There are moments when politics change, and others when it is hard to tell what is happening. Yesterday included both.
Laura Kuenssberg signed off as chief political correspondent of the BBC with a bizarre piece in which she claimed there was ‘No breakdown or big breakthrough in uncomfortable night for big parties', which was unfathomable unless you conclude she really is a Tory, and had not noticed they lost near enough 400 seats, which was many more than they feared. Her departure is good news, except I fear Chris Mason will be no better.
What she did celebrate was The Mail forcing Durham police to reinvestigate Keir Starmer. That this leaves questions open on its refusal to investigate the clear cut breaches by Dominic Cummings is something she did not mention. We have to worry about the rule of law when The Mail sets the agenda. The path to fascism is still intact after yesterday.
These two events suggest no change yesterday: the rottenness of our politics and BBC mainstream news coverage of it continues.
So what of elections? The Tory losses are very significant. It is back to having no councils in Scotland or Wales. This is no unionist party. It's redefinition as a party of the English far right continues.
In that context, the Tory losses in London, Southampton, Oxfordshire, Somerset and elsewhere were significant, and very telling. Their only comfort was that the working class Brexit voter has not returned to Labour, but there are very many Tory MPs who must be profoundly worried now.
Labour did well in Wales and Scotland. It did well in southern cities in England. It has to worry about the north. Can it win Wakefield? Who knows?
And even if Keir Starmer is not guilty of an offence in Durham, and I inclined to that view, he was foolish, as was Labour for getting all its communications on this hopelessly wrong. Bluntly, it was not a great night for Labour, and they know it.
It was, however, a very good night for Anything But Conservative. The LibDem gains showed they really are the Tory challenger in many English seats and the chance that Labour can ‘win' and then ignore them now is very small.
The Greens also had a good night.
And the SNP increasing their vote share is almost unbelievable after all this time in office. The independence cause is very robust, unless you are in Alba that is, whose prospects look grim.
I was also pleased by another trend. More than 200 losses were sustained by independents, who are almost invariably Tories in disguise. That added to the right wing rout.
But, given all that, where are we? In uncertain territory, I would suggest. Or, to be blunt, we're looking at a hung parliament. Labour has not made massive gains against an incompetent, corrupt government, and there remains no certainty that it has anything like the required enthusiasm to go further. Starmer still looks and sounds lame. Rachel Reeves does not sound like she has answers to the economic crisis. There really is not a team that is greater than its parts there at present. It may win a bit from the coming economic meltdown but to pretend that there is vision on display in Labour is to seriously overstate things.
Meanwhile, we all know the LibDem vote is partly about protest, but that does not make it irrelevant. It says there are many seriously unrepresented people. And Greens are showing there are real concerns, whilst the SNP hold on Scottish seems it is likely to grow again.
Westminster seat forecasts based on this are hard but with Labour on 36% of votes and Tories on 32% with people now demonstrating considerable ability in voting ABC, my suspicion this indicates decimation for the Tories; significant growth for Labour but well short of a majority, with the SNP third and a revived LibDem group also potentially holding the balance of power. Laura Kuennsberg (again) put it like this:
If ever you wanted to know bout the London-centric view, there it is. The 'others' are of course very largely SNP, plus Northern Ireland and Caroline Lucas.
This split is good, or bad, depending on how you look at it. No one is going to work with the Tories. Labour will then be in office. But who with, and how? Could it work on just confidence and supply with both the LibDems and SNP? Or is the chance of real reform from a short term, unity, government delivering electoral reform, a Scottish referendum and a real economic alternative based on a Green New Deal on which all can agree possible?
Three things swing this. One is the economy: the Tories may lose more seats. But in England they may well go LibDem.
The second is SNP desire for a retention, which remains low right now.
Third, there are events…..because there always are.
We are in interesting times. The only good news that seems to have any likelihood attached to it is that the Tories are in trouble. What they do next us also telling.
This is a case of watch this space.
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Of course Kuenssberg is a thinly disguised Tory – so much for BBC objectivity- I never watch BBC news anymore
Ditto. Haven’t watched B.B.C News since the 19th, September, 2014.
Does that date have a specific resonance? What occurred?
BBX… news is that an oxymoron?
A wide spectrum of Labour comentators agree the party needs to project ideas, and committment – not just clean up after the Tories.
Blunket asking for more ‘narrative’ this morning on radio 4 , Freedland; : ‘ talk a bit more about what Labour will do, ‘ Toynbee: ‘fire in the belly is what the opposition lacks’,
Owen Jones: ‘ mopping up purely because of Tory failure. It is clearly not enough’.
The Treasury team of Rachel Reeves and the appalling Pat McFadden need to be dragged kicking and screaming off the tracks of their self constructed railway to nowhere ‘we will look after tax payers money ‘ which is their way of saying they will stick to Tory spending limits.
Labour have to be bold enough to challenge the currently unanswerable question – ‘which taxes will you raise, or will you saddle future generations with burden of debt?’, and at least have the courage to reference Keynes ‘anything we can actually do we can afford’.
Looking at the totals, Labour have as many or more council seats than the Tories, Greens and Liberal Democrats combined. But they don’t look ready to take power. Labour websites are full of attacks from supposedly Labour supporters saying they will never vote Labour while it is led by Starmer. However, he must know that he is very unlikely to gain 320 seats and will have to work with the Lib Dems and SNP. That need not be a bad thing except to those who think the country needs a ‘real socialist’ program. We need to see more imaginative leadership. They could unite around a green new deal, stopping the privatisation of the NHS, a better housing program, more devolution, constitutional reform, and at some point, rejoining the single market. Perhaps address that when in power.
I think that is about right Richard.
In America they have the very useful phrase “talking points” that describes the way a political party will try and dominate political debate by insisting that the subjects they wish to talk about are the only topics that matter.
If you win this battle it means that your opponents are always on the defensive and topics that are damaging to you, no matter how important are never discussed.
In America this battle over talking points is roughly equal.
In Britain, for decades it has been total Tory domination.
The consequence is that even when a Labour, Lib Dem, SNP, Green representative is invited on to news coverage to discuss a topic they are only ever allowed to talk about the Tory talking points.
How refreshing it would be to hear a journalist say, “well that is enough time devoted to Tory talking points, now in the interest of balance let us devote a greater amount of time to what other parties think are the important issues.”.
Even better imagine a truly democratic world where what other parties think is always discussed first because they represent the majority of voters.
Yes, the political scene is in a state of flux. It is good that the Conservatives have got a hammering but the way out of the climate and economic inequality crisis shows no sign of resolution. The Green’s increase is encouraging but will it be enough to save us if Caroline Lucas is the only voice for progress? At the next general election let’s hope that now the Greens are reaching a critical mass to break through the first past the post barrier a Green surge will happen in the next year or so.
I was speaking to a colleague at work – a new one – the other day.
She is 40 year’s old, two kids and has been taken on by my org’ on an apprentice wage scale. At 40.
She has £60K of student debt having studied ‘interior design’ at Uni. And she’s not doing interior design for us. She has recently paid privately for some healthcare treatment because of the waiting times on the NHS.
And she lives in the city which has just got NOC with the Tories two seats ahead of Labour.
I ask you……………….!!!!?
It’s very telling because she just accepts that the NHS and the Government has no money. She’s a nice person, and we share our biscuits and make each other a drink every now and then. But it’s very difficult to not want to shake her and many others just to see if you can wake her/them up out of their passive stupor so that they can see what and who it is that is making them poor.
It’s shocking and bewildering what people will accept these days.
I’m not sure why you might be bewildered and shocked by what people will put up with. The vast majority in this country have known nothing else beyond Thatcherism and its malignant legacy. I started paying attention to the world beyond my relatively sheltered up-bringing as an increasingly curious 14/15 year old in 1977/78, hardly the greatest years for any Labour administration and I’m now 59 so, on the basis that I’m not unusual, a dwindling proportion of the population have any experience or indeed knowledge of this country pre-Thatcher.
Unfortunately, it seems that the public’s expectations of the Labour Party are somewhat higher than those of the Tory Party. For example, no-one should be in any doubt that the response of the Mail/Express/etc to news that the party had accepted significant donations from Russians with close connections to members of the KGB would have been different to the virtual silence and indifference on show when the Tories accept it.
The response of the same sections of the print media and its readership to the selection of Corbyn as party leader was therefore entirely predictable. As a member of the Labour Party I’ve had opportunity to speak to people on both sides of the argument and have heard nothing that would change my personal opinion of him but something that does shine through is that you have to go back to Harold Wilson to find a Labour Government led by someone they felt that they could wholeheartedly support. It’s worth pointing out that the only reason Wilson formed his minority Government was because Heath refused the terms for coalition and that is nearly 50 years ago!
Corbyn may have come close but he also came second, twice, the second defeat being an extremely damaging one. By 2019, those who range themselves against the political left had organised themselves rather better but also, and this is the important point, because the message they were peddling resonates in England whose population don’t naturally incline to the political left, particularly if they perceive it to be the far left irrespective of whether that perception is right or wrong.
Starmer may not be the answer, only time will tell although the manner in which the right-wing press are dredging up the events in Durham and equating them with Johnson’s behaviour tends to suggest the Tories are worried he may be but the evidence points to the fact that Corbyn, or anyone like him certainly isn’t.
Corbyn may not be the answer, but then again we tend to forget what happened in 2017. I wonder what the result might have been if his own party’s machine had been working for a Labour victory.
Perhaps the Foote Report will tell us what we need to know.
His achievement was to terrify the Establishment with the fact that too many people can still see through the lies, deceits and nonsenses of Thatcherism, all of which have brought the country to its current shambolic condition, with more, worse to come.
And his manifestos were a good basis for progress. What a pity people believe what the MSM tell them. It certainly isn’t reporting, in any credible sense.
Perhaps, at some point, people will wake up.
Labour lost in 2017. let’s not pretend there was any victory in 2017, because that is ridiculous unless you’re a secret Tory.
I am not
And nor were the manifestos that good. Candidly, micy of them uitretyrly missed the point
One of the big things about a lot of the TV coverage of the local elections was ignoring that councils in Scotland are elected on the Single Transferable Vote system.
And oh dear, Richard, why did you say that for the Tories, “it is back to having no councils in Scotland”? Before this year’s elections, there were NO councils in Scotland where any one party had overall control. Even now, there are only two with one party in power – Labour in West Dumbartonshire and the SNP in Dundee.
I thought it had a north east council from memory…
But that was an error
This is a blog remember…
Much talk across the media about the council elections in England, Scotland and Wales, but it’s N Ireland’s Assembly Election which has the potential to cause the greatest upset to the political status quo in the UK and it’s not had the coverage which its importance merits. At the time of writing Sinn Fein looks likely to have the largest vote of any single party. The implications of it holding the First Minister position and the impact which that could have on political policies in NI are as yet unknown, but have the potential to change the entire politics of the UK. Certainly they are far greater than the potential outcome of local council council changes across the UK.
Agreed
If there is going to be anything other than yet another Tory Government, Labour will have to do a lot better in England. Mark Drakeford, for Welsh Labour, has shown how it is possible to win 66 seats of the 86 which the Tories lost there. In England, Keir Starmer’s Labour could only pick up 32 of the 342 lost Tory seats. (Figures correct at time of writing)
I have only anecdotal evidence but I would say that the much better result in Wales is because the party there is much more united under Drakeford’s leadership. English Labour is never going to retake the erstwhile ‘Red Wall’ if Starmer is intent on carrying on as he does.
It is probably beyond anyone in the Labour Party to recover much ground in Scotland, which makes it all the more important for Labour to do well in England. No Red wall will almost certainly mean a Tory win in the next general election.
I think it means a progressive alliance
Keir Starmer is not good
Who is better? Leave out Corbyn et al
I’d like to see Andy Burnham back in Parliament and then elected party leader. I can’t see anyone else being able to convince ex-Labour voters in the North and Midlands. We need a suitable seat to become available in a by-election.
I expect the Lib Dems will continue to do well but if they just increase their vote share without winning in Tory seats, they will still be Tory seats.
Andrew Rawnsley in today’s Observer really gets up my nose with calling the Tories ‘intellectually exhausted’ (is he joking – there’s nothing intellectual about them at all – they have nothing but base reasons for doing anything – even breathing).
But his last sentence – that he thinks that the result of these elections benefits all parties – I think is right because as you have rightly explored here Richard, what we have is a polity with no new ideas; politicians and parties stymied by orthodoxy and whom as a result do not have the intellectual tools or courage to come up with something new in the face of these challenges.
In effect, there is no leadership of any kind whatsoever at least in the Government sector in this country. And that is woeful.
You may be right but I live in hope
Whatever your opinion about the efficacy of ‘beergate’ it would do us a favour by removing Starmer who has been an utter disaster and is a liability. Labour’s results outside of London can best be described as indifferent. Bear in mind too that Labour lost control of Tower Hamlets to the newly formed Aspire party which is hardly a ringing endorsement of the managerialist right of the party that Starmer personifies.
Who else then
And please don’t name the left if you want a Labour government
In terms of who is available and who Labour needs to get across to: Angela Rayner with Ed Miliband as shadow Chancellor, Thornberry as Foreign Secretary, Lammy as Home Secretary, Long Bailey and Barry Gardiner in Education or Health, Reeves hived off to Culture with that snake Streeting given something like Equalities. Strong policies on minimum wage and housing and the ability to stay on message. That’s my answer in brief. What’s yours?
I am not a Labour Party member
Tom that line up would have no appeal with the working class voter nor the middle ground..the best hope of a Labour govt is Kier Starmer keeps the party on its current course.
I tend to agree…
Neither am I and am unlikely to vote for them at the next election. However, if there is to be a change of government it will likely be led by Labour. That is less likely without the ability to develop popular appeal. Starmer has shown himself to be woefully inept in this regard amoungst others.
Who has got popular appeal
I see no one better
That is grim, but right now they chose the best they have got, I think, at least on that score