Starmer: the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living
‘By-Elections predict nothing. But they do provide evidence as to whether what the opinion polls are telling is us is being corroborated. And the broad answer is yes, it is. Labour are well ahead. Prof. John Curtice says the Tories are in ‘very substantial trouble’
Labour’s victory in the Selby by-election represented the second highest swing ever in history. The narrow defeat in Uxbridge still saw a 7.6% swing. The LibDem victory in Frome suggests that the party is recovering in its traditional south-west power base. In recent times the LibDems do well when Labour does as Freedland points out in the Guardian (22.7)
Yet at Labour’s Policy Forum in Nottingham on Saturday Starmer managed to make it all sound little short of a disaster and argued there is a long way to go.
I prefer the professional expertise of Curtice over Starmer who has been an MP for less than 10 years. The past does however weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living. The memory of the Kinnock debacle in 1992 remains.
Its true too that to win in 2024 Labour needs to take a lot more seats than it did in 1997. The Labour leadership seems to be obsessed with the idea that they will have only a small Parliamentary majority and therefore needs to purge anyone who disagrees with Starmer who might sabotage his plans once in Office (if he has any by then).
A lot of the undercurrent here however comes from the groupuscule around Starmer the Labour First/Labour to win clique. They are and always have been relentlessly one-dimensional. They are not interested in progressive coalitions as Blair was, hence they are not interested in Frome. They are also relentlessly factional so post Uxbridge Starmer led the attack on Sadiq Khan who is a classic centrist and a retreat from the politics of climate change, the green new deal is after all associated with the left.
There remains space just about to fight this inside Labour based on a more hopeful perspective. I heard Blair speak numbers of times when he was leader. No doubt I didn’t agree with what he was saying but that wasn’t the point. He made you feel that there was hope for the future. As even Starmer’s supporters in the media note, he does not.
There is also space fortunately in workplaces and communities for organising to fight for that more hopeful future that Labour at least once stood for but no longer, it seems, does
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