Labour

Like Covid data, polling data has a built-in time lag of several days. Those sifting the evidence on coronavirus typically expect to see about a four-day lag between someone becoming infected and them showing up as a positive case after getting tested. Indeed, the Financial Times has just produced a graph showing distinct Covid case spikes among young men four days after every England football match in the recent European championships. Opinion pollsters would recognise a similar lag when it comes to events that influence the standing of parties. It takes time for those events to percolate through the public consciousness. So the latest rash of opinion polls, which are

Brexit is done and dusted, but when it comes to playing politics on the UK’s departure from the EU, the Labour party is still managing to get itself in a muddle. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, is the latest Labour frontbencher to send confusing messages about Brexit to voters.  Starmer’s party, we are told, wants to come to an arrangement with the European Union on recognition of professional standards, something Boris Johnson’s deal lacks. Labour is also seeking a bespoke veterinary agreement with the EU to overcome problems inherent in the Northern Ireland Protocol as it stands. The party also wants to make it easier for British bands to tour on the continent. Yet

There is a problem with Sir Keir Starmer’s reported plan to expel 1,000 Labour members associated with ‘poisonous’ groups, and not just that there are way more than a thousand poisonous people in the Labour party. The problem – and it’s a common error – is that Sir Keir exaggerates the role played by the far-left in bringing Labour to the point where it has lost four general elections in a row and last led the Tories in a poll almost six months ago. The cranks became more visible after Ed Miliband’s election as leader, more numerous thanks to his three-quid revolution and more powerful when that policy put Jeremy

Half a century ago, Willie Whitelaw accused Harold Wilson of ‘going around the country stirring up apathy’. I can think of no finer description to apply to Keir Starmer’s summer tour of Britain, during which we are told he intends to listen to the concerns of voters in a bid to win back their trust. His first such excursion, on which he was accompanied by BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, saw him encounter a dozen former Labour voters in Blackpool. Several of them confided that they had never heard of him, a revelation he described as ‘utterly frustrating’. Ms Kuenssberg reported that the gathering gave Starmer quite a rough ride

Thousands have taken to the streets in Cuba this week to protest against the authoritarian government that rules over them. The Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated Cuba’s already bad living conditions, and anger at the government’s handling of the situation reached a point where it could no longer be contained. Cuba’s one-party state has cracked down hard on the protesters, by beating, shooting and imprisoning its own citizens. Last night, Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canal took a novel step and admitted that his government’s handling of the crisis had possibly not been as brilliant as his people should have expected. ‘We have to gain experience from the disturbances,’ he said during a

I went to my first live political event this weekend, organised by the big tent ideas festival, with actual people in a room together as opposed to talking to each other through their computer screens. It felt like taking a trip back to 2019. Unfortunately, some of the contributions from the speakers felt a little like a throwback to that time as well, particularly in the case of Fabian Hamilton, Labour’s shadow minister for peace and disarmament. Hamilton was speaking about the UK’s foreign policy, and his contribution revealed how little the Labour party really have changed since Corbyn stepped down as leader – despite the party’s ‘under new management’

Labour is unhappy with the government’s plan for unlocking, with leader Sir Keir Starmer calling it ‘reckless’. In the Commons this afternoon, shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth and then shadow education secretary Kate Green complained about the statements from their ministerial counterparts. Ashworth treated fellow MPs to the slightly bizarre spectacle of him waving a paper Sajid Javid had written on pandemics while at Harvard, which seemed an incongruous political stunt. All the more discordant is the party’s stance on unlocking, which seems to be to complain about it happening while offering a plan that isn’t vastly different. It is urging the government to keep mandatory mask rules to stop

Trade deals are in the air post-Brexit, but not everybody is happy. In a speech this week Frances O’Grady, the TUC General Secretary, accused the government of not taking international morality into proper account when closing such deals. She demanded the government take steps to suspend trade deals with a number of countries that, according to recent research by the TUC, had a murky record on labour standards and human rights. By failing to do this and continuing to deal with these regimes, she said, the UK would be turning its back on workers everywhere and in addition demonstrating that it could not be trusted to observe decent standards at

In January 1990 things looked truly bleak for Alex Ferguson as Manchester United manager. He had not won a trophy in his first two seasons in charge and the third was going badly wrong. With a long injury list and an eight-game streak without a win, fan discontent was reaching fever pitch and media speculation suggested Ferguson was soon for the chop when his team took the field in an FA Cup third round match against Nottingham Forest. Get knocked out of that and all hope of silverware would be gone for yet another year. Fortunately for him, a young lad called Mark Robins popped up to score the crucial

Sir Keir Starmer got through the whole of PMQs without telling us that his mum was a nurse and he used to run the Crown Prosecution Service. What a relief. Instead, he gave us a different look-at-me moment. Hailing England’s victory over Germany last night he confided that his pleasure was of a purer and more refined variety than anyone else’s, ‘having been at Wembley for Euro 96 and experienced the agony of that defeat.’ The Labour leader is running out of disasters to berate the government with. The economy is on the mend. Freedom from lockdown looms. He can’t mention the Batley and Spen by-election in case he loses.

The biggest reason Keir Starmer has proved a flop is not that he leads an unelectable rabble, or that Labour’s coalition of voters is splintering, or even that Covid has marginalised him — it is far simpler: He’s never known what to do. In fact, he lacks the first clue about how to do politics. High-powered lawyer he may once have been, but we might as well have pulled some random middle-class bloke out of a saloon car on a ring road and invited him to captain Britain’s next doomed attempt to win the America’s Cup yachting challenge. Because Starmer’s default pose is to be frozen at the wheel and

Crises often exhaust the capacity of governments to renew themselves. All consuming problems do not allow prime ministers to have what Walter Bagehot called ‘mind in reserve’ — and yet future success at the polls depends on it. The vast achievements of the postwar Labour government were largely built on the work of a Liberal in the form of the 1942 Beveridge Report, which most notably recommended a National Health Service. But Attlee was unable to create a new vision of his own during an era of crippling rationing and economic strife. Labour went from winning their first overall majority in 1945 to a very slim majority in 1950. Churchill’s Conservatives

As Keir Starmer’s re-run of the great Change UK centrist dad experiment sinks deeper into political quicksand, the importance of a party leader being able to project a compelling personality becomes ever more obvious. Even the pinko pundit class that was overjoyed by his election as Labour leader is now close to giving up on Starmer, whose lack of ringcraft reminds us that there is something to be said for career politicians after all. Ambitious shadow ministers with antennae more finely tuned in to the public mood than his are said already to be preparing prospective leadership campaign teams in anticipation of the voters of Batley and Spen delivering a

Labour’s candidate in Batley and Spen, Kim Leadbeater, reportedly pulled out of a hustings featuring George Galloway over the weekend. This makes sense. Not only is Galloway a master of bluster whose pompous bombast has a steamroller quality in a debate, but Leadbeater would have been debating the person of whom she is currently doing a dubious impression. If the organisers were concerned about getting Labour’s perspective, they could have stuck a mirror in front of Galloway and given it equal time. The no-show came as Leadbeater, whose sister Jo Cox was murdered by a right-wing extremist five years ago, told the Independent: I think sadly there are a number