Results from the local elections in England and Wales last week seem to have confirmed what has been known for some time: Labour is on course to win the next General Election, largely by default and with little enthusiasm from voters. The uninspiring choice facing the electorate is between an increasingly right-wing, tea party style Toryism, and an authoritarian centrist Labour Party whose opposition is largely focused on process and competence. In a nutshell, it’s like choosing between the plague and cholera.
Little wonder, then, that voters are turning off in droves, or, in council and mayoral elections, turning to smaller parties and independents. The Tees Valley Mayoral election reinforced this trend, albeit with a local twist. Although Ben Houchen’s majority was much reduced, the Tory vote did not collapse to the same degree as elsewhere, and so the Tory mayor strolled to a third consecutive term with a comfortable victory over Labour’s Chris McEwan.
There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Houchen’s opponents: did Labour miss an open goal? Was the battle lost on social media? Were enough leaflets delivered? In fairness to Labour, the swing against Houchen was one of the biggest ones in the country, but why did his vote hold up so well?
Labour’s nightmare
Houchen has built up layers of personal support which stretch well beyond the normal Tory base, and he succeeded in getting them out to vote. Yet again, the contrast with Teesside Labour couldn’t be greater.
Houchen is the stuff of nightmares for Labour politicians: a well-resourced, government-sponsored, interventionist Tory with ambitious, regenerative plans, involving massive capital spending – all backed up with a slick PR operation which makes an art form of turning molehills into mountains. Tory devolution has always been about making electoral inroads for Tory politicians in Labour heartlands, and on Teesside the strategy has worked like a charm: austerity was delegated to local councils while the metro mayor could be portrayed as the big spender.
Like Teesside Development Corporation before it, the achievements of Houchen’s Tees Valley Combined Authority have been superficially impressive, creating just a fraction of the jobs lost to austerity and industrial decline. TDC famously ended its life mired in scandal, and was closed down by the incoming Labour government of Tony Blair. A similar fate may await TVCA, but Houchen won’t care – by then he will probably have moved on to a more prominent role in Conservative national politics, and his job will have been done: to build a durable Tory presence where there wasn’t one before.
Strategic nous
Houchen and his coterie are highly strategically astute. Their campaign between 2017-19 to take Teesside Airport into public ownership was not only popular with voters, but set a trap for Teesside Labour, who ended up denouncing public ownership on cost grounds at exactly the point when their national party was championing the principle for the first time in decades.
Indeed, Houchen has pulled a similar trick in 2024 with his promise of a much-needed new hospital for Stockton, safe in the knowledge that, if it doesn’t happen, the Tories can blame the incoming Labour government – thus providing a wedge issue for the next four years – and if it does happen, they can use their lavish PR machine to take credit for it.
In the face of such eye-grabbing promises, what did the 2024 Labour campaign have to offer? The answer, risibly, was more CCTV, free parking and a ‘Guaranteed Skills and Employment Review’ for young people. (There was also public ownership of buses – a good idea, but it hardly sets the heart alight.) Who in their right mind dreamt this up as a proposition to excite and motivate Labour voters?
Insipid
In fairness, Labour’s insipid campaign should come as no surprise given the notoriously insular and conservative nature of local Labour politics. It is almost impossible to imagine a red-rosette equivalent of Ben Houchen emerging from Labour’s ranks, especially one with the autonomy to distance themselves from their colleagues’ more unpopular decisions, and market themselves as a non-partisan independent.
Nevertheless, it is Labour’s national leadership who should shoulder most of the blame. Tees Valley Monitor correctly identifies the party’s culture of centralisation and control as an impediment to the kind of campaign Labour needed to oust Houchen. This historic tendency has intensified under Keir Starmer, who has annihilated dissenting voices in the party, and stuffed it with (overwhelmingly male) careerist technocrats whose dull, unimaginative politics reflect his own.
Means and ends
The strategy is clearly not to inspire or energize prospective Labour voters, but to reassure demoralized Tory voters that they can safely stay at home. It failed in the Tees Valley contest but, after 14 years of Tory rule, and especially after partygate and the budget crisis, it looks likely to succeed in a General Election.
Labour loyalists will no doubt repeat the mantra that winning is winning, politics is about elections, and Labour can do nothing without being in power. The problem with this is that it forgets that means don’t justify ends – means shape ends.
As a case in point, it is worth remembering how bad things were the last time Labour became ‘electable’ by virtue of being ruthlessly unprincipled. It ended with Labour mired in the kind of scandal and disgrace which makes Houchen’s Teesworks look like a picnic, and with Teesside Labour politicians in hoc. It’s also exactly what brought us to the crises of the 2010s and 2020s in the first place.
As for Houchen, his cabinet now contains the leaders of four Labour councils, and within the next twelve months he faces the prospect of further scrutiny by a raft of new Labour MPs. Will he stick around for the inevitable investigation by the National Audit Office? But then again, how will Labour fare locally once they form a government? Much has been made of the party’s low ambitions for office – it is almost inevitable that their honeymoon will be short and a backlash will be swift, so there is no guarantee they will have it their own way. Whatever the outcome of the next General Election, turbulent times lay ahead.
Clarification: readers have pointed out that the claim that “the Tory vote did not collapse to the same degree as elsewhere” is inaccurate, because, as the article also acknowledges, “the swing against Houchen was one of the biggest ones in the country.” This is a fair point. The intended focus of the article is on why the large swing to Labour was insufficient in this particular regional election. The author would like to thank North East Bylines readers for this feedback.
