General election: How Labour really lost seats in Leave-voting areas

Tonight’s election has been crushing for Labour: Boris Johnson has won the biggest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher and dozens of the opposition’s MPs have been ousted.

Labour lost seats across the north and midlands: but when you delve into the figures, what is interesting is why.

There is a narrative that voters in these places abandoned Labour – that is only partly true.

Not all the results are in, but looking at the dozen or so Tory gains from Labour in Leave areas we have so far, there is almost always a pattern.

In 2017, Theresa May’s strategy in these seats nearly came off; the Tories surged. But she was stymied then by one thing – Labour also managed a 2017 surge of its own in these areas.

Darlington is a typical example of this: the Tories jumped from just 14,479 votes in 2015 to 19,401 votes in 2017 – enough to have taken the seat in 2010 or 2015. But because Labour also jumped from 17,637 votes in 2015 to 22,681 in 2017, Labour held firm. This was higher than Labour’s votes in 2005 or 2001.

What happened in Darlington in 2019 is that Labour’s 2017 bump unravelled: they were back down to 17,607, about what they won in 2015 and higher than 2010. The Tories went up a bit, to 20,901, but the victory was delivered by a combination of Labour’s 2017 bounce unravelling and the Tories sustaining their big 2017 gains. What has not happened is vast numbers of voters abandoning Labour in any unprecedented historic scale.

You can see similar patterns in seats all over England and Wales: in Leigh, Labour won more votes in 2017 than in any election since 1997, but this unravelled in 2019 and a Tory surge of 5,000 votes took the seat off them. In Vale of Clwyd, another Tory gain, Labour’s 2019 result was broadly comparable to 2001 and higher than any other election since, excepting 2017. But the Tories put on 3,000 votes in 2017, which they, unlike Labour, kept in 2019.

Similar patterns emerge in Stockton South, Bishop Auckland, Bolton North East, North West Durham, and many other places: the story is one of a Tory surge, often sustained from an initial one in 2017, rather than a complete Labour collapse of anything other than extra voters gained in 2017. In some cases, the Labour share is marginally lower than the historic average since 1997, but this is not a defining factor: in most places it is more or less the same. What’s changed is the Tories are well up.

If we look at the overall vote shares of the parties, this is actually fairly obvious. Labour seems to be heading for around 33 per cent of the vote – not far down on what it won in 2005 when it won a majority (35 per cent) and better than it won in 2010 and 2015, but lower than 2017. But Boris Johnson’s Tories appear to be on course for a historically huge share of the vote.

There are some implications of this. One is that the idea that voters have somehow historically “abandoned Labour” in its traditional heartlands – any more than they did in 2005, 2010, or 2015 –is not really correct. Rather, in most cases, a temporary boost that Jeremy Corbyn won in 2017 has unwound. More research will be needed to understand better why this happened in 2019 compared to 2017 – it may have been that negative stories about Jeremy Corbyn stuck more. But the fact that these losses are overwhelmingly in Leave areas, while Remain areas stood firm or even were added to Labour’s collection, suggests there is some kind of Brexit connection. Labour went into the election promising another referendum and the Tories hammered home the message that the party wanted to “block Brexit”.

There’s also a longer-term question – the Tories are clearly a huge force in these areas now. Can the party sustain this presence and mobilisation when Brexit isn’t an issue? If the answer is no, there may not be as much of a problem for Labour if the next election is fought in different circumstances, without Europe as the central question. If the answer is yes, then the party is in big trouble, because it will have to win volumes of voters that it hasn’t been able to count on before.

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