I think this is true.
I’ve been a big supporter of Starmer doing things I don’t personally like in order to smash the Tories, but the local elections showed that the downsides of his strategy are starting to appear. He needs to shore up that left leaning vote, now, and he should look to Sadiq Khan and the other successful metro mayors to see how it’s done. Luckily, and partly thanks to Starmer’s leadership, he has plenty of examples to pick from!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, but I never doubted that Sadiq Khan would win re-election as the city’s mayor – even when rumours of a surprise upset were being breathlessly repeated.
But this has meant that the party is all too often fearful in the face of large opinion poll leads, with an electoral strategy defined by the lessons of painful defeats.
He saw transport as critical, something that Andy Burnham has picked up with Manchester’s Bee Network and Steve Rotheram with Merseyrail, which is setting a template for Labour’s renationalisation of rail.
While this was understandable following the rout of the 2019 election and the collapse of parts of the “red wall” into Tory hands, the fact is that the real realignment in British politics is on the centre left.
His triumph over that lobby is instructive and will be critical in Labour’s first term in government, should it win – the need to replace fuel duty with road charging will become urgent because of revenue being lost by the transition to electric vehicles.
The coming general election will show the extent to which the pandemic and the change to working from home – and rising house prices – has exported a Labour-leaning London electorate to the greater south-east of England.
The original article contains 840 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
