Starmer has raised the SNP from the dead
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar – incredibly – is openly canvassing the possibility of doing a deal with Reform, to see off the nationalists.
“A week is a long time in politics” was Harold Wilson’s aperçu, mined so relentlessly by commentators as to become a cliché; but today it is easily misunderstood. Wilson, who represented an early experiment in Labour reinvention, his “white heat of the technological revolution” rhetoric an analogue version of the later, more streamlined, Blair imposture, operated at a time when British politics was inherently stable, to the point of stasis.
The post-war years were an undeviating alternation of the two-party system, barely disturbed by the short-lived SDP intrusion and only disrupted by the localised success of the SNP due to Labour’s gifting the separatists with devolution. Wilson’s much-quoted remark was implicitly understood at the time to refer to occasional moments of political convulsion, e.g. the displacement of a party leader or a fiscal crisis, at which times much could happen inside a week. It reflected a tactical, rather than strategic, view of political chronology. Outside those moments of crisis, a week was just seven days in the routine passage of political events.