Labour may now follow the Tories into unelectability

First one legacy party made itself unelectable, now the other is following suit. The Tweedledum/Tweedledee see-saw of Conservative and Labour which, over the past three-quarters of a century of complacent managed decline, has brought Britain to its present state is coming to an end.

No need to dwell on the Tory history of incompetence and betrayal: it has been part of the “lived experience” of Britons for the past 14 years. Now that disillusionment is, at least partly, beginning to be mirrored by Labour, as the wheels come off the precarious Heath-Robinson contraption that is Keir Starmer’s new-look party.

Labour’s strategy, which was really the only course open to it, in the absence of strong leadership, ideas or talent, was to lie low throughout the period leading up to the general election, denouncing the Tories at every turn, while largely shadowing their failed policies. New Labour did something similar in the 1990s, with Gordon Brown even restraining his spendthrift instincts during the early years of Labour rule, though the Blair/Mandelson machine was infinitely more formidable than the Starmer/Rayner collaboration, which more closely resembles two drunks helping each other along the road.

From the outset, the problem with that strategy was the length of time it would have to be maintained, with every month presenting the danger it would fall apart. This was due to the uneasy, even incompatible, coalition that is today’s Labour party. In the driving seat are the Starmer operatives – one might call them New New Labour – untrammelled, like their Tory opponents, by any beliefs or principles and simply dedicated to regaining power.

Below them are the Remainer/Guardianista supporters, a bloc of politically correct, middle-class, self-conscious progressives, obsessed with Brexit and climate alarmism. Below them lurk the unreconstructed Corbynistas, more interested in Gaza than in Britain, wholly intransigent and oblivious to public opinion. Their stance on Palestine unites them with the Muslim Labour vote, which controls 31 Labour-held constituencies.

Starmer was limping along successfully enough, sustained by the Tories’ freely indulged penchant for self-harm, until 7 October, when the one political issue that had the potential to blow his ramshackle coalition apart went live. Palestine completely consumes Labour, it is something between a fixation and a death cult. Normal Britons will ask themselves: why?

The interest of Muslim voters in Palestine is understandable; but they constitute a minority among the vast horde of Labour Gaza-obsessives. The media explanation is that anti-Semitism has taken over the Labour party. That is self-evidently true, but again the question is: why? For at least two generations, British schools have been focused on “Holocaust studies”. The History curriculum has been reduced to “the Nazis”. The UK education system seems the least likely nursery of anti-Semitism, yet it is the younger generations whose social media posts demonstrate the failure of the system to educate them.

The answer to a question the Labour leadership needs urgently to solve is: by the same token, why do so many members of the same age profile express confusion over sexual identity? It is groupthink, a contagion spread by social media and – a chilling consideration for Keir Starmer and his associates – there is no effective means of resisting it.

So, Labour is joined at the hip to its anti-Semitic supporters, so numerous that to disengage from them totally would make it impossible for the party to win an election. The Rochdale debacle demonstrates this, with the bookies looking at George Galloway and his baying-at-the-moon outfit with fresh interest. If Galloway were to win Rochdale, which serious observers are now touting as a possibility, it would be a catastrophe for Labour.

That is not because, in the grand scheme of things, George Galloway is a transformative force for Britain, but because of the timing of this month’s three by-elections. Labour is expected to do well in Kingswood and Wellingborough, with a good chance of taking both seats from the Conservatives. But if they were to do so, confirming their narrative as a party marching inexorably to power, only to lose Rochdale at the end of the month, that effect would be wiped out.

By 1 March, nobody would remember Kingswood and Wellingborough: the relentless focus would be on Rochdale, the rise of extreme-left and anti-Semitic politics, coupled with the most lethal perception of all: parties that are on their way to government do not lose seats less than nine months before an expected general election. Defeat in Rochdale would have even the legacy media peering under the canvas of the pantomime horse that is Starmer’s Labour, to see what is going on.

Most commentators would and do say that this is all Starmer’s fault: that he clearly failed in his initial purge to clear the anti-Semitic elements from his party; that his timing and judgement were all wrong, leading him to stand by his man, in this instance Azhar Ali, Labour candidate in Rochdale, only to denounce him as a pariah hours later.

You do not have to be an admirer of Keir Starmer to recognise that, while his lack of natural authority and political nous undoubtedly contributed to the car-crash effect, the problem runs much deeper. Labour is unreformable. It has become a haven for cranks with obsessions about Jews, climate, Brexit, class, sexual “identity” and every other unhealthy preoccupation of contemporary society.

This is an underlying reality of far more significance than the immediate fortunes of the Starmer clique. It means that the second of the two legacy parties is now being exposed as unelectable. The disillusioned Red Wall voters who lent their votes to Boris Johnson in 2019, only to be betrayed along with everyone else, are, in many instances, instinctively seeking to return to their natural home: Labour. But the party they regard as their natural home is the historical Labour party of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan: Old Labour. That no longer exists, any more than the authentic Conservative party does.

Eventually, it must dawn on voters that both legacy parties are unfit to govern. At present, a blip in the opinion polls is causing psephologists to speculate that Labour’s abandonment of its £28bn green squanderfest has alienated some supporters. If so, they are of the metropolitan, climate-obsessive faction, not from the Red Wall whose voters deplore green extravagance. Desperate Tories are clinging, as to a child’s security blanket, to a Savanta poll that shows Labour down five points, to 41, and the Tories up two points, to 29.

While that hardly points to a Tory landslide, the survey was taken before the Rochdale meltdown, which could further damage Labour’s appeal. But the real underlying importance of any such movement would be that Labour is decreasingly seen as an alternative home by disenchanted Tory voters – or even some Labour supporters.

There is a golden opportunity here for Reform UK, but it may well miss the chance, as the Tories did after their 2019 landslide. With people eyeing Labour as well as the Tories with disfavour and considering staying at home on polling day, now, above all, would be the time for Reform to seize the initiative and present itself persuasively as an authentic alternative. 

The narrative could not be more straightforward: why, out of habit, continue voting for two parties you dislike and distrust? Why disenfranchise yourself by staying at home, when there is a party on offer that promotes most of the policies you want? Why cling to the defeatist conviction that the first-past-the-post electoral system invincibly blocks Reform’s path to government when it is an obvious fact that, if all disgruntled voters supported that party, it would overcome even that obstacle to win seats.

Any such breakthrough depends on the drive and charisma of Nigel Farage, to persuade voters that what they want – an end to immigration and wokery – is within their grasp, if they simply go out and vote for it. Farage is a formidable politician and communicator who, by enabling Brexit, has made a larger contribution to history than anyone else in politics today. But he has a couple of blind spots. 

One is his ambition to abolish the House of Lords. Why on earth would Reform, as a putative future coalition partner, impose on itself the crippling burden of such a constitutional reform – the parliamentary equivalent of the retreat from Moscow – to abolish a chamber it would be in its power, by nomination, to turn in its favour?

His other blind spot is the pessimistic conviction that Reform can never break through because of First Past the Post. Rather than relying on some future, mysterious introduction of proportional representation, at a time of unprecedented public alienation from both the legacy parties, Farage should lead a crusade to see them off by raising the insurgent vote for Reform to a level that would overflow the electoral flood barriers. Only he could do it, but if he misses the opportunity presented by Labour following the Conservatives into public disfavour, he might be losing out on an historic political planetary alignment that may never occur again.

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