Labour is fixated on winning back the ‘red wall’. The only problem? It doesn’t exist | Alex Niven

The party’s electoral strategy is based on an outdated stereotype of the northern voter – and it will come back to haunt Starmer

In the 2024 general election campaign, both major parties seem intent on being as grimly, greyly unadventurous as possible. Moments of farce aside, the dearth of talking points has at times made me feel weirdly nostalgic for the heady days of late 2019, when talk of the “collapse of the red wall” dominated a rather more dramatic contest. Nearly five years on from the upheavals of 2019, what has happened to the “red wall” which became such a defining psephological cliche of that moment?

In fact, while the “red wall” phrase has somewhat fallen out of fashion, the idea that Labour’s electoral success depends on its ability to win back imagined hordes of socially conservative voters in the distant north and Midlands remains central to the party’s self-image. While coherent Labour policy announcements have been rather thin on the ground lately, the mood music of Starmerism – if such a thing exists – is dominated by themes of security, patriotism, toughness on immigration and the fact that Keir Starmer’s father was once a blue-collar worker. All of this apparently in the hope of appealing to a “white working class” whose heartlands lie in a vague northerly terrain called something like Outside the London Bubble.

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