No points to anybody who responds to the headline with “Batley and Spen”.

It would be fair to say that Keir Starmer did not expect to win the Chesham and Amersham by-election.

But the scale of his loss there – and I think it should be understood that it was a failure that Starmer owns – should make it clear to him that he has taken Labour in the wrong direction.

Of course Labour’s vote in Chesham and Amersham collapsed because of tactical voting. However, 1.6% is the lowest it has EVER polled in a by-election. What is more this is *exactly* the sort of seat Starmer is meant to appeal to.

The excuses need to stop.

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) June 18, 2021

His party’s 622 votes – just 1.6 per cent of turnout and one-sixteenth of the number Jeremy Corbyn managed to raise in 2017 – is fewer than the number of people in that constituency’s Labour Party.

Either party members abstained or they voted for someone else, which is an offence for which they could be expelled.

(Or there could be far fewer members remaining in that constituency than Starmer is willing to admit, after the – alleged – mass exodus of members following his election as leader. If so, even if remaining members did vote for somebody else, he’ll be in a quandary over whether to carry out disciplinary procedures.)

Encouragingly, it seems almost nobody aged less than 70 voted for the Conservatives:

Friends in Amersham and Chesham tell me that canvassing returns suggest that almost no one under the age of 70 voted Tory. The demise of the Right will proceed, one funeral at a time.

— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) June 18, 2021

I’m not sure Richard Murphy is right about that, as the number of pensioners in the UK will remain very high, some way into the future (even after the ravages of Covid-19), and the Tories have a knack of duping the gullible into supporting them (or perhaps that should be bribing the gullible). Still, it suggests that the Tories’ time is running out.

That said, the simple fact is that people aged under 70 simply didn’t go for Labour, despite Starmer’s attempts to woo them by changing Labour’s direction sharply to the political right. They voted Liberal Democrat.

I draw two conclusions from that:

Firstly, Starmer’s claim that Boris Johnson’s party has enjoyed a “vaccine bounce” – resurgent popularity because of the perceived success of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout – is bunkum. Or at least, any such bounce has now petered out.

With Tories losing Chesham and Amersham tonight Labour have no excuse regarding Batley and Spen on July 1st. The claim there is a ‘vaccine bounce’ for Tories won’t wash now. The truth is Labour haven’t provided an opposition.

2 weeks to make or break @Keir_Starmer leadership.

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) June 18, 2021

Secondly, that people prefer to put their trust in political organisations that have some consistency about them, rather than wandering around all over the political spectrum searching for votes – or very obviously trying to fool people into voting for them – like Labour under Starmer (and Miliband, Brown and Blair before him).

Some commentators are now suggesting that Labour should at least discuss the idea of a “progressive alliance” with other opposition parties like the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, to field just one candidate against the Tories in Tory strongholds, thereby making it easier to force them out. But there are problems with that…

Always been LP policy to contest every seat in local & national elections.
To topple the Tories maybe it's time to review that policy
If I lived in a stauch Tory area where Labour's chances were nil – maybe I would vote tactically, but never LD given their role in the Coalition.

— Clare Hepworth OBE (@Hepworthclare) June 18, 2021

I'm delighted the Tories got a trouncing.
But somehow I can neither forget nor forgive Lib Dem complicity in the carnage of Tory*austerity*
A harsh,discriminatory, unremitting fiscal & economic strategy which prepared the fertile feeding ground for the pandemic to hit harder.

— Clare Hepworth OBE (@Hepworthclare) June 18, 2021

The trouble with #ProgressiveAlliance idea is that many Labour voters don’t think the Lib Dems are progressive, many Lib Dem voters don’t think Labour are progressive, and many Green voters don’t think either Labour or the Lib Dems are progressive.

— Paul Bernal (@PaulbernalUK) June 18, 2021

Yes indeed; the Liberal Democrats won because they are the most similar to the Conservatives in Chesham and Amersham, not because they are a radical alternative.

So a “progressive alliance” isn’t going to happen. And dreams of getting the Tories out by using proportional representation will continue to be dreams for the foreseeable future because the Tories are in power and they aren’t going to bring it in because they know it would harm them.

What’s left? Tactical voting?

The best way for Labour to beat the Tories is to encourage tactical voting everywhere. That’s been the case for a long, long time.

— Paul Bernal (@PaulbernalUK) June 18, 2021

But that will just result in another hung Parliament that the Tories will probably dominate – with Liberal Democrats joining them for the sake of power if they get enough seats. We’ve already had that from 2010 to 2015.

And all of this theorising neglects one simple fact:

In order to beat the Tories, whichever party you support will need to deserve to win.

And Labour, under Keir Starmer, doesn’t.

How can left-wing voters support a party that deserts them in the way Starmer has? How can they support a party whose Parliamentary representatives no longer come from the working class but represent exactly the kind of middle-class privilege that Labour was originally created to oppose?

How can right-wing voters support a party they know only courts them in order to gain power for its own purposes? They know the Tories are untrustworthy – but only in their promises to people earning less than £100,000 a year; as long as Tory priorities are aligned with their own, they’ll carry on with Johnson’s bandits, even if it means imposing fascist-style dictatorship on the rest of us.

Starmer has been criticised because he hasn’t brought forward a single policy to replace the 10 pledges he scrapped as soon as they had won him the Labour leadership under false pretences. There is a reason for this failure: Starmer is trying to find a magic promise that will fool a majority of voters, just long enough to get himself into Downing Street.

His problem is that we all know that this is what he’s doing. He is probably the most classic example of Tony Benn’s “weathercock” ever to come forward – a career politician who doesn’t have any principles of his own but goes any way the wind blows, chasing votes according to what his focus groups tell him is popular.

And Starmer’s focus groups are disastrously out-of-touch. This means Starmer is continuously trying to tell us what we want, and getting it wrong.

So he drapes himself in the Union Flag because he has seen the Tories do it and he thinks it appeals to our patriotism – but under Boris Johnson’s fascism, we have no reason to feel patriotic at all.

So he blames Jeremy Corbyn for his failures and tries to remind us that Corbyn was accused of letting anti-Semitism into the Labour Party – when we all know that the accusations were (mostly) false (there are always a few racists in any large organisation but the leader cannot be blamed for them). Labour has just been in court defending itself against a group of former members who have brought a hugely damaging case against the party.

In all this squirming, he presents himself as entirely untrustworthy.

So we don’t trust him, and that means we don’t trust Labour:

Batley & Spen, constituency voting intention:

CON: 47% (+11)
LAB: 41% (-2)
WPGB: 6% (+6)
LDEM: 3% (-2)

No Local Ind Grp (-12) and Brex (-3) as prev.

via @Survation, 09 – 17 Jun
Chgs. w/ GE2019

— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) June 18, 2021

It won’t change until Starmer is gone. I don’t mean that he should step down as leader of the Labour Party; I mean he should leave the party altogether, along with all the other cuckoos who got in under Kinnock, Blair, Brown and Miliband. You know who they are. Including party staff members who support them rather than traditional (pre-Kinnock) Labour values.

One more note: I could happily tap out a list of policies that Labour should adopt in order to win public support – it isn’t hard to do.

But there is no point while Starmer and his cronies are in charge. They would see such policies as a marketing strategy to win votes – and if it worked, they would then ditch those policies in favour of the right-wing agenda they’ve had all along.

They have to go.

The problem is, they won’t. They know they are unacceptable; unelectable. But they absolutely won’t allow anybody to lead Labour who could possibly break the deadlock.

And in the meantime, Boris Johnson gets worse and worse. Enabled by Starmer.