This year’s bank holiday Monday kicks off a week in which, for the first time in many of our lives, we may actually find ourselves represented in politics. I dreamed a dream…
In Wales, more than a century of Labour dominance will end, with Plaid Cymru and Reform battling it out to be the largest party in the Senedd. In Scotland, the SNP will remain dominant in Holyrood, with some polls suggesting they could win an outright majority, putting independence back on the political agenda. But it’s in Thursday’s local elections across England that a seismic shift will take place: the beginning of a definitive end to the two-party system in the country.
I don’t need to bore you with the ‘how we got here’. Suffice to say, enormous swathes of voters have come – finally! – to see that neither Labour nor the Tories have them at heart. It’s the collapse of these two parties, caused by their dismal inability to govern in the interests of the people, that is the leitmotif of these elections – and probably of many more to come.
Yet even on the edge of extinction, Labour appears to have little to offer. Which is why the party will do its best in the coming days to turn these local elections into local deflections.
Don’t fall for it.
A fascinating graphic in Prospect magazine shows with startling clarity that a new era of British politics is upon us. And not before time. With more than 5,000 council seats up for grabs, you may be surprised to learn that, according to former YouGov president Peter Kellner, losing half of the roughly 2,600 seats it’s defending would be a relief for the Labour party given its collapsing support. Meanwhile, for Reform to gain that many (it’s defending only two seats up for election this week) would be a disappointing result in light of its polling.
To put that in starker terms: a 50% loss of seats will be somewhat positive for Labour, the party of power; a 65,000% gain for Reform somewhat underwhelming. That’s unprecedented.
The Labour response to that heavy loss of patch? La-de-da. Its effort to protect many great councillors from Wandsworth to Wakefield? Look over there!
And way over there is exactly where the party’s critical energy has been laser-focused this weekend. The surgent Green party, expected to land significant blows on the ruling party, particularly in London, has come under strange attack.
We all know what happened in Golders Green last week. Two Jewish men were brutally stabbed in an act of senseless violence that’s spread waves of fear throughout the Jewish community. We don’t have to speculate on the motives of the suspect – who is also alleged to have attacked a Muslim man earlier that day – to recognise that our fellow Brits are in pain. But instead of asking how our Jewish communities could have been left so unprotected, the Labour party – and not just the Labour party – has pointed a finger at the left.
One second, if you’ll forgive me. Which party controls the government and its enormous resources? That would be Labour, I believe. Which party receives confidential security briefings from the secret services? That would also be Labour. And which party has budgetary and operational powers over security and policing? Wait, don’t tell me: it’s Labour!
And yet somehow, Green party leader Zack Polanski, who is not even an MP, is to blame. “Polanski’s Greens are a ‘Party of Poison’” screeched the Daily Mail on Saturday, urging Polanski to purge the party of “antisemites”. When Polanski reposted a tweet questioning the level of aggression used by arresting police officers in Golders Green, the commissioner of the Met Police publicly accused him of “contributing to rising tensions”. Without irony, prime minister Keir Starmer, who elevated paedophile-bestie Peter Mandelson to one of the country’s greatest diplomatic roles, said Polanski was “not fit to lead any political party”. For a repost.
You can’t spell ‘unserious’ without a ‘sir’, sir Keir.
The fact is, despite having to answer endless questions about anti-genocide marches on Sunday’s political shows (newsflash: he doesn’t organise them), Polanski has no power to make Britain’s Jewish communities materially safer. That is something only the Labour government can do. And the evidence suggests it has failed.
In the wake of the violence in Golders Green, the government raised Britain’s terrorism threat level from substantial to severe. “In light of yesterday’s attack and a spate of vile antisemitic arson attacks in London,” the Home Office explained, “The government is investing an additional £25m funding to protect Jewish communities against horrific antisemitic attacks.” (An earlier tranche of security money was given in October last year – £10m – but, again, only after a deadly antisemitic attack at Heaton Park synagogue, in which two of its members were killed.)
Why did it take a rampage in a Jewish community for the government to act with cash, rather than words? By its own admission, antisemitic attacks have been increasing. Yet it sat on its hands, only taking action when people were badly hurt. No wonder Starmer was booed when he visited the area last week. And why, as far as I know, have no mainstream media outlets asked Labour – the actual party of government – why they took such a reactive approach to Jewish safety?
It is incredibly lazy – and incredibly dangerous – to blame, without any serious evidence, marches against genocide for violence, as Labour has now repeatedly done. It is a betrayal of hard-fought British principles of free speech and association for a government to attack those rights in order to shield its own failures to protect minority groups in this country. And it is frankly obscene to hold a Jewish leader of a party that was until recently pretty fringe responsible for any of that.
But that’s this Labour government, folks. Great at deflections, about to be crushed at elections.
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