'Keir Starmer needs to be bolder for Labour to seal winning deal'
Thursday should have unleashed a deafening scream for change all around this country.
By-elections in the North, South and the West of England in three solid Tory seats should have sent a howl of disgust at the party of sleaze and self-interest which has mismanaged Britain for far too long.
The pollsters were confident that Rishi Sunak would become the first PM to suffer a triple by-election defeat in one day since 1968 and we would all be talking about when, not if, Labour formed the next government.
Instead, all three major parties took a seat, and the postmortem concluded that the Tories still have a glimmer of hope, the Lib Dems are rising from the dead, and Labour hasn’t “sealed the deal”.
A hung parliament after the next election has never looked a safer bet. Because, even with the ULEZ issue in Uxbridge (Sadiq Khan’s low-emission tax on drivers), a Labour party on course for Downing Street would have taken a Greater London seat from a Tory government in permanent crisis which was last occupied by the disgraced Boris Johnson.
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Clement Attlee would have won it in the 1940s, Harold Wilson in the 60s and Tony Blair in the 90s. The reason being that they offered a fresh vision that inspired voters. They offered a clear alternative to an out-of-touch Tory elite.
If Keir Starmer has a vision, I’d love to see it. If he has a message other than “we’re not the Tories” I’d love to hear it.
Last October, when Starmer was still talking about transforming Britain with radical policies, Labour were 30 points ahead in the polls. That lead has been cut by a third.
Since then, U-turns on pledges like renationalisation and House of Lords reform, plus reversing the worst of George Osborne’s welfare slashing, (and after Uxbridge a probable rowing back on his green revolution), have left many voters asking what Starmer actually stands for.
That lack of trust was confirmed in a YouGov poll of 2,151 adults this week, which saw his approval rating drop from an already negative -14 in June to -22.
It was a fantastic result for Labour in Selby and Ainsty but they only gained 2,600 votes from the last general election (some of them tactical ones from Lib Dems), with turnout down 27% as most Tories stayed at home in protest at Sunak’s government.
Will they vote blue again at the next election if inflation is beaten and tax bribes are offered?
If Labour are to “seal the deal” over the next 18 months they have to start telling people who are on their knees how they can lift them up. Not that they can’t because the Tories have left us skint.
Dozens of Scottish seats are up for grabs due to the SNP’s implosion. But those left-leaning Scottish voters won’t be won back to Labour with a pale red Tory act. They need a transformative offer with social justice at its heart.
At some point Starmer needs to outline a radical levelling-up vision for Britain that the Tories can never deliver.
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That’s how Labour won in 1997 in a country, like today, desperate for change. That’s how they can win next year if Starmer starts telling people what his government can, and should, do.
Not what it is too frightened to attempt.
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