Unions can no longer sit on their hands and watch Labour dashed against a brick wall! They must act NOW or forever regret the part they played in Labour’s demise and that’s exactly where we’re heading if they don’t do something soon. Need we remind them there is no credible alternative for a socialist opposition than the Labour Party and, if they allow Labour to fail, how then will they answer to their own membership after they’ve destroyed the only political support they have?
Labour centrists seem extremely keen to pursue a goal of complete redundancy and political inconsequence. Having already sacrificed the Scottish vote back in 2015, when the SNP pretty much trebled their vote share and gained 50 seats, they’re now working feverishly, and apparently succeeding in their efforts, to hand almost the entire red wall to the Tories as well.
Pollsters have consulted a representative sample of voters in 45 red wall seats (in the North/Midlands) that the Tories took from Labour in 2019 and have discovered that the Tories have pretty much managed to retain all the seats they gained. This will no doubt come as a shock to those on the Labour right who repeatedly claimed it was Corbyn who put off pro-Brexit red wall voters.
According to the people taking part in the polls, the key reasons they’re sticking with the Tories are that they don’t know what Keir Starmer stands for (+37% Agree), that they think Labour have played party politics during the coronavirus pandemic (+35% Agree) and that Labour haven’t proven that they can get the debt under control (+33% Agree).
When comparing leadership attributes and looking at how important they were to voters, they saw Starmer as mildly fair and competent but they saw Johnson as someone who clearly gets things done and is a lot stronger than Starmer. Many more people also saw Johnson as patriotic, determined and charismatic.
In fact, shockingly, on their popularity scale, Starmer is in 4th place, behind Sunak, Johnson and Matt Hancock and he’s on equal pegging with Dominic Raab.
On the positivity scale, Starmer’s dropped 10 points, while Johnson’s shot up 9 points…
I recently researched into the general election results from 1979 to 2019 to try and get a picture of how voting majorities have ebbed and flowed. I did this to satisfy a question I had because I’d repeatedly been told by people on the right that the 2019 election gave the Tories the biggest majority since 1987. What I discovered was rather surprising…
This data shows that the 2019 election did give the Tories a majority of 80 seats and, yes, you would have to go back to 1987 to get a worse result but what a lot of people don’t know is that it was Neil Kinnock (an arch centrist) who conceded 102 seats to Thatcher in the 1987 election. Clearly, centrism hasn’t always been the magic pill it has been purported to be by the Labour right. In fact, the research also revealed that between 1997 and 2005, under Tony Blair, Labour reduced the Labour majority from 179 to 66. In other words, we conceded a shocking 113 seats and, of course, we also lost the 2010 and 2015 elections on a centrist slate.
Spotlight has now also published its investigation into the 2019 general elections and revealed that while Labour suffered significant losses there was no actual boost to the Tory vote share. What has now come into sharp focus is that the 2019 election was in fact perceived as a 2nd Brexit referendum with the vast majority of voters choosing to vote along leave or remain lines. Contrary to what Labour centrists would have us believe, it was not a referendum on socialism, on socialist policies or on Jeremy Corbyn. Far from it!
In conclusion, not to put to fine a point on it but the left can no longer sit and wait things out, hoping the ship will right itself, while Labour centrists get ready to land their final blows.
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