'Four Labour defeats in a row are a reminder to take nothing for granted'
Walk up the famous yellow staircase in No10 and you will notice how few portraits of former Prime Ministers peering from the walls are of the Labour party.
There are only six, a mere half a dozen, since the first, Ramsay MacDonald, moved into Downing Street 100 years ago today. The Conservatives have had five since 2016 alone so Keir Starmer would be creating his own bit of history should he, as is widely expected this year, become Labour’s seventh after MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan, Blair and Brown.
Though it has provided the PM for only 33 of the past 100 years, Labour has achieved much that is golden and enduring, headed by Clement Attlee’s precious gift of the NHS. Yet it also helps explain Labour’s gnawing nervousness despite opinion polls and the bookies showing Starmer is red-hot favourite to be Britain’s next Prime Minister.
Four defeats on the trot are grim reminders to take nothing, absolutely nothing, for granted. Ahead of Starmer there are dozens of Wilson’s “long weeks” during which fortunes can fall as well as rise. Nobody in Britain would still be paying tax if we enjoyed reductions every time a Tory Government that talked about cutting rates actually did so.
Picture this...Starmer on the wall of No.10Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Budget on March 6, however, will be in one of those long weeks, arguably the last one, as the response to Tory election bribes might seal the deal for Labour or revive Conservative fortunes.
Teachers, civil servants and train drivers walk out in biggest strike in decade
My impression is what’s left to play for is only the scale of Starmer’s victory, as voters show exactly how fed up they are with the incompetent and sleazy Conservatives. Shadow Cabinet members whisper that Starmer repeatedly warns against corrosive complacency even as the party’s team meet civil servants to discuss how they would implement Labour’s programme.
In the Scottish fishing port of Lossiemouth at the weekend, I listened to tributes to MacDonald, an illegitimate son of a farm labourer and brought up in terrible poverty. MacDonald wasn’t really ready to govern in January 1924 and had no majority. He had to govern with fewer seats than the Conservatives, later that year losing an election due to the infamous Zinoviev letter smear trick.
But he demonstrated Labour weren’t “wild men” incapable of running Britain, implementing a house-building initiative that saved 500,000 families from slums.
MacDonald was back in No10 in 1929. His great betrayal of 1931, forming a coalition National Government with mostly Conservative ministers, is for another day. Starmer setting his sights on at least two terms and 10 years if, or probably when, he triumphs in 2024 is an increasingly confident leader making up for his party’s lost time.
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
