It is a myth 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.
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...
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