The Writing On The Wall?

Fellow Red Wall constituents, has your opinion been polled? Has that of anyone you know? Does a 16 point Labour lead here correspond to your experience? Who are they asking? That this poll had been commissioned by the Keir Starmer Fan Club that the Fabian Society has become was not an excuse to limit participation to its members.

In any case, the talked of 100 gains would still take Labour to only 299 seats, meaning that it would only be the largest party in a hung Parliament. If Starmer had not changed Labour's Brexit policy, thereby enticing Boris Johnson to call a General Election in 2019, then a General Election this spring or early summer, five years after the one in 2017, would have delivered in the ordinary course of events a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party.

Who knows what would have happened then? But something would have done. Were it to happen next time, then would anything at all come to pass? If so, what? Furthermore, what are the numbers from the Conservative seats where the Liberal Democrats were in second place last time, even as distantly as they were at Chesham and Amersham? Or where they were in third place, as they were at North Shropshire, where their candidate who took 10 per cent of the vote in 2019 is now the Member of Parliament?

The Red Wall seats were lost at Labour's fourth consecutive defeat. Winning them back would barely be the beginning of any road back to office, in which the only progress was made in 2017. Not counting Starmer's causation of the 2019 Election, the New Labour that has been restored has so far fought five General Elections, and it lost the two most recent, with the fifth resulting in a Conservative overall majority, the only meaningful one since 1992. The Liberal Democrats had made David Cameron Prime Minister in 2010, the DUP kept Theresa May in office in 2017, and the Parliamentary Labour Party is now Boris Johnson's majority against his own party.

Labour would be an Opposition in anything more than the most nominal sense only to a Sunak Government that was economically well to its left. Some strategy that, for winning back seats that had voted for Jeremy Corbyn when he was pro-Brexit, and which would have done so again if he still had been. Never mind for winning back Hartlepool, which voted for Corbyn both times. Plenty more seats like that would turn blue in the face of such an approach.

Anyway, it is hard to see how Labour plans to have 100 new MPs without the candidates. For example, there is still no Labour candidate here at North West Durham, which is supposedly the "totemic" and "iconic" Red Wall seat. In 2019, Labour lost it for the first time and by only 1,144 votes. More than two years later, it can still find no one to try and take it back. The Fabians are a sophisticated lot who clearly know better than to believe their own opinion polls.