Labour Comes “Home” With A 7% Loss - Now Project That Nationally
Yes, the Labour Party managed to pull off an unexpected victory in Batley and Spen, but this was a hollow victory.
The Labour vote collapsed once again. Despite coming up against an invisible Tory candidate, and the public backlash from the Matt Hancock affair, the Labour vote plummeted by 7.4%.
So, imagine going into a general election and your overall vote drops by more than 7%.
It would be a bloodbath. Labour would be lucky to walk away with 100 parliamentary seats, and Starmer would’ve completed his mission to destroy any chances of a Labour government for at least the next 25 years.
Are we *still* celebrating losing 7% of the vote? Get real.
No gains were made. This was simply about clinging on to a seat that Jeremy Corbyn comfortably won twice.
Starmer’s Labour has no realistic ambitions for government.
How can they when they are jumping up and down with glee because they only lost 7% of the vote? Do they even stop for one moment just to realise how pathetic they look?
A parliamentary seat was held on to, just. Nothing has been gained. We can’t even call this a “moral victory” because we know damn well that it wasn’t. It was yet another humiliation for Keir Starmer’s once-great-now-shite Labour Party.
The Starmerrhoid group chats must’ve been buzzing on Friday morning. After more than a year of abject failure this would’ve felt like a lottery win for some of them. Let them have their moment, let them celebrate ensuring the Tories can pick up the seat with very little effort the next time around. Let them celebrate the decimation of the Labour vote and the utter rejection of their leader, FBPE Keith.
You can imagine the T-shirt in years to come.
“We lost 7% of our vote and held on to Batley and Spen by the skin of our scrotes, 2021.”
Starmer himself went on to talk about a fantastic victory. Nobody beyond his loyal band of Manic Keith Preachers is buying into that nonsense. There was nothing fantastic about watching George Galloway hoover up the votes that a left-wing Labour Party would’ve pocketed with ease.
This was a humiliation, Keir Starmer, and no amount of spin will change that.
Starmer is a deeply unpopular individual. While his lack of charisma stands out like a sore thumb, he just doesn’t seem approachable. He isn’t a natural leader of people and he is incapable of achieving anything that even slightly resembles unity.
Without unity the Labour Party will continue to lose votes. Starmer was elected on a ticket of unification, yet he has spent more time attacking the left of his own Party than he has the right-wing Tory government.
We’ve spent more than a year with our hands over her eyes. The Labour Party has been forcefully dragged, kicking and screaming to the right, against the will of vast swathes of the membership.
We know the votes for the left are out there. 2017 wasn’t a lifetime ago. 2019 would’ve been a better result if it hadn’t been for the treachery, the sabotage, the lies and the smears. The votes are out there. Go and look at the history books. 2017 was an absolutely remarkable result, but I’m afraid that sort of vote share - which would be enough to win most general elections - will not be repeated under the leadership of Keir Starmer.
It’s not going to happen because Keir Starmer simply isn’t likeable. Of course, it goes much further than that - there are no policies to gather around and get behind, for example. But Starmer himself just doesn’t have any redeeming features.
His leadership throughout the global pandemic was utterly atrocious. While the bodies were piling up, sycophantic Starmer was nodding along with Boris Johnson. In years to come the historians will be asking where the opposition were during 2020, and if they look far enough up Boris Johnson’s back passage they will find what they are looking for.
While charisma alone doesn’t win elections, it certainly goes a heck of a long way. You do need to like someone, or their politics, to acknowledge they had a certain charismatic approach that won them votes.
Thatcher? Don’t worry, she’s still gone. But she played the Iron Lady thing well. Well enough to secure enough votes to win elections.
Blair? The warmongering haemorrhoid of a human is detestable and detrimental to every cause that he supports, but he knew how to win an audience, and once again, enough votes to win elections.
Johnson? The man is an utter c*nt. He is a liar, a thug, a racist that has attacked Black people, Muslims, and Jewish people, a known homophobe, a philandering lump of nastiness from head to toe, and an utterly incompetent pissant ghoul. But, again, he knows how to play to his audience with the bumbling fool act.
Johnson won the 2019 general election with just three words: “Get Brexit Done”. Starmer helped lose the 2019 general election with ten words: “No one is ruling out Remain being on the ballot”.
Hopefully you see my point about charisma. Jeremy came very close in 2017. The buzz carried on through the summer with Jeremy addressing more than 100,000 revellers at Glastonbury. Come the autumn we sat EIGHT points clear of the Conservative Party - and as you know, that’s when the smears went into overdrive, particularly from former Labour MPs who now call themselves “Lord” after receiving their reward for destabilising the biggest threat to the British establishment in my lifetime.
Honestly, you could search far and wide, and you would struggle to find three more disingenuous tosspots in British politics than those three.
Starmer’s charisma - that key ingredient in the electability recipe - should be like the fragrance of his soul.
Charisma in this world is often just looking good and speaking well. Others merely project onto you what they want to believe to be true. Most people have superficial attachments and shallow thoughts, so a glib man like Starmer should be able to persuade many.
He does not have to be a supreme salesman, and he doesn’t need to be a wizard with words. Starmer’s voice should be the voice of a leader confident in his capabilities and beliefs. Changes in tone should have a reason.
When Starmer speaks the audience are left praying for a hasty ending, because he is so damn monotonous. He seems to have the emotions of a fence panel.
We want our leaders to care. We want them to feel our anger. We want our leaders to feel injustices the same way that we do. We want our leaders to build the bridges and force the changes that are needed to end inequality, institutional racism, poverty, homelessness and getting the corporations out of OUR National Health Service. We CAN achieve this. The British government choose not to.
Essentially, charisma only wins people’s attention. Once you have their attention, you have to have something to tell them. What has Keir Starmer got to tell them?
“We support the Government”?
How about taking the Shadow Cabinet position and just tell anyone that asks about your policies that you can’t talk about your offer to the British people because your policies are a secret.
A FUCKING SECRET!
Too many focus groups and not enough grassroots, that’s your problem, Sir Keir.
Starmer had a golden opportunity to stand out from the political crowd during his first year in charge. But he stayed seated and left it to the Marcus Rashford’s and Howard Beckett’s of this world to show us what leadership and holding power to account should look like.
Not you Starmer, a footballer, a Union leadership hopeful - they offered inspiration and guidance while you swapped cosy private letters with that fucking arsehole Johnson.
Starmer still finds his version of the Labour Party a country mile behind the Tories - even with the assistance of the mainstream media. If Corbyn had the same media as Starmer we would be into our fourth year of a Labour government.
Starmer celebrated winning Batley and Spen by the width of a fag paper by announcing “Labour’s coming home” - trying his best to cling on to the passing football bandwagon.
I repeat: Starmer decimated the Labour vote by more than 7%. If this was replicated nationally it would be the end of Starmer and decades in the wilderness the Labour Party.
Don’t be fooled by a ‘win’. Starmer had to go before Batley and Spen, and this dreadful collapse in the Labour vote, against an invisible Tory candidate, off the back of the Hancock affair, means he still needs to go. The urgency hasn’t gone. He will obliterate the Labour vote, and whatever remains of the left will be obliterated with him.
If Starmer gets to conference, which is looking rather likely, the left may as well pack up and go home, because he will drive through the changes to ensure the left never get anywhere near another leadership contest.
I offer my congratulations to the winning candidate, Kim Leadbeater, it sounds like she won the contest by keeping Starmer and Labour off her leaflets, with the added bonus of being the only genuine local candidate working heavily in her favour.
But we all know this was simply a held seat, just. It wasn’t a magnificent victory, it’s the same demoralising win you accused Jeremy Corbyn of having in Peterborough.
The Labour Party of Hardie, Attlee, Benn, and Corbyn is now the Labour Party of big corporations and political donors and their lobbyists queuing up to purchase their own little bit of influence.
This isn’t a Labour Party for the many, nor a Labour Party for me, and I would be very surprised this is a Labour Party for you, particularly if you have just put aside the time to read the last 1,716 and final words.
Take care everyone.
Rachael x
Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts, if you want to chip in towards improving my ongoing campaign, and it would cause you *no hardship*, you can do so here:
Well said
ReplyDeleteI have decided after 42 years of support of every Labour leader since Callaghan, to abandon Labour, it ls become a joke under Starmer, an embarrassment, a Tory party in all but name..
ReplyDeleteI am going Green, at least they actually give a damm about people and the planet, just like Jeremy does.
It's time the Unions pulled their funding and told Labour 'Either get rid of Starmer or it's no money'... Why they haven't is a mystery.
Remember, we on the Left have a choice, let's start a new party with socialist values. Time for a change. Labour is the past, the future awaits and needs us to start anew.
What RW PLP MPs & guardian New Labour revivalists can't grasp is the fact they were carried in the nineties early noughties but lots of left-wing voter goodwill.
ReplyDeleteAfter New Labour and Blairism voters are wiser and won't simply be voting fodder for another Tory lite outfit. 2017's GE and 40% vote share, confirmed a proper, undiluted left-wing alternative without crushing compromises is perfectly electorally viable.
Starmer apparently wants to woo Tory voters, but he's never going to outbid the Tories on lowering taxes or being more business friendly, and just risks disenfranchising the base. His and Reeves' strategy of trying to recreate the nineties will prove disastrous.