Lutfur Rahman won the Tower Hamlets mayoralty on a clear left-wing platform for his Aspire party. Aspire also took 24 of 45 council seats, winning 22 of those seats at the expense of Labour.<\/q><\/aside>\nThe Tower Hamlets electorate doesn\u2019t seem to have been too impressed with Mawrey\u2019s decision to oust Rahman, either. After completing his five-year suspension from elected office, the former mayor defeated Labour candidate John Biggs by a bigger margin than in 2014.<\/p>\n
Completing the uneven picture for Labour, the Tories made advances elsewhere in England. Examples include Hartlepool, where Keir Starmer had already lost a high-profile parliamentary by-election a year ago, and in many former Labour strongholds whose Westminster seats were captured by Boris Johnson in 2019, such as North Staffordshire\u2019s Newcastle-under-Lyme.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n An Open Goal<\/h2>\n \n Labour should be doing much better than this. Like the rest of Europe and indeed the world, Britain is in the grips of a cost-of-living crisis. Inflation is expected to reach double digits by the end of the year, and economists are forecasting that a recession is imminent.<\/p>\n
To make matters worse, the Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak has insisted that nothing can be done to relieve these economic pressures. His woefully inadequate response to spiraling energy prices is a small tax rebate and a compulsory loan to cover a portion of rising fuel costs, to be paid back by those who receive it at quarterly intervals.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the personal standing of Boris Johnson has collapsed after revelations that he hosted and took part in as many as seventeen parties in Downing Street while the country was under pandemic lockdown restrictions. The image of Johnson partying while the rest of the country had to abide by stringent rules on social gatherings has destroyed confidence in the prime minister. In recent months, his premiership has been almost entirely focused on day-to-day survival.<\/p>\n
This conjuncture shaped Labour\u2019s strategy going into the elections. Starmer focused on the \u201cPartyGate\u201d scandal and made sure it was the top issue in his weekly parliamentary questions to the prime minister.<\/p>\n
In relation to the cost of living crisis, Starmer and his shadow chancellor have been pushing the idea of a windfall tax on the oil companies to fund a \u00a3600 energy bill relief payment. But there was one big problem with making this a central plank of Labour\u2019s local<\/i> election campaign: no matter how many seats Labour won, it would never be in a position to deliver on the pledge. The idea of a windfall tax may have put the Tories on the spot over their inaction, but as a positive promise it was a gimmick that fooled nobody.<\/p>\nThere is simply no clamor for the anaemic, authoritarian, and socially conservative brand of Labour politics by which Starmer has defined himself.<\/q><\/aside>\nThis was all that Starmer had to offer. In areas where local Labour leaderships had a decent, relevant manifesto to put forward \u2014 such as Preston, with its ongoing community wealth-building project, or parts of London where Labour politicians put the stress on their plans to tackle housing shortages \u2014 the electorate by and large rewarded them.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, when a narrative about national politics dominated Labour\u2019s campaigning message, Labour wasn\u2019t rewarded with substantial votes. Indeed, the fact that the other opposition parties did better than Labour in England shows that Starmer has been unable to associate aversion to the Tories in government with support for his own leadership.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n Exit Stage Right?<\/h2>\n \n This was another subpar electoral performance, on top of Starmer\u2019s existing record of local council failures and by-election embarrassments. His inability to generate any kind of electoral enthusiasm is now well documented. There is simply no clamor for the anaemic, authoritarian, and socially conservative brand of Labour politics by which Starmer has defined himself.<\/p>\n
Even so, Thursday\u2019s election might have been enough to rescue Starmer from another round of speculation about the future of his leadership. However, new developments have intervened to generate more trouble for the Labour leader. Having made so much hay from the revelations about Boris Johnson\u2019s partying, Starmer is now under intense scrutiny for his own alleged breaches of the lockdown rules.<\/p>\n
While campaigning in a previous set of local elections in April 2021, Starmer attended a dinner in Durham that seems to have been in contravention of the limits on social gatherings. Tory-supporting newspapers have pressed the Durham police force to reopen an investigation. Starmer has now promised to resign<\/a> if he is found to have broken the rules, as has his deputy leader, Angela Rayner. These elections could well prove to be the last ones fought under Starmer\u2019s leadership \u2014 and given how poor the results were, that would be no bad thing.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barnet is one of the London councils that the Labour Party won control of in last week\u2019s English local elections. Paying an early morning visit to the district after the results were in, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, declared this was a \u201cturning point for Labour.\u201d He went on to boast his party was winning [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8583,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646591"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8583"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":646592,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646591\/revisions\/646592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}