KEIR STARMER’S blunder in embracing the poisonous Natalie Elphicke has exposed him to a wider range of criticism than even he is accustomed to.
He took a real drubbing from Canterbury Labour MP Rosie Duffield who, in her own way, is turning out to be a more adroit politician than many anticipated.
Her patch adjoins Elphick’s Dover and Deal constituency and she skilfully channelled the angry concerns that Labour folk feel about the maladroit way in which Starmer has positioned Labour as more reactionary even than the Tories on the migration issues that torture politics in this corner of England.
She is entitled to be grumpy about Starmer. When, at the height of the gender wars, she stuck to her position on identity politics and women’s rights, Starmer left her undefended. Now that he has, predictably, backed off his earlier position she awaits any recognition of consistency in this most fractious of issues dividing progressive opinion.
Recollect that she won the Canterbury nomination and then the seat in the height of the Labour Party’s confusion over Brexit and in the midst of delusion about the class nature of the neoliberal EU.
In fact, her narrow majority was down to her campaign cannibalising the Green and Lib Dem vote in sufficient quantities to offset the large number of working-class voters in this largely Brexit-voting community who found Starmer’s betrayal of Jeremy Corbyn’s commitment to respect the referendum vote too much to stomach.
Those with a slightly longer, or more local, take on the campaign, will remember that the initial heavy lifting in demolishing the supposedly solid Tory vote in Canterbury was done by the leading Palestine solidarity activist and union leader Hugh Lanning alongside a local Labour Party that then was both remarkably united and very well organised.
As the voting figures last week, and the polling results since, show, where Boris Johnson picked up Labour votes on the basis of a promise to get Brexit done Rishi Sunak is losing them.
Like a lot of Labour hopefuls, Duffield may well find herself re-elected by a still surly Labour electorate that sees removing the Tories as its most urgent priority.
In one sense, all politics is local, but in this corner of Kent, we see in clear outline the several questions which bedevil Labour nationally. Migration, membership of the EU and sex and gender are issues which divide party and electorate in ways which do not fall neatly into the categories of left and right, run across the boundaries of different parties and leave the working-class majority divided in the face of a ruling class that is exceptionally skilled in fomenting divisions.
Which brings us to the vexed question of how solid and cohesive the Labour vote is and what divides it.
The answer to the first question is that the Labour vote, although larger than the Tories, is not very cohesive. When we reflect back to the sharp rise in the Labour vote that was a response to the 2017 manifesto — in circumstances where Corbyn’s stunning victory in the Labour leadership election had temporarily silenced the right wing — we can see that where hope and trust is fused with a progressive radical manifesto that Labour’s vote blossoms.
This time, a critical tranche of Labour voters went Green, abstained or voted for dissident councillors standing as anti-genocide independents.
Finding a way back to a Labour government that offers a radical break with austerity and war is a task that, if unsuccessful, will require a very big rethink.
