After months of speculation and talk leading into the 2019 General Election in December, many pondered how Boris Johnson was going to regain a Conservative majority in the Commons. With Labour’s Red Wall still intact in the North, it seemed unlikely Boris Johnson was going to be able to break the mould quite so easily. But this was no normal election. The Conservatives came out with an 80-seat majority: their biggest since 1983 under Margaret Thatcher. With Labour losing 48 seats and the Conservatives gaining 60, including entrenched left-wing constituencies like Don Valley, Bassetlaw and Bolsover, the result was evident: the Red Wall had fallen. But what even was the Red Wall?

Well, the ‘Red Wall’ of Labour was a strip of constituencies generally in the Midlands, North-East and Southern Wales. These constituencies traditionally voted for Labour regardless of Leader, manifesto, or local MP. They’d generally consisted of working-class miners or other labourers who voted Labour because of its pledges to support them, the Labour ideology consistently gunning for worker’s rights and trade unions. On the Durham Miners website before the 2017 General Election, it was stated that ‘Under Labour, people will be treated with dignity and given the support they need’, and that the Conservatives ‘have nothing but contempt for the huge contribution [their] mining communities have made to this country.’ The loyalty to Labour was unquestionable, so, why did it falter?

Well, some credit must be given to Boris Johnson’s ‘boosterism’. His ‘boosterism’ methods support the ‘trickle down’ tax-cutting approach to economics, offering a change to unconvinced Labour voters who saw little change in their constituencies and little funding for public infrastructure. He planned to ‘level-up’ the UK with hundreds of billions to be put into the UK economy to bridge the North-South divide in Britain, which appealed to working class voters in the former ‘Red Wall’, finally offering some support that hadn’t been received in their era of red voting. Boris also promised to have 5 years of funding for infrastructure outside of London costing $11 billion a year – making him popular with the working-class people who had rarely voted Tory before.

However, it’s likely that as much as we can credit Boris Johnson’s economic ideas, Jeremy Corbyn’s failures with Labour lead to huge problems for the party. Many Labour MP’s blamed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership for the crumbling of the red wall including Stephen Kinnock, who stated that the election was ‘Not a Tory victory but a Labour failure,’ and that Corbyn’s stance on anti-Semitism did not help his popularity in the 2019 election. The lack of significant change in the North-East and in the red wall prompted some Labour voters to ‘take a punt’ on Boris Johnson in the hope he would offer something different with Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to adapt to the ever-changing demands of his Labour voters resulting in a desire to take a chance somewhere else. Finally, much media ultimately hounded Corbyn, and his portrayal in the media was an insight into how poorly Labour would perform in the 2019 election – with their 48 seats lost an embarrassment to the party.

Perhaps the most important issue of the 2019 election leading to change was really Brexit. Labour’s biggest failure was their lack of clear stance on Brexit – in complete contrast to Boris Johnson’s clear Brexit motive: ‘Get Brexit Done. Unleash Britain’s Potential’. Grant Shapps, MP of the Conservatives, stated that when knocking on doors pre-election people said they just ‘wanted to move on’ and were ‘fed up’ of the uncertainty around Brexit. Whether they voted Leave or Remain, the British public voted to Leave in 2016 and many people just want to honour that vote. Don Valley, Bassetlaw and Bolsover – the same constituencies talked about earlier that switched from Labour to Conservative - all had over 68% of their population vote Leave, and so this led to many calling the 2019 election the ‘Brexit election.’ So, was the election really a change in voting ideologies, or was it just a reflection of the referendum 3 years prior?

Well, it’s likely to be a mix of both. Whilst there can be no doubt the Labour party lost touch with its voters in the general election, it’s unquestionable that Brexit played a massive role in the vote. If the 2019 election really was just about Brexit, it’s entirely possible Labour might regain their red wall – but it’s going to take a huge change in image, and the working-class people in the old red wall will have to feel like Keir Starmer’s Labour are committed to supporting those communities. Ultimately, with the UK generally swinging from centre-left to centre-right every 15-20 years, it seems like an insurmountable task for Starmer to revive the Labour party – but with it being a tough task to perform worse than in 2019, he can surely only let his party ascend.