Falls and losses define night for Starmer’s drab party as lack of substance and opposition bite, with Labour gains limited to retaking from independents
Catastrophic falls for Labour in two West Midlands seats defined an evening of by-elections for Keir Starmer’s party as the lack of leadership, policies and opposition came home to roost.
In both Bar Pool and Knutton, Labour lost seats to the rampantly incompetent and frankly murderous Tories with falls of more than 25 points – 25.8 in Knutton and 26.7 in Bar Pool – that they had previously held with a wide margin
But results elsewhere were peppered with grim news for Labour. Even where the party held onto seats – or failed to gain seats it didn’t hold – it was often with a dramatic loss of support:
- 10.7 points in Oxton on the Wirral, while the LibDem incumbents gained 8.4
- 9.8 points in Bedford, holding off a Tory gain by only a single vote in a seat where Labour had enjoyed fully half of votes last time round
- 4 points in Spedhurst, where the Tunbridge Wells Alliance won 49.8% to unseat the Tories
- 12.8 points in Lee Chapel North (Basildon), holding off the Tories by only five points
The small bright spots for Starmer were:
- a win in Bryn (Wigan) by just 17 votes – but with two independent candidates splitting a 55.7 vote share to Labour’s 31.2%
- a gain in Maryport South where the previous independent candidate was removed by the Allerdale Independent Group for a string of offences including homophobia
- a 6.7-point gain in Horringer (W Suffolk) but still losing to the Tories by ten points
- a hold with a vote gain in Carnforth and Millhead that almost exactly matched the previous vote share of an independent candidate who did not stand this time
For a party facing a mid-term government whose policies have led to the deaths of approaching two hundred thousand citizens and put our children in the firing line of the pandemic – and which is facing ongoing supply crises and rocketing energy prices – last night’s results were a disastrous showing.
Starmer and his drab front bench offer no hope or opposition and are not even trying to win arguments on the major issues facing the country. Instead, they have colluded with the Tory mishandling of the pandemic and abandoned all of the policies that much of the country supports and that Keir Starmer promised to keep in order to get elected as party leader.
Those realities are now biting. If people want Tories, they’ll vote for the full-fat version not the Tory-lite – and if they want genuine change for the better, Starmer offers nothing.
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