Local elections May 26: significant implications

There are some really significant implications from last week’s local elections, as follows:

Death of the Starmerbot

If you come to power without a plan, you will be buffeted by the unrelenting 24/7 pace of government and end up inevitably being consumed by events. As one anonymous Labour MP said last week, Starmer is more toxic on the doorstep than Jeremy Corbyn ever was; that really is quite the statement. And since the local elections there’s been a gentle but steady stream of party grandees, union leaders and Parliamentary backbenchers openly calling for his head. And as we go to pixel, with one backbench MP now laying down the gauntlet to flush out a cabinet revolt as soon as possible.

Obviously the Starmerbot is trying to cling onto office, attempting to look in control with his distraction strategy of appointments and announcements. (Surely the ultimate sign of sheer desperation must be Starmer, statistically the most unpopular PM in recent times, reaching out to Gordon Brown, the second most unpopular PM, thinking it will help him). Everyone knows he is a dead man walking, so the question is how long will this slow motion car crash take? There are of course two ways one can look at this problem:

• It is an obvious truth that if the polls show that your leader is incredibly unpopular, then you either change your leader or accept you will lose the next election.

  
  

• But as the Tories have tested to destruction in recent times, changing the pilot of your kamikaze plane plummeting towards certain death doesn’t really make a difference; you are still going to die.

The Starmerbot’s plan seems to be to play for time and rely on the Labour party’s natural inertia reflex when faced with a leadership problem, viz Blair, Miliband, Corbyn etc. We all know the reckoning is coming, but when? He may stagger on for longer than he should unless Wes ‘let me through I’m the future PM’ Streeting has actually got the 81 signatures in the bag he needs, but he seemingly does not want to be the first hand on the knife. Big Ange needs more time because…well there is that pesky HMRC investigation to deal with. And St Andy of Burnham and his outriders need time to desperately dangle a peerage in front of any Labour MP who is willing to vacate their seat and take a bet that Andy can win it and then win the leadership race.

For now, the Starmerbot stumbles on malfunctioning.

New leader, new direction?

We have all heard the siren Labour voices from the usual suspects saying that Labour must move Left to get itself out of its funk with its voter base. That is what we might call the Mandy Rice-Davies analysis: ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ In truth, this is palpable nonsense for three fundamental reasons:

• In poll after poll the two most salient issues with voters right now by a huge country mile are the economy and immigration. If you think moving towards the Greens is going to help you on either of these, then the REC team has a selection of very fine bridges to sell you.

  
  

• And if you didn’t notice that Reform took more votes, seats and councils from Labour than the Greens did last week, we’ve also got some nice magic beans we can throw into the deal at a very competitive price.

  
  

• No one, not even the Greens themselves, think that they can get anywhere close to being in contention to form the next government. Reform can, duh!

Moving Left is madness, but it’s traditionally what Labour does when under pressure. And if they think they can’t win the next General Election, then standby for all the Left hobbyhorse policies they usually are too frightened to let loose; wealth taxes, anyone?

The Burnham question

Much of the Labour dinner table talk is how will Manchester Andy get into the race, whenever it is. A few glaring problems here:

• This assumes there is a winnable Labour seat that Andy could easily win. Right now, after last week, that is quite an assumption. Wherever he stands, as REC’s droll Scottish MD said recently, ‘the circus will come to town’; every political party will take aim at that by-election.

  
  

• No one sems to have noticed that much of the North West red wall, let’s call it ‘Burnhamland’, just flicked two fingers at Labour and voted for Reform. The idea that St Andy of Burnham has some magic Manchester pixie dust that will get him elected seems a little questionable right now to say the least.

  
  

• And all the noise emanating from the Starmer-friendly NEC is that they ain’t gonna let Andy have a seat any time soon.

So poor old Andy may never get his chance unless something changes.

The incoming Reform challenge

It’s all very well winning elections. That’s great. Well done. But what do you do once you’re in power. In the last local election cycle and now this one, Reform is beginning to pick up meaningful numbers of local authorities, now in the mid-twenties. But to govern is to choose and there are never any good choices, only a long list of horrible ones because there’s never enough money and always too many problems.

Let’s try a live example: Reform has just won control of the London Borough of Havering. Great. Have your website picture taken. Get a new email address. Jockey for position for a cabinet job or committee role. Start banking that allowance. But…

Havering is in a mess. Hopelessly in debt, it apparently needs £20 million of cuts ASAP. How much are you going to put up council tax? Which services are you going to cut? Again, to govern is to choose. And the voters end up hating you for those tough choices.

So as nice as it is to pick up councils, as ever with public office, that is the start of your electoral demise.

Tory/Reform cohabitation

The media have long asked the question, when will Reform and the Tories merge, work together etc. The real answer is, when they have to. Up until now, they have been locked in a battle to kill each other off. But the Tories haven’t got close to dying despite Reform’s success. So we might now soon be reaching that moment.

The truth is the Tories are probably more up for this than they pretend as they are pretty desperate. But the hardcore team around Farage are true Tory haters. They want to kill the Tories and assume the automatic position of the ‘go to’ right of centre party. So it will stick in the throat to even contemplate this for them.

How this plays out will be interesting. With all these new ‘no overall control’ councils we may see some local Tory/Reform cooperation, to keep right of centre council control from Labour, the Lib Dems or a left of centre coalition. (Bear in mind that lots of the local Reform activists and councillors are ex-Tories, so they know each other well). We could see either or both parties issuing edicts to their local parties not to cooperate, as Labour has done with the Greens. We could see local parties ignoring central party edicts. We could even see local Tory/Reform cooperation spreading up to national level. It’s all to play for.

But ultimately, they both know the lesson of the 2019 General Election, when the then Brexit Party stood aside for the Tories to “Get Brexit Done”: united they win, divided they fall.

Schizophrenic Greens

Putting aside the recent ‘Polanski poll plumet’ as it has been dubbed, which inevitably hit the Greens results – take Richmond for example where they lost all five Green councillors in what should theoretically be a target council for them – the question is will the real Greens please stand up? Are they the:

• Mostly white, middle class, older ex hippies and young, very online graduates, who are eco warrior tree huggers living in metropolitan England wanting to legalise hard drugs and party hard at LGBT rallies with gay, bondage wearing go-go dancers, or

  
  

• The newly joined anti-Israeli, pro Gaza Muslims supporting deputy leader Mothin Ali, an Islamic studies teacher?

How these two entirely opposite factions can possibly work together is rather unfathomable; oh to be a fly on the wall at a Green Party leadership meeting. How is this going to play out?

And as the lengthening dubious back story of David Paulden, sorry Zack Polanski (it’s difficult to keep up with all his names), has begun to come under ever closer media scrutiny – the best tabloid headline being ‘Walter Titty’ – how long before the new messiah himself implodes?

#Indyref2 on steroids

The SNP did well – albeit their vote share was down in every single Scottish constituency, they did not win an outright majority in Scotland and in fact lost six Scottish Parliament seats. The question therefore is will they do a deal like previously with the Scottish Greens to achieve that ‘independence majority’? But remember the previous arrangement descended into acrimony not long ago. The scars are barely healed.

And if they do, or even if they don’t, are we back to what The Times’ Fraser Nelson previously called the ‘neverendum’ where the SNP anti-English grievance machine cranks back into life endlessly demanding a second referendum.

Plaid Cymru sensed they would not win outright so explicitly downplayed their own independence messaging in the run up to the elections. But how long can they resist their natural urge? It’s quite possible Plaid Cymru, leading Wales for the very first time, could get in on the act too, possibly in concert with the SNP. But they too have a minority government with no natural allies to bolster them like the SNP in Scotland. And when taking all parties in the Senedd into consideration, there is a clear majority for the Union. So how will this play out? Will an ever desperate Labour government cave in order to seek nationalist support before the next General Election?

Fiddling while the UK burns

The big issues facing UK politicians right now are:

• How to deliver desperately needed growth to our flatlining economy

  
  

• How to massively increase defence spending when we are broke

  
  

• How to deal with our enormous debt crisis

  
  

• Where to position the UK geopolitically in the post-Brexit Trumpian world

Not one political party nor any single UK politician has anything approaching coherent thinking on any of these issues nor frankly wants to address them, preferring ideological displacement activity they can boast about to voters on social media. It’s a problem.