Warhammer is a game of dice. You make little armies of plastic figurines, paint them up, and then take it in turns to move and shoot, rolling the dice to see how well your little chaps do it. I used to play it as a child; then, 25 years later, blessed with more disposable income and burdened with less social shame, I took it up again. 

Since then, to my slight surprise, a little group of my friends has taken it up as well, dads in their late thirties and early forties, some of whom played in their youth, some of whom did not but who have obviously been closet nerds for decades. We play Kill Team, a smaller, faster version of the game, with only a dozen or so models on each side; the real Warhammer 40K could have 50 or more and might take four hours for a game, and we have jobs and families.

The idea is simple enough – your Necron Warrior’s Gauss blaster might shoot 24” and hit on a three, so you measure the distance, crouch down to see if it can see its target, and then roll. Then, if you hit, you roll the other dice to see if it does any damage. Or for your fang-toothed, green-skinned, cleaver-wielding Ork Boyz, you might roll to see if they successfully charge into combat, and then roll again to see how many times they hit their opponents.

The game is all about dice-rolling. It is explicitly random – dice are the archetypal random-number generator. The game is about understanding and managing randomness, about surfing uncertainty; the skill is in navigating the luck. Your big, tough Terminator has good armour; you can probably expect him to shrug off most shots from normal guns. But if you get shot enough times, you’ll probably roll a few ones. Do you dare put him out in the open where everyone can see him, but where he can quickly close with the enemy and do the most damage? Or do you try to sneak him around behind cover, which takes more time but is safer?

We struggle, sometimes, with randomness and uncertainty. We struggle with it in the sense that we don’t enjoy it – we don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen. We struggle with it in the sense that we are bad judges of how likely or unlikely things are, of thinking in more complex shades than “will happen, won’t happen, might happen”.

But we also struggle with it in the sense that we don’t recognise it: after the fact, contingent facts seem inevitable; randomness dissolves into fate. We judge decisions not by whether they were made using the best information available at the time, but by what actually happened – a mistake known as “outcome bias”. Say I charge my Terminator out into the open and he gets 15 lasgun shots in the face, with three of them sneaking past his armour, killing him: did I make the wrong decision? Maybe – but maybe I made the right decision and rolled a few bad dice. 

Years ago, I used to play poker, very occasionally and very badly: I tended to get drunk and go all-in on bad hands. Once, I played at a casino against a pro for a feature for the Telegraph. As usual, I played my signature move, betting very heavily on useless cards after a few pints; but for once, I drew exactly what I needed on the river, and won. Very obviously, I had made bad decisions, but got lucky. But from the inside, it felt as though I had played brilliantly. 

I spoke to a financial trader for that poker piece, who uses poker to teach decision-making; he said that in games of uncertainty, like poker (or like Warhammer, he did not in fact say but could have), you can only detect the role of skill over a long time. Even after a new player has played 100 hours of poker, he said, still, “we don’t feel that we have a good handle on truth;” there’s so much noise, so much luck, that the (very real) skill can be drowned out except over the very long term. “If you win a single hand,”, I wrote at the time, “it’s meaningless to attribute it to skill. If you’re in profit after 100,000 hands, you can say with reasonable confidence that you’re a skilled player.”

In Warhammer, too, it feels as though the outcome of the decision is what determines whether a decision was the right one. But these are games of chance – explicitly random. That is, I think, why games of chance are important. Because you know they’re random, it’s easier to detach the outcome from the process. In other areas of life, without the training that games of chance give you, it’s not so easy.

A stock trader might become a billionaire off a few lucky trades. Are they good? We don’t know: millions of traders make trades every day; some of them will be lucky. A company runs a huge profit for a couple of years: is that because it’s well-run? We don’t know; it could just be survivorship bias. Warren Buffet clearly is genuinely skilled: we have years of data to show that. But if someone has one good year, that might just be fluke.

We have an inbuilt need to explain success and failure. And sometimes that’s important. But in some situations, huge outcomes hinge on tiny moments; a dice-roll, in essence, but a hidden dice-roll. The recent Batley & Spen by-election, for instance: Labour won it by 323 votes. In an electorate of 80,000, that’s essentially coming down to a coin-toss. If Labour had lost by 323 votes, it would have been a huge blow to Keir Starmer’s leadership; he might have faced a challenge. But in reality it would have told us nothing different about his success or otherwise.

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Or football. As I write this, the memory of England going out on penalties is still fresh and painful; Gareth Southgate is being criticised for bringing Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho on in the last minute of extra time to take penalties, and for asking Bukayo Saka, a teenager, to take the last one. They all missed.

But before the shootout, Jermaine Jenas, the BBC co-commentator, was saying that Sancho was probably being brought on because he had the fearlessness of youth. The outcome was negative, but was the process wrong? As this guy says, in 1996 people got angry with Terry Venables for leaving penalty-takers like Robbie Fowler on the bench; in 2021 we get angry with Southgate for doing the opposite. And it works both ways: at 1-0 up against Germany, Thomas Müller ran clean through after a misplaced pass from Raheem Sterling; he should have scored but put his shot just wide of the post. He would probably make that shot five times out of six; he rolled a one. Sometimes you do.

People then make narratives about it. If the Tories had won Batley & Spen, we’d have been told it was because the Hancock affair wasn’t cutting through, or because “woke” issues were alienating the Labour base. Labour won, so the ground game was strong, or Kim Leadbetter was an engaging candidate. 

Likewise: if Müller scores, our defence isn’t good enough; if Rashford does (and his penalty sent the keeper the wrong way and was only a couple of inches wide), then Southgate’s plan worked. But if you’re trained by games of chance, then you can think: OK, sometimes you roll a one; sometimes the coinflip comes up heads. 

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There’s an obvious counter-argument: dice actually are random, whereas football and politics are not. But that’s wrong. Technically, dice are not random: when you throw them, you impart a certain amount of spin, you give them a particular velocity, they will bounce a certain way. The face they show when they land is not randomly determined: it is determined by how you threw them, by the surface they land on, by how sharp or rounded their corners are, by their density and elasticity. A Laplace’s demon, an all-knowing God, could in theory predict how they bounce, limited only by the apparently true randomness at the quantum heart of the universe. But in reality, as chaos theory tells us, tiny changes in the input make it fundamentally unpredictable.

Similarly, tiny, unnoticeable differences in reality can have major impacts on your outcome. David Foster Wallace, writing about tennis in 2006, talks about the minuscule details a tennis player has to pay attention to: the tiniest difference in the angle of the racquet’s face; hitting a ball a millisecond earlier or later. Tennis players repetitively, obsessively hit the same shots thousands and thousands of times in training, so that it is second nature, so they can hit it 999 times out of 1,000. But still, a minor irregularity in the court’s surface can change a bounce; a momentary slip can make a shot fail. The difference between a bad player and a good one is that the good one is more able to control randomness, to put the ball into the area they want to more often. But the randomness is still there. If, in Batley & Spen, a few Labour activists had had to self-isolate for Covid, or if the weather had been different, that might have changed the result. 

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If you want to draw conclusions from these things — to say that England should have done X or Labour should have done Y — there are hard limits on how much you can say, from a single data point like a by-election or a cup final. Too much of sports and politics journalism, I think, is finding narratives after the fact, “analysing” events by looking at the results. As in poker, you need more data than a single hand can provide. 

We suck at spotting randomness. The whole enterprise of science is a careful, and only partially successful, attempt to get past our innate human need to see patterns where they often are not. But one way of training your own ability to think about processes, not outcomes, to see the hidden dice rolls behind the events that shape our world, is to play something with real dice rolls. It doesn’t have to be Warhammer; Dungeons & Dragons will do, or poker, or bridge; cards do the job just as well as dice. But I do recommend Warhammer, because you can learn about randomness while also smashing someone to pieces with a gigantic poisonous scythe. Which makes it a lot more fun. I’m going to preorder the new edition.

Not really. As it turned out, Sir Keir described the outcome as a “fantastic victory”, and his acolytes in the party were quick to join in the crowing. Given what was at stake for Sir Keir personally, and what they perceived as the threat of the party passing back into the hands of the radical Left following a leadership challenge, it was perhaps no surprise that, privately at least, these people were cock-a-hoop about the result. But nobody in Labour’s ranks — at least not anyone serious about the task of winning power — could seriously consider Batley and Spen to be cause for jubilation.

I have never, by the way, been a member of the “Starmer must go!” brigade. Neither do I believe that Angela Rayner or Dawn Butler or anyone else being touted as a challenger to Sir Keir would offer a route out of the morass. In truth, the question of who leads Labour is barely relevant at the moment. What matters is whether or not the party at large is willing to undergo the kind of internal revolution necessary to make it a credible political force again. All the signs suggest it isn’t.

There is, too, the very real prospect that the Starmerites will, post Batley and Spen, make an identical mistake to that which the Corbynites made after the unexpected result in the 2017 general election: a not-quite-as-bad-as-we-feared outcome portrayed as some kind of stunning victory; an entirely misplaced triumphalism; the party’s deep-seated problems masked; the challenges unconfronted; the subsequent annihilation when the party next presents itself to the British electorate.

The clanging from Batley and Spen is a warning bell, not a victory one. Opposition parties which have not won a general election for 16 years and have just managed to cling on to a seat in a by-election in which their vote share plummeted have no reason to celebrate. All the more so when it follows hot on the heels of a devastating defeat in one of their strongholds. Batley and Spen may have granted Sir Keir a stay of execution, but it has not shifted the fundamentals in any meaningful way.

As far as I can see, the major political realignment which has been taking place in British politics for some years, and which was revealed most starkly at the 2019 general election, remains unchecked. Nothing that has happened since that election can be seen as giving Labour any cause for optimism that the outcome was merely an aberration — that the millions of working-class voters who, for the first time, turned to the Tories will at some point in the not-too-distant future realise the error of their ways and return to the fold.

Like all political parties, Labour has, throughout its history, experienced the shifting sands of public opinion, from the ecstasy of the landslides in 1945 and 1997 to the ignominy of the routs in 1931 and 1983. But the catastrophe of the 2019 election represented something different, something seismic. That particular defeat could not be attributed to routine fluctuations in political popularity; it was plainly something more. The ensuing 19 months have done little to disabuse us of this reality.

That the Labour Party is no longer an objection of affection for vast chunks of the British working class is beyond doubt. That millions among that cohort now actively dislike the party and everything it stands for is equally indisputable. And while, in matters of political discourse, it is important at all times to resist the temptation of hyperbole, it is still very difficult, even — perhaps especially — in the wake of Batley and Spen, not to draw the conclusion that the game might genuinely be up for the Labour Party; that the situation is now irrecoverable and we are witnessing the inexorable decline of an organisation that has been a fixture of our national politics for 120 years. In 27 years as a member, I don’t think I have ever felt such a sense of fatalism about the party’s prospects.

Further reading

Labour deserves to lose Batley and Spen

By Peter Franklin

There was a time when even many Tory voters would harbour a sneaking fondness for the Labour Party. They may have been unwilling to place the levers of government in its hands, but they recognised its value in putting the case for Britain’s poorer classes and pricking the consciences of those who would otherwise be content to give primacy in all aspects of our national life to the diktats and caprices of the ‘free’ market. But, while elements of the working class do still vote for it and will go on doing so, Labour these days commands true reverence from little more than a hardcore band of dogmatic progressives, radicals and utopians whose unyielding belief in their own moral rectitude acts as an instant repellent to most ordinary voters.

The truth is that, over the past 30 years, the Labour Party was unknowingly digging its own grave. The promotion of identity politics, the embrace of a militant and uncompromising cosmopolitan liberalism, the drastic oversteer to those living in our fashionable cities and university towns, the elevation of globalism over the nation state, the sneering contempt for the small-c conservatism of large parts of the country, the rapprochement with market fundamentalism — all these things helped to drive a wedge between the party and its traditional base. At the same time, the party itself was undergoing a radical transformation: the professional and managerial classes began to dominate, while the old blue-collar element was increasingly sidelined; the priorities of provincial Britain were subordinated to those of the metropolitan elites.

Batley and Span threw into sharp relief the depth of the mire into which Labour has sunk. The contest itself was a damning indictment of the party’s trajectory — the natural consequence of an aggressively identitarian politics which divides people into ‘oppressors’ and ‘victims’ on the basis of their biological, religious or ethnic characteristics. Every old hatred seemed to rear its head during the campaign, from anti-Semitism to homophobia to Kashmir and Palestine. It would be dishonest to claim that Labour was a victim in all of this; on the contrary,it was up to its eyeballs in it, even resorting in one leaflet to what appeared to be naked racism. “We are far more united, and have far more in common, than that which divides us,” said the constituency’s former MP Jo Cox in her maiden speech to the Commons. Those words seem like a bit of a sick joke after the by-election.

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The toxic battle for Batley and Spen

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That so little of the narrative in the by-election focused on the socio-economic challenges facing local voters was depressing. In fact, the contest seemed to centre on anything but these issues. It’s hard to imagine that the constituency’s silent majority – many of whom surely struggle daily against the effects of inequalities in income and opportunity – would have been happy at how these questions were largely ignored. They could also be forgiven for not having a clue about how Labour intends to address these challenges on their behalf.

Batley and Spen showed us, too, the fruits of state-sponsored multiculturalism: a community divided against itself, grievance heaped on communal tension, a paucity of social solidarity, families residing just yards from each other but living wholly parallel lives, a sense of one-nationism utterly absent, the associative bonds that bind us together as humans and communities seemingly torn all ways. What did anyone expect would be the consequence of an ideology — once again, traceable largely to Labour and the wider Left but embraced now by most of the establishment — predicated on the active promotion of separateness and difference? That constantly telling assorted groups how dissimilar they are from each other would somehow bring unity and cohesion? Surely nobody can survey the battlefield of Batley and Spen and not be forced to think again about such questions.

Neither is it acceptable to dismiss critics of this ideology as bigots and reactionaries. Is seeking to break down cultural differences rather than accentuate them some kind of ignoble ambition? Are all attempts at cultural assimilation and those who strive for it somehow unworthy? What an error we made when we opted for the salad bowl over the melting pot.

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Labour isn't working

By Paul Embery

Doubtless many in the Labour Party will now set about misdiagnosing the lessons from Batley and Spen. The Corbynites will blame the leader for the unimpressive performance. Sir Keir’s people will, in turn, argue that a fine victory was secured in spite of the fact that the Corbyn legacy continues to hobble the party. Some will blame George Galloway for eating up Labour votes. All will be missing the point.

Meanwhile, amid this internecine bickering, the party will plod on with no narrative, no strategy, no purpose, no sense of direction and little real leadership, with each of the warring factions – the liberal Left and radical Left – desperate to use victory in any new skirmish to assert its authority. The next of these skirmishes will be the ballot, beginning on Monday, to elect a new general secretary of Unite. Sir Keir will be hoping desperately that Gerard Coyne will triumph and rid the party of what he sees as the malign influence of Len McCluskey and his disciples. But, again, the risk is that such an outcome merely adds to the complacent belief that things are moving in the right direction. In reality, these types of victories will, unless the party can get its act together at the macro-level, prove to be pyrrhic, and will do little to turn things round in the polls.

Neither of the factions vying for dominance points the way to salvation. And it certainly isn’t within the gift of a single person to save Labour. For that to happen, there must be a radical overhaul in the party’s ideology.

The grisly campaign in Batley and Spen was a symptom of Labour’s disintegration and descent into a politics that does not resonate with large parts of mainstream Britain. That it squeaked home cannot mask that reality. Only when the party begins articulating a narrative that combines economic justice with the cultural politics of place, belonging and community will it stand an earthly chance of winning power again. We in the movement can only pray that we haven’t left it too late.

Una, the graphic novelist and artist, grew up in the same world I did. I spent my youth in a small, white town in the northeast during a deep economic recession;  the only work available was in a very gloomy factory, 20 miles away. Racism was creeping and insidious. The National Front would recruit by standing outside our sink school and handing out leaflets, with headlines about immigrants “taking the jobs” of white men.

Most of the young blokes in the neighbourhood became skinheads, the few Asian families who lived there constantly attacked. After they learned I was a lesbian, I was targeted by the skinheads too. Walking to the shops on our council estate was deeply unpleasant as I was fearful I might bump into groups of young men, looking for distraction from the boredom and poverty.

Even the boys who defended me against the thugs frightened me. I was reminded of all this when I read Eve, new graphic novel by author Una, which though ostensibly about the climate crisis, also considers Right-wing populism and Left-wing authoritarianism. In her book the anti-fascists deployed the same tactics as the racists — just as I remembered from my own experience, and just as we’re seeing today.

I picked Eve up because I had so loved Una’s previous book, Becoming Unbecoming, all about experiencing sexual exploitation at the same time that the Peter Sutcliffe’s psychological cosh was terrorising young women. That book spoke to me because I came of age in the same time and place that Sutcliffe mutilated and killed six of his 13 victims.

The new book is also set up North, in a town similar to Keighley. It has a beautiful landscape, a diverse population — and a lot of tension. But this time it is set in the future. It is, Una tells me, about her worries for her children and the next generation. “It’s hard to talk to my own kids because I don’t feel optimistic for them,” she says. And so she funnelled all those worries into the book.

It is all pretty abstract. But if there is a story, it is about how a young girl and her family cope as society slides into totalitarianism. Their world is in turmoil, something we can relate to in our current angry political moment; and the family fears feel familiar — like something we’re about to experience ourselves. Following some sort of life-changing catastrophe, Eve leaves her community and sets off alone to seek a new way to live.

One of the things Una was trying to work through in the story were her memories of that tension in the Seventies. Because she was something of an outcast, she was protected somewhat from the poisonous views: “I knew not to trust what people say when they are in that racist headspace.” The best that most people who might be a target for these attitudes can – and could — do in the Seventies is just get on with their lives and ignore it. Which is precisely what Eve’s family is doing. “Eve is a sort of ideal, artistic, bolshy, outdoorsy loner,” Una tells me. “She had the childhood I wished I’d had. I wrote her as a lesbian because I didn’t want the story to be about Adam and Eve, but Eve and Eve.”

In the novel Eve’s best friend, Si, is a mixed race boy who ends up fighting the fascists. He means well, but he soon becomes more enamoured with the fight than the cause.

As Eve’s mother says in the book: “These kids grow up with the constant soundtrack of spite, resentment, envy, despair… then they pick up this weekend, superiority-based victimhood…Bad things on the Internet. A few psychopaths. That’s all it takes.”

This is what’s happened in today’s world, with many on the Left using social media to bully and harangue women and some minority groups. They claim to be on the “right side of history”, but they are causing misery and distress. Eve refuses to be online and won’t even consider having a Nokia mobile. She describes the internet as being “like a virus, infecting people… and we all like to think we are immune.”

I couldn’t cope with the homophobic bullying when I was growing up; I decide to leave home to look for work. My mum wasn’t happy, it was the last thing she wanted, but she showed me nothing but support. She understood there was nothing there for me, and that my world was becoming a living hell. I needed to leave everyone I loved behind. Eve, in the book, does the same. She walks away from safety and security into the unknown.

When I moved to Leeds, it felt much better. There were lesbians, feminists and, although predominantly still white back in 1979, the city was home to a number of people from black British and immigrant communities.

But the racism remained fierce. The National Front chose Elland Road football ground to recruit from and would sell its newsletter every Saturday morning in the town centre. I lost count of the number of times the flat in which I lived with Rosie, who was mixed race, was vandalised and daubed with racist and anti-lesbian slogans. In the pubs, my girlfriend would be asked “Where are you from?”, and Rosie would answer “Hull”. I was seen by my family and those I’d left behind as someone in constant conflict with the world.

This was 40 years ago. And, yet, we can see the same flames being fanned today. There they are there in Batley and Spen, where race baiting is rife and is poisoning the polls. And the electorate is just getting angrier and angrier. I was the same back then, in constant conflict with the world. Every advert on TV, every comment from a man, every single thing made me angry. Si is angry about the world he inhabits but has nowhere to go other than into battle alongside the totalitarian Left. Si may think he is counteracting the right-wingers, but in fact is becoming almost as bad. Luckily, I found feminism before I could be swept into a hard-Left faction which would have allowed me to act upon my frustration with the ruling classes.

As far as Eve is concerned, she escapes into the beauty and serenity of nature and her writing, which is exactly what I did as a teenager in order to shut out the ugly reality of the despair and hatred all around me.

But Eve has little faith in her writing skills, despite her mum’s encouragement and praise. Reading Una’s novel uncovered a buried memory for me. As a child, I used to write poetry and, because my dad kept promising to decorate my bedroom and never getting round to it (he worked long shifts and he never had the time or energy), I would scrawl them on my bedroom wall. In these poems I raged against the poverty, violence and brutality towards women and girls, and looked to the day when I could leave that town and escape the pain.

Una channels all her anger through the book, which poses some uncomfortable questions about the kind of society we’re building. The imagery of a world heading into dystopia is powerful and scary, with Una uses the metaphors of racism and fierce nationalism. There is politics: the shadow of Brexit, the idea of northern deprivation, and the fall of the red wall.

But the novel does manage to invoke a feeling of both hope and impending disaster, as though one force is in constant battle with the other. Which, of course, it is.

Eve is a book about human relationships, and in particular mothers and daughters, as well as how we build and maintain community and friendship. Human weakness and conflict are juxtaposed with hopeful futures and painful pasts. It is speculative fiction that feels incredibly timely. The questions threaded through the narrative is, “where will it all lead”, and “what kind of society do we wish to leave behind”?

As Eve says towards the end of the book: “We’ve wasted decades, arguing about things that didn’t matter.”

In the war between fascists and anti-racists in the Batley and Spen campaign, accusations of homophobia and bigotry have been targeted towards young Asian men, and the white, openly lesbian Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, has been aggressively challenged on her position on the Middle East conflict.

Everyone is certain that the arguments about such issues are about the things that do matter, but are we wasting our energy by entering into conflict with those that will never listen? If we wish to avoid slipping further into the dystopia depicted in Eve, we need to wake up to what is staring us in the face.

Back in my hometown recently, I heard from third generation Asians and newly settled migrants from southeast Europe. All had previously voted UKIP. All were disillusioned with the Labour Party, telling me they believe it could deepen divisions between minority groups if they ever regain power. I felt sad remembering the hopes and dreams of my youth, and the boys from my estate who got sucked in by racists. As Una so clearly sets out in Eve, we have choices, and we are standing not by the crossroads, but on the precipice.

‘Eve’ is published by Virago

For a start, all three indicate low standards: sleaze in the realm of morality; tawdriness in the realm of good taste; and shoddiness in the realm of workmanship.

However, delving into the etymology reveals a less obvious connection: originally they all referred to low quality fabrics. Thus sleazy may have been a mangling of Silesia, a region from which a type of thin cloth was imported. Tawdry was a corruption of “Saint Audrey’s lace” — a cheap version of a luxury product. As for shoddy, that was the name for a heavy woollen fabric made out of old rags.  

The relevance to tomorrow’s by-election is that shoddy manufacturing began in Batley. For its time — the early 19th century — the processing technology was cutting edge. A machine that could turn a waste product into a useful and affordable material was a wonder of the age.

Today we’d recognise the shoddy industry as an example of advanced recycling. We’d also recognise its geographic concentration — in towns and villages to the south of Leeds — as an example of economic “clustering”. Indeed, the Heavy Woollen District was the Silicon Valley of its day — which makes Batley the Palo Alto of West Yorkshire.  

Sadly, there’s no doubt as to which sense of “shoddy” best applies to the campaign for tomorrow’s by-election. Tawdry is an equally fitting description. As for sleaze, there are some searching questions to be asked. For instance, how did a bogus leaflet purporting to be from the TUC in support of Labour come to be produced?

Then again, one shouldn’t have too much sympathy for the Labour Party, not after a shameful leaflet that it definitely was responsible for. This one combined allegations of “whitewashing Islamophobia” and not caring about human rights in Kashmir with a photograph of Boris Johnson meeting the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

Playing politics with the nuclear-armed tensions of the subcontinent is blatantly irresponsible — and so is trying to turn it into a domestic issue.

There is nothing wrong with British voters taking a special interest in foreign policy issues in parts of the world where they have family connections. For instance, I’m half-French and thus take a special interest in the politics of France. It’s equally understandable that someone of, say, Pakistani heritage would take a special interest in South Asian politics. 

However, to link an entire community to an overseas conflict — and politicise the association — is not acceptable. It’s especially dangerous when so many voters in Britain naturally take the other side of the conflict, for equally valid reasons.

The Labour leaflet has been widely condemned: Labour Friends of India called for it to be withdrawn; George Galloway, spotting an opportunity to stick his oar in, described the controversy as the “fruits of identity politics.” Meanwhile, Owen Jones is warning that, in the event of defeat, “supporters of the [Labour] leadership are preparing a narrative that Muslim voters are disillusioned because they’re homophobic, antisemitic bigots.”

I’ve no idea whether Jones is right about that, but identity politics is a dangerous game. Even if you play it with best of intentions you may be surprised where the ball ends up. To use a phrase popular five years ago, Labour risk “unleashing demons” in their desperate attempt to shore up support.

In all the discussion on what the different candidates think about Kashmir or Palestine, almost no thought is given to the dangerous consequences of focusing this by-election on just one part of the constituency’s population. It’s not that the Asian voters of Batley and Spen don’t matter; but how are the other 80% supposed to feel about being sidelined?

Indeed, how is any local voter — whether white, Asian or other — supposed to feel if their main concern is for where they live and its economic future? What has a party wrapped up in identity politics and foreign policy issues got to say to them? As with so many other seats in Labour’s disintegrating Red Wall, there is no real answer. 

At the outset of the by-election campaign, the conventional wisdom was that the constituency is not like Hartlepool, which Labour lost to the Tories in May. But in many ways, Batley and Spen is very much like Hartlepool — and scores of similar constituencies across the North of England. 

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How Boris can save the Blue Wall

By Peter Franklin

For all their individual distinctiveness, they share an urban-but-not-metropolitan geography that isn’t found to the same extent in most other parts of the country. They exist in such numbers in the North because of the industrial revolution, which as well as creating new cities also transformed villages into a dense patchwork of towns. 

If the industrial revolution haunts the North, it’s not because of nostalgia, but because the North is still made in its image. This may have become a cliché of political reporting, but that doesn’t make it any less true. 

A cliché that isn’t true, however, is that, before Brexit, these sort of seats were solidly Labour. In fact, the unbroken Red Wall that stretched from Lancashire to Hull was first breached in the 1980s. There were some seats that the Tories won back then (and later lost to Tony Blair) that not even Boris Johnson has managed to regain. 

One of them is Batley and Spen, a Conservative marginal from 1983 to 1997. Throughout this period, its MP was Elizabeth Peacock — who bore a superficial resemblance to another Tory blonde of the era, but was very much her own woman. In fact, she was well ahead of her time, being an independent-minded northerner with socially conservative but economically interventionist views. She was, for instance, a determined defender of the mining industry, not something that could be said of the prime minister at the time.

Today, the equivalent politics may differ in the details, but there’s no doubting its popular appeal, or that the Tory party of the 2020s is closer to Peacock than to Thatcher.

Suggested reading

The toxic battle for Batley and Spen

By Tanya Gold

If you take a chart and measure people’s economic views along one axis, and their views on Authority versus Liberty on the other, then you produce four quadrants. According to research findings tweeted out by Tim Bale, a remarkable 60% of 2019 voters put themselves in the Left-Authoritarian quadrant. By way of contrast, only 2% took the opposite Right-Libertarian position. 

This doesn’t make the British public quite as Stalinist as it sounds, nor does it make them raving populists — it just means that they support the National Health Service and national borders — and expect their politicians to defend both. 

There is, however, a divergence of opinion between our MPs and the people who vote for them. Labour MPs are more socially liberal than Labour voters, while most Conservative MPs are closer to George Osborne in outlook than Elizabeth Peacock on economics. The difference is that Tories find it much easier compromising with their voters on economic issues than Labour do on social ones; for Labour, progressive beliefs about the crusade against racism, sexism, homophobia (and now transphobia) are sacred causes. These issues cannot be compromised over, and because they are sacred activists inevitably push them to further extremes. As for the Tories, all they have to do is appeal to the median voter against an absent, divided opposition, while appearing less obsessed with strange, niche obsessions. In other words, they don’t have to try very hard. 

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They don’t even have to offer concrete details of how they’d propel northern towns back into the economic fast lane. The pits aren’t going to re-open and nor are the shoddy factories, and it’s a long time since anyone has expected that they would.

A competent opposition would therefore press the government on the specifics of renewal. A clever opposition would drive a wedge between our free-spending Prime Minister and his tight-fisted Chancellor. Once you divide the amount money that the Conservatives are willing to invest by the number of communities they’re promising to level-up, just how much difference can it make?

But perhaps that’s Labour’s cunning plan, to lose so many constituencies to the Tories that levelling-up fails by a process of dilution.

More likely though is that the opposition is neither competent nor clever nor cunning. Instead it’s hamstrung, a victim of its own longstanding, lazy use of identity politics. If Labour lose yet again tomorrow, they only have themselves to blame.

It is self-seeking and short-sighted: a mistake. There is a vacuum to be filled because Tory and Labour are a functional absence. I come upon them only through campaigning literature on lamp posts and under foot: it floats around the constituency like tumbleweed. Party leaders come for photo opportunities so there is evidence for posterity that they exist. Press officers rarely respond, even to requests for information. So, others come to fill the void. Their complaints are superficially rational — opposition is easy — but they are here not to soothe but to ignite. George Galloway, a charismatic, wants to exploit the racism British Muslims face because major parties will not grapple with it. Laurence Fox is here too, offering support to the teacher at Batley Grammar whose use of an image of the prophet Mohammed led to protests at the school, and the teacher choosing exile from the town. It is astonishing to see Fox and Galloway on the same platform but, as self-defined mavericks, perhaps it is not so strange.

Last week, the Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater, a well-being coach and personal trainer, was harassed in the street by a Muslim anti LGTBQ activist, demanding that she condemn LGBTQ education in schools. (Leadbeater is gay.) “The colour of blood is what you are,” he said. Now she has police protection. Labour sources say Galloway supporters are repeatedly driving past the campaign office; once they crowded in to harass them. Labour activists, including Muslims, were pelted with eggs and one was beaten. In white areas, fake Labour leaflets are circulated, saying, “Labour supports taking the knee”, and “The Labour Party believes that it is high time that white people acknowledged their privilege”. Labour itself published a leaflet showing Boris Johnson shaking hands with India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the caption: “the risk of voting for anyone but Labour is clear”. Labour Friends of India asked for its withdrawal.

It is a co-incidence, or perhaps, worse, an omen, that this is the constituency whose Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in 2016 by a white supremacist outside, of all places, a public library. Leadbeater is Cox’s sister. I wonder if it is another mistake from a Labour Party that embraced centralisation, a wound that took too long to show itself: the wrong candidate in the wrong place. Many Labour supporters feel unseen by the party they once embraced as family. Is it seemly to emphasise family ties, through a woman who only joined the party this year? What happened to Jo Cox is a tragedy, but her sister’s candidacy is still morbid nepotism, and it is unpopular with some voters. It takes politics further away from them, and into someone’s else’s personal narrative. “I can’t vote for someone who jumped on a bandwagon,” says one former Labour voter, “the sister of someone quite good.”

Batley is superficially sleepy. The once bustling market has declined; the police station has gone. Most commercial activity is sucked into a vast supermarket, with the now mandatory support for a foodbank in the window. (More than a third of children live in poverty in Yorkshire, and most of them are in working families.)

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Alienation is obvious as you wander Batley and Spen. The young SDP candidate Ollie Purser tells me: “The biggest demographic I meet is people who aren’t going to vote and before I can even give them a leaflet the door is shut.” I follow him as he campaigns in Birstall, an estate of red-brick houses dominated by a sign that says NO BALL GAMES, and in an area where people, according to Purser, either say, “There’s nought for kids to do”, or they else they say: “There’s too much anti-social behaviour”. The main issues here are public services — the Liberal Democrat candidate Tom Gordon says constituents are using Dentaid, a charity that usually operates in developing countries — and whether to build a new Amazon distribution centre for more air pollution and ill-paid, exhausting jobs.

“You all talk shite,” says a man when he opens the door to Purser, though genially. “I have no interest in voting whatsoever.” “Anything to do with working-class culture gets chopped up,” mourns the next, though he takes a leaflet. “I never go out,” says the next, “I’m a Mum”. As we leave two children wave from the window. “I’ve never voted in my life,” says the next potential voter, who must be 70, and Purser patiently explains the principles of a polling station to her. Even when voters do enter a polling station, Purser says, “they are always holding their nose. That’s the problem. [People] biting their lip and putting their cross next to the name because they hate the other team more”. These people are, Purser says, “dislocated. Atomised. Individualised.” As if to illustrate this point, there are two local Facebook groups dedicated to the town: Batley Matters and Batley Really Matters. Even the advocacy groups have split.

In the middle, preening calmly amid the chaos, is George Galloway, the former Labour MP fighting an Oedipal battle with the party he once loved. Though he remains the same, he changes parties more often than he changes his hat: from Labour to Respect to the “economically radical and socially conservative” Workers’ Party.

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Galloway hopes to take Labour votes from the Asian community that make up 20% of the electorate here. He believes they are vexed by what they perceive as Labour’s lack of support for Palestine and lack of action on Islamophobia. One woman says her five-year nephew saw a tabloid headline, and said: “Auntie, look, we are terrorists. It says there”. This has reached a tipping point for Galloway supporters, with Palestine as the flashpoint. Shops in Batley are papered with pro-Palestine messages, and it is not, for these voters, something remote. It is, at least partially, a proxy conflict. In Palestine’s suffering they see themselves: it is a paradigm of their perceived powerlessness. One woman explains the change in dynamic: “We’re not your servants anymore.” Another woman says, “Obviously Israel own everything. It is an untouchable country.” She, though, will vote Conservative. I doubt this view is as widespread as Galloway would like.

Outside Galloway’s campaign office I find a mass of photographs of Galloway on sticks, so they look like a bus station with only one destination: a Galloway victory. I meet him in Starbucks. He is all twinkling vanity; he reminds me of Boris Johnson. Like Johnson, he likes campaigning more than governing; like Johnson, victory over the enemy is not a moral but a psychological imperative. The chase is all. If policy alone was his aim, he would add his voice to the SDP perhaps — “we respect them”, he says — or the Yorkshire Party — campaigning for devolution through its candidate Corey Robinson — or even Labour itself, prostrate but still breathing.

He speaks in perfect paragraphs, emitting campaign literature laced with memoir. Galloway does not converse, not really. He orates, mirrors, boasts. Labour is now a party of “trans-maniacs” who deplore the British voters and the British flag. Labour has, he says, no leadership. They are, rather, “a series of people sitting in circles. I remember vividly Tony Blair’s wife shouting at me to stop shouting, when in fact all I was doing was speaking clearly in the way that one does when one is making a speech. I remember it vividly even though it was more than forty years ago”. I wonder if this, at least partially, is why he is here. He has a long memory.

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He also remembers a woman outing herself as a lesbian at Conference decades ago. “Everyone clapped. I remember saying to the fellow next to me, ‘Why is everyone clapping? Should I announce what I like sexually? Would they clap?’ The personal,” he mourns, “became substituted for what united all of us — whoever we slept with”. And yet here he is, effectively trying to deliver a Conservative MP to Westminster, because of who he is, and I can’t think of anything more personal.

Is he concerned about this? “I draw no distinction between Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson,” he says, “in fact Boris Johnson is better at it than Kier Starmer would be”. He compares Johnson’s campaigning in the Fox’s biscuit factory to how Starmer would do it, if he had done it: “He would have would have walked around like a robot, a desiccated calculating machine, while Boris was practically breakdancing on the factory floor”. For Galloway, Starmer’s failures are ever expanding, like space. Where they do not exist — the biscuit factory, for instance, where he did not appear and so could not fail — he imagines them.

I offer the decline of child poverty under Blair as an example of an important difference between Labour and Tory policy. “I didn’t say there was no difference,” he says, “I said I make no distinction. The difference is this,” he explains, “the Tory wears on his sleeve what he is. Labour are wolves in sheep’s clothing and it’s our job to tear away that sheep’s clothing and reveal the wolf within”. He changes his mind: “it’s not really a wolf, it’s more a jackal. The jackal within has to be exposed”. The jackal feeds on the dead. I think he is projecting.

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Eventually, after multiple emails and telephone calls and knocks on campaign office doors, I do meet a Labour activist, though by accident: a white man walking his Labrador in the park. He too speaks in perfect sentences, as if the relative silence on the street is creating rhetoric straining to be heard.

“The Tories,” he says, “are hoping to win by default, and they are hoping that Mr Galloway will help deliver that for them. He’s incapable of winning the election and if he wants to play a small part in electing a Tory candidate,” – his anger is obvious, though he speaks calmly — “for a party whose leader insults Muslim women, refuses to deal with Islamophobia in the Conservative Party and will do nothing to defend the causes including that of Palestine which Mr Galloway professes to hold dear then that’s up to him”.

That night there is a hustings in a community centre with only one candidate: George Galloway. His wife videos him for posterity. Kim Leadbeater pulled out, and Galloway seems both delighted and appalled. The Yorkshire Party candidate Corey Robinson says he accepted the invitation but was not given the address, and so wandered around Batley looking for it until he gave up and went to visit his family. That is not mentioned.

The interviewer thanks Galloway, whose rhetoric rises to this tiny crisis. “It is I who should thank you,” he says, “and commiserate with you for the great insult that the Labour Party has just delivered half an hour ago”.

He says Labour’s loss will cause an earthquake to destroy its leader. “Why do I care about that?” he asks himself. It’s a good question. The answer is, he says, that the country needs an opposition and, “Britain currently doesn’t have an opposition because the Opposition Leader is no leader at all. He’s so wooden that birds are trying to nest in him. He’s so robotic he might as well be speaking through a speak-your-weight machine. His words go nowhere, move nobody, persuade nobody.”

He continues in this vein for an hour while around him, in a vacuum made of cowardice, the major parties flail, and, in Labour’s case, sink to his tactics. This is a filthy by-election, and only one man is made happy by it. It will not be enough.