Inexpert Analysis

So, we're into the post-mortems now, all the pundits lining up to tell us what went wrong and what should be done next to avoid a repeat performance, all delivered with a tone of absolute confidence and authority.  I speak, of course, of last week's local government elections. Although I could describe the weekend's football programme in the same terms.  Sport and politics: both cursed by a coterie of supposed experts applying the benefit of hindsight to their analyses.  It's amazing how clearly they can see what everyone did wrong, how their strategies were flawed and approaches misguided after the event.  Pity they didn't say anything in advance.  But getting back to those local election results - they are all busy picking over Labour's disappointing showing and trying to extrapolate the future collapse of the party on their basis.  The problems with their analyses are manifold.  Most fundamentally, they are trying to pretend that the conditions these elections took place in are 'normal'.  They weren't.  Thanks to the pandemic, we are still living in extraordinary times.  Despite the Tory government's culpability with regard to the mismanagement of the pandemic overall, the fact is that they have, in the run up to this contest, presided over a highly successful roll-out of vaccines, which are helping us edge closer to some form of normality.  Consequently, it wasn't unreasonable to expect them to benefit from the 'feel good' factor with a bounce at the polls.  Moreover, local elections aren't necessarily fought on the same issues as national elections: a Tory council, for instance, won't necessarily be held responsible for the misdemeanors of a Tory government.  All matter of local factors will play into these contests.

As for extrapolating national trends from local elections, the results of one will rarely reflect the results of the other.  If it were the case then, back in the nineties the Liberal Democrats would have been romping home to form, at the very least, a coalition government, such was their success at local level.  But it never happened.  Quite apart from the fact that, as already mentioned, local elections are usually fought primarily on local agendas, they also use a different electoral system, with voters able to rank candidates i order of preference, allowing smaller parties and local independent candidates a route to election.  By contrast, the first-past-the-post system still used for parliamentary elections effectively shuts out smaller parties, regardless of their strength at local levels.  So, really, there is no clear way to predict national results based on these local results.  Besides, by the time of the next general election, the issues will have changed, events will have come out of left field to influence voters, the global economy could have crashed or boomed.  Right now, it is impossible to accurately predict this future political landscape.  Not that you would know that from the confident pronouncements being made by the political 'experts' in the media right now.  The truth s that they have no more idea than the rest of us.  It is rather like all the speculation about who the next Tottenham manager will be - we have all the 'in the know' sports writers confidently bandying around names and drawing up shortlists, but the truth is that they know no more than I do.  The only person with any idea is Spurs chairman Daniel Levy - and he isn't sharing.

Not that any of this means that Labour doesn't have a lot of work to do - with the pandemic in the UK apparently drawing to a close, it has to end all its pussyfooting around the issue, trying to be bilateral and support, most of the time, government measures.  Now is the time to go back on the offensive against this bunch of corrupt incompetents.  It is also the time to start coming up with some bold and radical policy proposals that reconnect with traditional voters and clearly differentiate them from the Tories.  I recall, back in the nineties, on the back of three successive election defeats, people earnestly telling me how there would never be another Labour majority government, how they were a spent force electorally.  Then, in 1997, they won a landslide victory.  It really is dangerous to extrapolate on the basis of current, temporary, conditions.  Things can and do change very quickly.  (Oh, as for those fucking Corbynites smugly rejoicing in Starmer's relative failure at his first electoral test, let's just remember that he is still doing better than your guy, who couldn't win anything and took the party to record lows n terms of poll share.  As for the sudden surge in support for the idea of Andy Burnham as leader - well, you had a chance to do this, but plumped for Corbyn instead, resulting in the current situation).