Chasing trophy seats

The argument

The Labour election campaign fought tough battles in Boris Johnson’s seat of Uxbridge and Ian Duncan Smith’s Chingford and Woodford Green seat. Neither seat was a realistic target for Labour candidates but the party wanted to make a statement by taking a trophy scalp. In doing so, it wasted resources that could have been better spent elsewhere. Its strong performance in 2017 was built on a defensive election strategy. Labour invested time and resources in its heartlands and shored up its working-class stronghold while only targeting a minimal number of Conservative-held seats. In 2019, this changed. In the first week of the election campaign, Labour strategists drew up a list of 100 seats they wanted to take from the Conservatives. Corbyn would visit 10 of these targets in the first few days of campaigning. Even as polling showed a Conservative majority was imminent, strategists refused to divert attention from trophy seats and Conservative targets to focus on the Labour heartlands. Every time an incumbent Labour MP appealed for help, suspecting their seat was in trouble, it was added to the list of targets. Eventually, the initial 100-seat list had grown to 150. Rather than abandoning Conservative-held seats to focus on retaining existing Labour seats, strategists persevered with their offensive election campaign. In the end, Labour only turned one of their 100 target seats red—Putney.

Context

Instead of channelling resources into the seats where Labour stood the best chance of winning, a large amount of manpower and campaign efforts were wasted on chasing trophy seats that Labour stood no chance of winning.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The headline evidence is consistent with the opposite reading. Labour won one of its hundred targets — but a party losing dozens of seats to a national swing does not capture seats it is attacking, whatever it does with its resources. The figure measures the scale of the defeat, not the strategy's contribution to it, and the argument treats a symptom as a cause. The account is also internally inconsistent at its most important point. It criticises the target list for expanding from 100 to 150, then explains that the expansion happened because incumbent MPs who suspected their seats were in danger asked for help and were added. That is the defensive redeployment the argument says was refused. Either the list grew because the campaign responded to threatened seats, or it refused to respond; the passage asserts both. Contesting a sitting Prime Minister's constituency is, moreover, standard practice, undertaken by opposition parties in most elections. It costs a leader's visits and some volunteer effort — real resources, but small ones set against a national campaign — and the argument offers no estimate of how many of the sixty seats lost a different allocation would have saved. The seats that fell did so on swings that a local ground operation could not in most cases have covered. The 2017 comparison does not isolate strategy either. Labour that year campaigned against a governing party whose own campaign collapsed, with Brexit unresolved and a manifesto that landed unusually well; in 2019 Brexit had realigned the vote in exactly the seats that were lost, and the leader's ratings had fallen sharply. Those are sibling positions in this debate, and an explanation resting on target lists has to show it outperforms them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Contesting a sitting Prime Minister's seat is standard opposition practice with a symbolic value the premise dismisses, and a leader's visits are a small resource against a national campaign; no estimate is offered of how many seats a different allocation would have saved. [Rejecting P2] The evidence is consistent with the opposite reading — a party losing dozens of seats to a national swing does not gain seats it is attacking — so winning one of a hundred targets measures the scale of the defeat rather than the strategy's contribution. The account is also internally inconsistent, since the list grew precisely because threatened incumbents were added, which is the redeployment said to have been refused.