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Given how close Labour came to power in 2017, the only sensible response to this sort of claim is: maybe. https://twitter.com/NewStatesman/status/1248694739869880320
But equally, maybe not.
Thank you very much. That'll be 9000 quid a year.
Thank you very much. That'll be 9000 quid a year.
I'm largely keeping out of this slightly daft debate about whether Labour could have won in 2017 but for those pesky kids etc, but just for the record, I think some of the stats I keep seeing are wrong.
It would have required just under 1000 people to have voted differently in 2017 to have produced what would almost certainly have been an anti-Conservative blocking majority in the Commons.
As we said in The British General Election of 2017:
As we said in The British General Election of 2017:
This would not have been a Labour majority - Labour were miles off that - but it would probably have been enough to make Corbyn PM as head of a Labour-led minority government.
I doubt it would have turned out to be a government marked by longevity, but it would have been a government nonetheless, and an impressive achievement.
Yet at the same time, Theresa May was a mere *51 votes* from having a Commons majority.
From the same book:
From the same book:
Anyway, you need to take these sort of calculations with some caution:
So when the election ends up that close, it's easy to argue that things might have turned out differently if only x or y had happened.
But these sort of counter-factuals are almost always too simple.
For example, assume that disunity in 2015-2017 hurt Labour. If Labour had been more united, it might have polled better. But if it had polled better, there might not have been a 2017 election in the first place.
For example, assume that disunity in 2015-2017 hurt Labour. If Labour had been more united, it might have polled better. But if it had polled better, there might not have been a 2017 election in the first place.
And even if there had been an election, there almost certainly wouldn't have been a risky announcement about social care, which we know hurt the Conservatives.
The various counter-factuals about where the party might have concentrated its targeting in 2017 is also more complicated than it first seems.
Yes, Labour wasted resource targeting the wrong seats in 2017; had they focused resources better they might have done better. But then so did the Conservatives. And so did Labour in 2019, under a different regime.
Targeting is difficult.
Targeting is difficult.
And there's some real retrospective wisdom here.
Again, from The British General Election of 2017:
Again, from The British General Election of 2017:
