovely numbers...

Constituency	2015	2017	2017 Result	Con majority 2017	Number of new under-30 voters needed for Lab majority
Middlesbrough South & East Cleveland	Lab	Con	Gain	1,020	2,550
Bolton West	Con	Con	Hold	936	2,340
Broxtowe	Con	Con	Hold	863	2,158
Northampton North	Con	Con	Hold	807	2,018
Telford	Con	Con	Hold	720	1,800
Stoke-on-Trent South	Lab	Con	Gain	663	1,658
Aberconwy	Con	Con	Hold	635	1,588
Calder Valley	Con	Con	Hold	609	1,523
Norwich North	Con	Con	Hold	507	1,268
Chipping Barnet	Con	Con	Hold	353	883
Hastings & Rye	Con	Con	Hold	346	865
Thurrock	Con	Con	Hold	345	863
Pudsey	Con	Con	Hold	331	828
Preseli Pembrokeshire	Con	Con	Hold	314	785
Southampton, Itchen	Con	Con	Hold	31	78

Bad spreadsheets (election edition)

So: YouGov tells us that if only under-40s voted in next month's general election, "Jeremy Corbyn would be heading to Downing Street". In the words of YouGov pollster Chris Curtis, "age is the new dividing line in British politics", replacing social class as the most significant correlate of voter preference. But young people, famously, don't vote very much. And so, Polly Toynbee says, "To save the young from themselves, it’s time to march them down to the polling station, making voting compulsory, at least the first time."

Theresa May, 1971

Meanwhile other professional opiners as disparate as Liam Byrne and Aaron Bastani tell us that Labour has to appeal to older, largely more conservative voters -- as Bastani insists, it can't win with the millenial vote because it's concentrated in urban areas, whereas its the shires that swing it.

So: is a centrist Labour Party appealing to rightward older voters a demographic necessity if it wants to take power? Or is there demographic wiggle-room for a leftist agenda backed by a young vote, if the under-40s turn out to vote in sufficient numbers?

This seems like a central question in British electoral politics -- and perhaps the central question for the parliamentary left. I was quite surprised that I couldn't find any recent modelling on the impact of youth turnout on 2017 election predictions ( there surely has to be some, and it's likely I'm not looking hard enough).

So instead, being a fan of half-arsery to inform my political prejudices, I spent ten minutes with an Excel spreadsheet.

It was a depressing ten minutes. If you take the size of the UK voting-age population within different age brackets, and plug them into both (1) age-specific polling on 2017 voting intentions, and (2) age-specific turnout figures from the 2015 general election, then you can roughly estimate the number of votes that different parties will receive in 2017, if turnout amongst different age groups is similar to that in 2015:

Votes, GE 2017, if turnout at 2015 levels

Age group	18-19	20-24	25-29	30-39	40-49	50-59	60-69	70+	TOTAL	%
Con	149826	443211	695497	1675171	2368265	2960161	3108403	3714204	15114739	44%
Lab	292843	775620	1007272	1624409	1578843	1547357	888115	754448	8468906	25%
Lib Dem	122585	295474	287792	761441	789422	672764	555072	464275	3948826	12%
UKIP	27241	92336	119913	355339	667972	807317	499565	464275	3033959	9%
Other	88534	240073	311775	659916	728697	672764	444058	348207	3494022	10%

Then you can see what happens if, say, there's a 75% turnout in all age brackets (in 2015, over-50s turned out at around 78-79%, under-25s at around 43%):

Votes, GE 2017, if turnout at 75% in all age brackets

Age group	18-19	20-24	25-29	30-39	40-49	50-59	60-69	70+	TOTAL	%
Con	261325	773043	965968	2093964	2612057	2810280	2988849	3571350	16076836	42%
Lab	510772	1352825	1398989	2030511	1741371	1469010	853957	725430	10082865	27%
Lib Dem	213812	515362	399711	951802	870686	638700	533723	446419	4570214	12%
UKIP	47514	161051	166546	444174	736734	766440	480351	446419	3249228	9%
Other	154419	418732	433020	824895	803710	638700	426978	334814	4035269	11%

The Tories lose just 2 percent of the vote share to Labour. Still a recipe for a landslide.

Indeed, to demonstrate the demographic impossibility of it all: let's imagine that turnout was 100% in all age brackets -- compulsory voting ,say -- and everyone aged between 18 and 30 voted Labour, with everyone else voting as they intend to do this time round:

Votes, GE 2017, if turnout at 100% in all age brackets and all 18-30 vote Labour

Age group	18-19	20-24	25-29	30-39	40-49	50-59	60-69	70+	TOTAL	%
Con	0	0	0	2791952	3482743	3747040	3985132	4761800	18768666	37%
Lab	1583789	4294683	4441234	2707348	2321828	1958680	1138609	967241	19413411	38%
Lib Dem	0	0	0	1269069	1160914	851600	711631	595225	4588439	9%
UKIP	0	0	0	592232	982312	1021920	640468	595225	3832157	8%
Other	0	0	0	1099860	1071613	851600	569305	446419	4038796	8%

It would take a youth result of these Jong-Il-ian dimensions, in other words, for Labour to get a lead of just 1% in the vote share.

There's everything wrong with this simplistic model, of course: it assumes that non-voters have the same split of voting preferences as voters; it assumes that population translates straightforwardly into electorate; it ignores regional differences; it completely ignores the fact that FPTP doesn't translate vote share straight-forwardly into seats (though in only one general election, in February 1974, did one of the two main parties actually win more seats than the other with a (fractionally) lower share of the vote); and so on and so on.

So I'd be very keen to see some better modelling, and at constituency level. There must surely be some places where getting the youth vote out could swing seats.

But overall, even on this crudest of models, it looks like voter registration and voter turnout won't -- can't -- even seriously dent the Tories, let alone stop them. And that the myth that sofa-bound young people can rise up and rock the vote is just that: a patronising myth to hide the basic fact of British electoral physiology that you can't turn a pear into an apple. I suspect the same is true of BME communities, though I haven't looked into the figures.

Young people are a minority in post-demographic-transition societies: a relatively powerless, relatively property-less, minority. They differ from other minorities, of course, because they are destined over time to become the majority. But then they won't be young, and the policies they make or ratify likewise won't have the same impact on them as on others younger than them.

Perhaps, therefore, instead of either haranguing or misleading young people about their electoral potential in the face of their (rational) electoral apathy, we need to start doing what we do for other powerless minorities in majoritarian democracies: require legal safeguards to ensure that their interests are not unjustly ignored or damaged in the political process, precisely because the electoral process can't provide such safeguards. What if there was a statutory requirement that all legislation had to be tested not only against human rights and equalities law, but against its differential impact on those with longer futures? Wouldn't that automatically lead to better, long-term thinking and decision-making in politics? What would a Finance Bill look like against such a legislative test? What would such a legislative test itself look like? Could we even argue -- perhaps in court -- that the Equalities Act 2010 already provides for such a test, by including "age" amongst "protected characteristics"?

Meanwhile, suggestions greatly appreciated for more (or less oafishly used) data...