Whistle-Stop Tour

If you alone could hear the dog whistle, Lucy Powell, then what did that make you? Powell halved her majority last year. Keep saying that until it quite sinks in. In 2024, a Labour MP halved her majority from 2019. Not that she is singularly useless. Leader of the House of Commons is not a policy role, yet if Powell held on, then Keir Starmer would demonstrably have no one else to fill even that.

I have been rightly taken to task for the following: "Reform has won County Durham, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, the south east of Northumberland, and a by-election in Bridgend. Even Kent has a coalfield, and Staffordshire has two, so from Labour's point of view, at least there was no longer a South Yorkshire County Council to lose to Reform." As I should have added, the council and the mayoralty were both up in Doncaster, and while Labour's Mayor Ros Jones held on against Reform UK by 698 votes, whereas her majority over the Conservatives had been 10,213 in 2021, Reform took 37 of the 55 council seats. It is Doncaster rather than Sheffield that is on the East Coast Main Line because when that backbone of Britain was built, then the coal on which its trains ran was king.

Politicians who talk about things like "remoralisation" are setting themselves up for one hell of a fall, and a party that promises to "erect statues of great British figures" is inviting the ridicule than which nothing could be more British. But on economic policy, Reform voters turn out to be decidedly left-wing, at least compared to the officially designated centre ground. If the Labour Party were what people who had not been paying attention imagined that it used to be or least ought to be, then its means of dealing with the challenge of Reform, whose challenge is indeed to Labour, would be obvious. Starmer would have us believe that he had now accepted both Brexit and the fact of biological sex. If that were true, then seeing off Reform would be easy.

Labour took back the Red Wall last year, and is now fighting to keep it from Reform. For the Conservatives, the struggle is with the Liberal Democrats. By a wide margin, the Coalition was the most enduring and, from its own point of view, the most effective Government of the period since 2010. From austerity to Libya, what it got done was appalling. But it did get those things done. For five whole years. Iain Duncan Smith resigned because its welfare policies were too vicious, although they had been perfectly acceptable to Harriet Harman as Acting Labour Leader, and they had nothing on what Liz Kendall was doing today. But no Lib Dem ever resigned from the frontbench for any policy reason. On the backbenches, only one Conservative voted against the war in Libya, but no Lib Dem did so. Not a single one.

So the Lib Dems are sweeping the Thatcherite, socially liberal, Remainer heartlands, mostly but not exclusively in the South, because the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are the parties between which socially liberal, pro-EU Thatcherites, and the 1980s were a time of moral chaos while the Thatcher Government dismissed opposition to the Single European Act and thus to the Single Market as "Loony Left", choose on a case-by-case basis when seeking the more effective vehicle for their ideology that, though hugely mistaken, is nevertheless coherent. They are not "Anywheres". The places where this is the electoral battle are very much Somewhere. David Goodhart has always been wrong about that, and, as a son of the liberal haute bourgeoisie, surprisingly so. Not only are his posited tribes less than entirely distinct, but each of them has a deep culture that includes strong local, regional, national, international and global concerns and connections.