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| Uxbridge by-election |
"I can’t see how Labour can be content with the results of the 3 by-elections.
They won in that rural seat in Yorkshire but can expect to lose it at the general election when Tory abstainers return to the fold. They should have won Uxbridge in west London but didn’t. They are pleading that there was a local issue there that sunk them (extension to the area of a charge for using old cars and vans) but, besides being a bread and butter issue, this concerns all the outer London boroughs.
It is clear too that, in seeking to please the international speculators who lend governments money, they are alienating the more radical-minded of their voters sone of whom are deserting to the Greens. In fact, they lost by much less votes in Uxbridge than the Greens got. Starmer may be regretting his outburst about hating tree-huggers.
They weren’t trying in the West Country but what happened to their vote there is also relevant. An “independent socialist” picked up 635 votes compared to their candidate’s 1009. They lost winning the London by-election by less than 635. In other words, Left-of-Labour candidates in other constituencies in a general election could prevent them winning some marginal seats and might even result in a hung Parliament with the LibDems and the Scots Nats holding the balance of power.
Serve them right, some might be inclined to think. That’ll teach them to behave like a government in waiting whereas they might just be a minority government in waiting. On the other hand, that would provide them with the same alibi they used to try to get out of the failure of the 1924 and 1929 Labour governments that “we were in office, not in power”.
Actually, of course, all governments are just in office as no government has the power to overcome the economics laws of capitalism and make the system serve the interest of the majority."
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