- Sun Jan 01, 2023 8:28 pm
#37238
As we commence 2023, Labour has a 26 point lead over the Tories, enough to secure a handsome win at the election when it comes. This is by any standard quite an achievement for Keir Starmer’s leadership when you consider that when Starmer blessedly took over from Corbyn only just 2 years and 8 months ago in the teeth of the pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn had just led Labour to its biggest election defeat since 1934, granting a huge majority of 80 seats to Boris Johnson. At that time, the opinion polls had Labour trailing the Tories by a despairing 26 points. A total turnaround has taken place in less than three years.
The Tory record in government for the past three years has, it is true, been absolutely appalling. A disastrous Brexit, a grossly mishandled Covid-19 pandemic entailing more avoidable deaths than virtually any other comparable country, corruption and lies in public office made endemic, a truly grim cost-of-living and energy crisis with record levels of inflation, public services in perpetual crisis with dedicated professionals forced into strike action by callous government indifference, food banks needed everywhere, £30 billion lost by a disastrously incompetent Prime Minister inflicted on the country by the Tories, and people dying for want of a timely ambulance. It is a government that has run out of road, made literally everything rubbish, and which it would seem the electorate has already decided is to be voted out whenever the election comes.
The Corbynite narrative on this is that *any* Labour leader would be benefitting similarly from the Tories’ dreadful record, including Jeremy Corbyn, and there may even be a tiny kernel of truth in that. But Starmer’s achievement is to have positioned Labour as irrefutably *the* default alternative government, perfectly placed to benefit from the Tory meltdown, and all but certain to return to government to begin re-constructing a decent society in the UK. This is an achievement that, it seems to me, was totally beyond Jeremy Corbyn, who had no grasp whatever of the strategy required to get the Labour Party to this position.
There is room for some self-congratulation, but not very much room. Labour’s offer for the coming election is still not fully developed into an attractive package that people will actually vote *for*, although the 2022 conference put quite a bit of flesh on bones, particularly in respect of investment in green industries and energy. The job now is to be ready to shape policy into a manifesto at the clause V meeting that people will vote for in numbers. I am confident that this will happen.
In theory, the election may still be as far away as January 2025, and truth I can only envisage Sunak possibly hanging on for those full two years, only calling the election before then if he can somehow bring about some kind of miracle Tory recovery. 2023 looks to be a lousy year for the economy again, and it is difficult to see how or when anything is going to get any better during the Tories’ remaining time in office.
So where are we? Roy Jenkins’ image of the Labour Party in around 1995-1996 as a man carrying a priceless porcelain vase and walking along a long corridor(now possibly longer than it’s ever been) with a highly polished floor seems spookily appropriate again. We need, in short, to keep the heid. .
"The opportunity to serve our country: that is all we ask.” John Smith, May 11, 1994.
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