Labour must ditch what’s not working and take new approach

KEIR Starmer’s reshuffle of the Shadow Cabinet will make no discernible difference to the way the party is viewed by the voters. It’s not a surprise that, having suffered some significant losses at last Thursday’s elections, the leader of the Opposition felt it necessary to move around his top team. But both the scale of the changes – which were modest – and the personalities involved – who are barely known outside Westminster – mean that these changes can be nothing more than the opening salvo in the major battle the party faces to lift its fortunes in time for the next General Election.

If there was any doubt about the scale of that battle, which might have looked a little less dramatic to some after a handful of much better results for the party over the weekend, yesterday’s skirmishes across the radio waves and in the newspapers, between left and right, confirmed how big a mountain Labour has to climb.

Electors are generally happy with political parties that represent a broad church but, when factions effectively declare war on other factions, disintegration threatens and the difficulties for a party attempting to claw back credibility greatly increase.

Keir Starmer came to the leadership of the Labour Party with a mission to unify. He appeared, early on, to be succeeding and his choice of senior supporters in top roles reflected a wide range of views taking in both wings of the party. But it has done him little good, and now those who seemed to have been silenced by the disastrous results in the 2019 General Election have woken up, following a similarly poor showing last Thursday under Sir Keir’s leadership. There are those on the left who now feel emboldened enough to believe they have a chance to seize back some influence.

Yet it is not hard to see where success lies for Labour. The moderates in Exeter improved their position at the local elections last Thursday, and in many other parts of Britain, from Wales to Manchester, where the party scored highly with the voters, a combination of competent management through the coronavirus pandemic and experience during Labour’s years in office under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown paid dividends.

Nowhere is there obvious evidence of Labour candidates espousing far-left policies doing well in traditional working-class areas. If that message was not clear enough after the December 2019 election, when Boris Johnson’s Tories demolished much of Labour’s red wall, it was underlined on Thursday, particularly with the fall of Hartlepool to its firstever Conservative MP.

Talk at the weekend was of perhaps a decade of rule by Mr Johnson’s Conservatives, given the disarray in which Labour finds itself and the modest scale of all the other parties who might challenge them. Such predictions perhaps fail to take account of the PM’s propensity to engineer his own problems.

But what is not in doubt is that Keir Starmer now has a clear mandate to forge a very different Labour Party to the one that has been badly beaten. He should go for it.