After all, this was what the BBC called a “mixed picture” – that is, a disappointing night for Labor. The new incarnation of the party after Corbyn made some major gains in London: Wandsworth, Westminster and Barnett, which were particularly important for their symbolic historical significance. But in the rest of the country, and especially in the north, it wasn’t a conservative bloodbath.
In fact, in Hull, once an impregnable postwar Labor territory, the Liberal Democrats took the council. In fact, the Liberal Democrats have won quite widely, as they do in local and by-elections, from Labor’s failure to break through.
All this seems perverted by the most popular theory of how it will go. The Red Wall regions are relaxed, it was said. Where is their promised “alignment”? Instead of new jobs and more opportunities, all I got were higher energy bills. The cost of living crisis should hit them much worse than all those high-income Londoners who work happily from home with their fat wages. Yet they did not choose to take revenge on the ruling Conservatives. Why not?
My own completely unscientific, anecdotal research suggests that up there in the unsentimental, rigid parts of the electoral map, the new look of Sir Keira Starmer Labor simply does not. The northerners I know best thought Corbyn was a dangerous idiot, but Starmer thought it an insult: the very embodiment of Islington’s elitism, which knows nothing about the real lives of working-class people who can’t make a living. sitting in front of a computer in an office overlooking the garden.
This is – as has always been the case in British politics – still for the class, but in a completely new wording that is not yet properly understood. In the end, it is not the prime minister’s position that is at stake, but that of the opposition leader.
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