Theresa May had a pretty bad start to the year with resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the European Union. It was unfortunate for her that his email to all staff was leaked to the media. His warning about ‘muddled thinking’ should be a theme that the Labour leader – were he to comment on such matters – should pick up on and repeat over and over. May has now made Tim Barrow pretty much unsackable as he takes up his new post in Brussels. The prime minister is due to make a big speech on Brexit in the coming weeks. The Guardian’s cartoonist Ben Jennings sums up her known position extremely well.
Women finally winning
Last night Clare Goghill was elected leader of Labour group and, in turn, the London borough of Waltham Forest. With too few women leaders in local government, this is a very welcome development. She takes over from Chris Robbins – who has given exceptional service to the party and his community – in May this year.
In addition, today the party confirmed two metro mayor candidates. Sue Jeffrey will be Labour’s candidate in Tees Valley and Lesley Mansell in the West of England. Both should elected based on recent local and police commissioner results. Best of luck to all three.
Mistaken predictions
In the last poll of 2016 Labour was on a staggering 24 per cent of the vote but trailed the Tories with both ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ voters – and in every age group, social class and every region. Of the less than quarter of the voting public that say they would vote Labour, only 53 per cent thought our leader Jeremy Corbyn was the best candidate for prime minster. By contrast May, at a relative high in the polls for her party, some 39 per cent, was preferred prime minister with 96 per cent of current Tory voters.
But shadow attorney general Shami Chakrabarti had a great line with the Oxford Union last night on her running theme: nothing to see here. Politics Home reports her saying, ‘people that base their values on polls are mistaken, and people that base their predictions on polls it would seem are also mistaken.’ She cites Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as proof the pesky polls cannot be trusted. As Owen Jones is now pointing out ‘when polls are wrong, when does it benefit the left?’. I would not want to butt in but no poll has been 17 points out either!
Chakrabarti will wake up to pleasant news that in Labour’s best poll performance of 2017 the party nationally now gets 26 per cent of the vote. A whole two point increase. The leader’s office will be worried that Corbyn’s support for best prime minister among this group has dipped to less than half – only 49 per cent of Labour voters think our current leader is the best choice for No 10.
Livingstone cannot ‘linger’
But we should not have a downer on everything the shadow attorney general says. Last night she said the issue of Ken Livingstone’s membership – remember he was suspended last April for saying Hitler ‘was a Zionist … before he went mad’ – should not be allowed to ‘linger’. I agree with Chakrabarti that there is ‘a case to answer’. It is surely time Livingstone was kicked out once and for all.
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Richard Angell is director of Progress. He tweets at @RichardAngell
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Livingstone is a hero. 16 yrs in charge of London and a socialist. Very Successful. Hope he’s back soon.
For a moment Richard I thought you were going to train your guns on the Tories and their disarray. However by para 3 you were back to your normal ‘moderate’ vituperation about Corbyn.
I wonder why Labour voters have doubts about him. Can’t be anything to do with moderate, centre, progressives mounting attack after attack on him and providing the Tories and their media allies with the post truths to use against him – and us.
It is not moderate, centre, progressive to same the same as the Tories but to do so with a softer voice and a smile.
Well, that was fun. A car crash interview with a Prime Minister who doesn’t have a clue. She is coming up to six months in office, but she has yet to do anything at all.
Her unexpected dalliance with grammar schools lasted about a week before the whole idea was sent back to two newspaper columns, one of which has long advocated a vote for UKIP, while the other has long advocated outright abstention.
Theresa May was sent to a private school in order to get her though the 11-plus, and that did the trick. But early in her time at her girls’ grammar school, that institution merged into the much larger, mixed comprehensive that then sent her to Oxford. Clearly assuming that she made it to the City of Lost Causes all by herself, she feels no gratitude to her comprehensive school, only resentment at having had to share a building with the oiks after all. Even though the consequent scheme never came to anything, it provided an invaluable insight into her character.
She has, however, unintentionally created the space for those who have been working for years on workers’ representation, pay restraint, controls on foreign takeovers, the shape of a post-Brexit Britain, and a very great deal more besides.
Since Jeremy Corbyn became Leader of the Labour Party, the Conservatives have lost six out of eight parliamentary by-elections. They have lost over 50 council seats. They have lost every Mayoral Election, including the one in London, where they had held the Mayoralty for the previous eight years. They have been forced into 22 U-turns, with more in one a year than there were in the whole of the last Parliament.
As for Labour, the tripling of its membership under Corbyn has paid off all its debts. It has increased its national share of the vote at the local elections by four per cent. It has won five parliamentary by-elections, three of them with increased majorities of as much as eight per cent. It had been predicted to lose them all to UKIP, a prediction that is being made again about Copeland, Leigh, and Liverpool Walton. Some people never learn.
We shall soon see whether one of those people is Paul Nuttall, with impending by-elections in no fewer than three Labour seats in his own North West. When UKIP does not win any of them, when Labour certainly wins two and probably wins all three of them, and when Gerard Coyne does not win the election for General Secretary of Unite, then it will be very high time to stop pretending that Labour was dying in the North. Or that its working-class supporters were exercised much at all by immigration, including in the casting of their decisive votes for Leave at the EU referendum.
Instead, it will be very high time to concentrate on the issues emphasised by Corbyn and by Len McCluskey. For example, the fact that England’s NHS is now in such a state of humanitarian crisis that the Red Cross has been moved to intervene. On that basis, consider that Bernie Sanders was able to come within one year from 60 points behind the lavishly funded Hillary Clinton, and that in Britain there is no Democratic National Committee to rig these things.
Although there may be other forces at work. If Russia had done what we learned today that Israel had done, then all diplomatic ties would have been cut, and expulsions would have been complete and immediate. Even Saudi Arabia would have struggled to have got away with this, and that is saying quite something.
The plot to embroil Sir Alan Duncan in a scandal makes one wonder how spontaneous was the attempt on the life of George Galloway, who was then a sitting MP, in 2014. Corbyn’s internal Labour enemies have a million pound slush fund at the embassy of a foreign power. Give that a moment to sink in. The SNP has made a useful statement on all of this, and ought now to move the expulsion of Robert Halfon and Joan Ryan from the House of Commons.