Labour sticking to the middle of the road will not deliver a mandate …
WITH the TransPennine Express now taken back from the failing private sector, more than one in four rail journeys are on nationalised services.
This serial failure of Tory policies means Labour must come up with a clear alternative if it is to make a decisive challenge at the next general election
On present figures — not opinion polls but local election results — Labour is set to be 28 seats short of a majority if a general election were to reproduce last week’s local government votes.
Labour is on 36 per cent. To give some perspective that is four full points below Labour’s percentage under Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election before Keir Starmer’s Brexit betrayal derailed Labour.
It is worth repeating these figures because both media and Westminster Labour conspire to erase the significance of that result.
The important thing about it was less the figure — impressive enough — but more the manner in which it was achieved.
Labour’s best recent performance came about because the party programme struck a chord with an electorate that is overwhelmingly working class and most mobilised by pledges to repair the damage that decades of privatisation and poverty have inflicted.
As of Wes Streeting’s abandonment of Labour’s policy to tackle the student fees crisis, the party has lost firstly the student vote and the parents who bear the brunt of unaffordable education. Secondly, it has lost the moral high ground which the Lib Dem’s betrayal of their pledge to meet student expectations granted Labour.
The Tories are on 29 per cent which is a testament to the remarkable ability of our ruling class to shift the ground whenever the temporary expedients they deploy to manage capitalism's enduring crises come awry.
In a few months, we have had the chaos of Boris Johnson’s era in office, the dreamlike interlude of the Liz Truss times and now the rich man’s rule of Rishi Sunak.
The Tories have a full year to fashion an electoral appeal that might reconstitute its electoral base beyond the loyalist residue.
Britain’s undemocratic election system advantages Labour in that Lib Dem advances in southern and suburban seats might scalp a good number of Tories.
The SNP meltdown, and now Plaid Cymru’s woes mean Labour is set to recover some ground in Scotland and Wales.
The one area where Starmer’s easy abandonment of every pledge might recover some votes is in Brexit majority areas which went Tory. His unshakeable adherence to the ruling class deal with the EU means that those innocents who took his pro-EU pitch as gospel are now lost.
And Labour’s not insignificant local government gains are energising what is a remodelled Labour Party now largely made up of people who, irrespective of their actual politics, are sticking with the party as it has become.
If it is necessary for the rich and powerful to make concessions to maintain power then concessions will be made. The tragedy of the moment is that the main party of the parliamentary opposition is more inclined to make concessions to power and wealth than challenge either.
The latest projections are that Labour will gain nearly 100 seats, the Tories lose rather more than that and the Lib Dems will make something of a breakthrough.
Already we can detect subterranean moves for a Labour deal of sorts with the Lib Dems. Normally this would arouse fears of a policy sell-out to the Lib Dem’s notoriously unprincipled political positions but on the main class questions, Starmer has already conceded much of that ground.
Experience tells us that Labour mired in the middle ground of consensus politics can never energise a decisive majority for change, most especially when the capitalist system is so conspicuously failing the cost-of-living test.