Are British voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks?

Woe it iseuGDPnhsgp to be a Labour wonk right now. A streak of nihilism has infected the party’s boffins after Kamala Harris’s defeat in the American presidential election. The American economy zoomed under Joe Biden yet voters defenestrated his party. Essays such as “The Death of Deliverism” by Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams and Harry Hanbury, which argued in 2023 that voters would not thank Mr Biden’s Democrats for a thumping economy, are passed around the British left like sombre texts.The idea that voters no longer reward material improvements has taken root among the academics, advisers and think-tankers who make up Labour’s intellectual milieu. “Substantive policy achievements simply don’t have much electoral resonance,” writes Ben Jackson, a professor at Oxford University, summarising an increasingly dominant strand of pessimism. Parties can no longer rely on “deliverism”—whether a growing economy or thriving public services—to produce electoral rewards.This critique of deliverism relies on an old idea: false consciousness, or the notion that people are so misled about reality that they act against their own interests. What was once the preserve of Marxists, flummoxed that workers refused to lose their capitalist chains, is now the fall-back position for the modern British centre-left, which worries that voters cannot accurately comprehend the world in which they live.False consciousness has often clouded Labour’s political thinking. How could voters possibly re-elect a after five years of austerity? The simple explanation—that enough voters were unaffected by spending cuts—passed many Labourites by. Why on earth would a majority of Britons vote to leave the ? Explanations focused on misinformed voters, rather than the idea that 17m people got what they wanted.This thinking now pollutes almost every policy area. It is easier for a politician to assume that voters are confused about the stats than that they are concerned by other things. When batting away complaints about crime, ministers huff that it is down overall. Social media are to blame for providing a stream of misleading videos of phone-snatching thugs and gory knife fights. That specific types of crime are up, and often in a way voters can see, is ignored. Shoplifting is at a 20-year high; knife crime is near its peak. Assuming that voters are confused about reality, rather than worried about an aspect of it, can cause political peril. For all that the American economy roared in the run-up to the recent election, prices had also rocketed. Soaring inflation trumped growth.Often, what is called false consciousness is accurate but unwelcome analysis. Immigration is now the main concern of British voters, pipping the economy and the , according to Ipsos, a pollster. Concern about immigration tracks actual numbers. Immigration hit an all-time high in 2022; the number of people crossing the English Channel annually has jumped from a few hundred in 2018 to over 30,000 today. And lo, immigration is the most important issue in British politics once more.Concern about immigration is seldom interpreted as being about the volume of people arriving in Britain. Worries are dismissed by the left as surrogate concerns about housing or job security, or attributed to the workings of a malign press. A more plausible view is that Britons sincerely want less immigration and voted for successive governments which have pledged (and failed to deliver) just that. In 2024 Labour became the latest party to be elected on such a pledge. If Labour is the first to fulfil it, why would it not be rewarded by the voters it most needs to keep?If it is true that voters are incapable of giving thanks for, or even noticing, material improvements, then social democracy is toast. A creed built on the prosaic improvement of living standards cannot compete with the politics of identity and grievance. But deliverism—hoping that voters appreciate improvements—is still Labour’s best bet, whatever the party’s brains trust may think. Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister and a political idiot savant, has come to the same conclusion by being unable to think of any other. “Populists are waiting in the wings with their easy answers and their snake oil,” he is quoted as saying in a biography by Tom Baldwin. “We can beat them by delivering change.”There is little false consciousness when it comes to public services. Perception of public services largely matches their reality, according to Public First, a research firm. Where public services are good, people rate them highly; where services are poor, they do not. People who live in areas with shorter waiting lists for s and dentists rated those services more highly than people in areas with longer waiting lists. People in places with higher crime thought their areas indeed had higher crime. Those lucky enough to have good schools locally knew about it. Reality trumps vibes.Deliverism is a simple ethos that has fallen out of fashion for a simple reason: it has been so long since a British government could honestly say that things have improved. Ask for the achievements of the Conservative Party’s 14 years in power and former ministers will mutter something about the covid-19 vaccine and school standards. Practically every area of British public policy, from health care to defence, has got worse since the financial crisis. Pledging to actually improve public services now feels as outlandish as pledging world peace and a free pony.Assuming that voters will not notice improvements is a belief that swings between arrogance and insanity. If public services improve, so will Labour’s standing. British politicos kid themselves with ideas of false consciousness. Far better to adopt a different adage of diehard communists: deliverism is not dead, true deliverism has never been tried!