Can Labour win again in the 2029 general election?

There’s a lot of talk at Labour conference about 2029.

The party is in power for the first time in 14 years and they are determined not to be a one-term government.

“It is going to be a two-term job to turn things around,” Meg Hillier, the veteran MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch told a fringe meeting organised by the influential LabourList website.

She and others on the panel were discussing the coalition of voters who propelled Keir Starmer into government.

Labour’s election strategy guru Morgan McSweeney ran a ruthless and brilliantly effective “battleground” campaign, that was more about getting candidates over the line instead of winning massive majorities.

Hillier’s majority went down from 34,000 to 15,000, but, as she pointed out, what’s the point of an MP having a huge majority if their party isn’t in government. 

“At one point I did work out, if I distributed my majority and possibly have a bit of help from Harriet Harman's majority at the time, around the country, we would have been in power [in 2019]. 

“That's what Morgan McSweeney and the team did. They did the maths.”

It worked. Labour ended up with 411 MPs, more than double their haul at the previous vote.

But can they hold on to them? Almost certainly not, seemed to be one of the messages at this fringe.

The phrase – taken from a leader in the Times – used to describe the party's victory was “wide but shallow”.

At the fringe event, delegates discussed a poll of 8,000 voters across the UK, carried out by Savanta for LabourList, which will make uncomfortable reading for Sir Keir, and possibly, Anas Sarwar.

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Basically, when it comes to the next Westminster election, the party will face pressure from the left and the right.

Nearly half of what the pollster terms the ‘loyalists’ – those who voted Labour in 2019 and 2024 – would consider voting for other parties.

Around 28% of them would think about looking left and (if in England and Wales) voting Green.

Then there are the ‘joiners’ – those who did not vote Labour in 2019 but switched to back Starmer in July. 

Interestingly, the joiners were the most satisfied with the government, with 62% saying it was up to or above their expectations. By contrast, just 47% of loyalists felt the same.

Nevertheless, some of these joiners could also be tempted away to a different party.

A quarter told the pollster that another party lost their vote. 

For this UK wide poll, around 60% of those joiners were from the Tories. People who after Partygate and the Liz Truss mini-budget could simply take no more.

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The joiners, says Chris Hopkins, the Political Research Director at Savanta, “don't necessarily feel particularly strongly aligned to the Labour Party”.

He told the fringe meeting: “They don't feel as though Labour earned their vote. They felt another party lost it, and if that party can get their act together, then perhaps they will be very easy picking for that party, primarily, I guess, the Conservative Party, to end up winning back.”

In terms of UK politics and, in particular, the next election south of the border, there is a great unknown here.

What will the Tories be like in five years time? 

The last Labour government wasn't sustained by their record compared to the previous Conservative government, Starmer’s biographer, Tom Baldwin told the event.

“It was sustained by what the Conservatives did in opposition. It was sustained by the antics of William Hague and Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, that kept the Tory party off the centre ground,” he said. That ultimately helped Tony Blair and Gordon Brown secure three terms. 

If Tory members don’t do what Tory members often do and pick the candidate who might appeal to the country rather than the one who appeals to Tory members, then they could do some real damage to that coalition.

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Clearly, in Scotland, the big unknown is the shape of the SNP. Though Scottish-specific polling wasn’t discussed at the fringe event, we know that a significant number of SNP voters backed Labour in July. 

Something which, to be fair, the Scottish Labour leadership recognises. 

Those who voted for the party, “did not come home to Labour,” Ian Murray said in his conference speech. 

“They chose us in the hope and expectation that we will deliver for them.”

We don’t know what the battleground for the next general election will look like. We don’t really know what the battleground for the next Holyrood election looks like. But this will be key for Labour in both. 

The one way for Labour to tackle challenges from the right and the left is to deliver.