Is a Labour victory now inevitable?
Local election results were not encouraging for Rishi Sunak. Emily Hohler reports
“Whichever way the results are spun, last week’s local elections were ugly for the Conservatives,” says The Sunday Times. They lost more than half the council seats they were defending and were left with just over 500. Labour gained almost 200, ending up with more than 1,100. Labour also won ten out of 11 mayoral seats, with London mayor Sadiq Khan elected for a historic third term.
Rishi Sunak “seized” on a polling device that extrapolates the results into national vote shares, putting Labour on 35% and the Tories on 26%, leading to a hung parliament, says Rafael Behr in The Guardian. This might happen, but the analysis by Oxford academics Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher “inflates the likelihood” by ignoring Scotland, where Labour hopes to make big gains at the expense of the SNP, and assumes that Liberal Democrats and Greens do as well, when voters may vote tactically for Labour.
“National equivalent vote” exercises are a poor guide to general election outcomes, says George Parker in the Financial Times. People often back smaller parties in local elections, basing their choice on who they would like to run things in their area.
A better kind of defeat
The picture wasn’t entirely rosy for Labour, with analysis showing that Labour’s position on Gaza had cost it support, says Robert Booth in The Guardian. Despite the party’s huge gains, there was “an almost 18% drop in the Labour vote in areas of England where more than a fifth of the population identified as Muslim”. This prompted Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and a “majority of Labour MPs” to place a “bulk order for olive branches and white flags”, says Allison Pearson in The Telegraph. Is the “lesson Labour needs to learn… that you better genuflect to threats from Islamic hardliners, or else”?
Despite it being a political occasion, “by custom strictly secular”, Mothin Ali, the Green Party’s winner in Gipton and Harehills, used his victory speech to support Palestine, shouting “Allahu Akbar”, a religious slogan “unfortunately, more familiar to the British people as the death cry of terrorists”. “Scenting weakness”, the Muslim Vote, a pressure group, has sent Starmer a list of 18 demands for Labour to win back support. These “do not come from moderate British Muslims”. If Starmer “buckles”, he will “soon find himself snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”.
So far, Starmer’s central objective has been to “remove every obstacle that could stand in the way of a disaffected Conservative” switching to Labour, seeking to reassure them that his party is “just as patriotic, just as strong on defence and crime”, and “just as prudent with the public finances”, says Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. This doesn’t change the fact that the Tories are so unpopular “because so much is broken and there is not enough money to fix it”. Once this problem has swept the Tories out of power, “it will become Labour’s problem”, too.
A Tory defeat looks fairly inevitable, says William Hague in The Times. “No British government in modern history has ever won re-election after more than 13 years in power.” The Tories have been in power for 14. But since defeatism is “wrong in principle” and “quick fixes unavailable”, the Tories’ best option is to think longer-term. The electorate deserves a debate on how we prepare for a world that “might change more in the next five years than the previous 50”. It requires “more security and more innovation”, something the government can explain “clearly and bluntly”. If Labour fails to match their ideas, there will be something “important to argue about”. And if the Tories still lose, they will at least be a “better opposition for having framed the future correctly”.