Another corker in the FT - oh how the FT have performed a volte face after backing Labour in the run up to the 2024 GE…
Regicide is in the air, even though Labour’s rule book makes it hard to remove a leader. Predictions for May have Labour in third place in Wales and in Scotland, where its resurgence only two years ago was key to winning the general election.
In England, many of its councillors fear local losses. Downing Street is so frit that it has taken the outrageous and anti-democratic step of delaying four mayoral elections and giving 63 councils the chance to postpone local elections. Even with such gerrymandering, the strength of polling for Reform UK means that Starmer has at best five months to explain what his government is for.
His New Year message promising to defeat “decline and division” would be more convincing if that wasn’t what his government has wrought. Repeated U-turns on domestic policy have kept him in office but not in power, even though some reversals — most recently on inheritance tax for farmers — have been a welcome admission that the policy was ill-conceived.
Regaining the initiative would require a radical move: opening negotiations to rejoin the EU customs union, perhaps, or implementing dramatic reforms to asylum. It has not helped Starmer that he often looks as though the government is being run as a riposte to Nigel Farage, rather than because it believes in anything.
The Labour Party are deluded if they think their unpopularity is not 100% their fault. Every big decision they take, they U-turn on, except tax rises. Every time you think you can get on with your life and not worry about further changes, they return to rob you again and again. They have no plan to reduce taxes, no credible plan to improve public services and no ability to force through any difficult decision. They are a ghost ship of a party sailing towards shipwreck beach in 2029.