THE ice Keir Starmer is skating on is only getting thinner. Yes, Labour retains a commanding, if narrowing, lead over the Tories in opinion polls.
But seldom can there have been an opposition leader who generates less enthusiasm, be it among the public or his own party members. The only buzz around him is the sound of voters gently snoring.
Now he casually risks alienating key Labour voting blocs. Many in the Labour coalition are rightly deeply concerned about climate change.
Yet Labour’s leader has made it clear that the party’s Green New Deal programme will be postponed, while sending out negative messages on the expansion of Ulez in London.
This equivocation, alongside other retreats from Corbyn-era radicalism, is surely helping propel the high polling figures for the Green Party, figures attained at Labour’s expense.
At the same time, Starmer is backing realignment with the European Union under a Labour government.
Such a flirtation with Brussels risks reawakening fears that he really intends to reverse Brexit when the opportunity presents. Such fears are scarcely surprising when one considers the Labour leader’s prominent role as an uber-remainer in 2018 and 2019, using every device to obstruct the British people’s vote to leave the EU.
He now disclaims any intention of trying to rejoin the EU, or even the single market. But voters can smell a rat, and Starmer’s now-established reputation for dishonesty and policy U-turns — the one thing fixed in most voters’ minds about him — does not assist.
Reports from constituencies in the north of England — those Labour precariously held in 2019 and those which it must reclaim if it is to win the next election — indicate mounting concerns about the Brexit issue.
Many voters still hope that Britain will eventually start to make constructive use of the added possibilities for economic and social intervention created by leaving the EU. They are certainly not ready to contemplate a reversal of the referendum vote.
Nor are those Labour supporters who backed Remain mostly clamouring for it. And there is none of the pressure from the Liberal Democrats on the issue that there was in 2019.
Ed Davey did not mention reversing Brexit at his party conference this week. So there is really no political imperative for Starmer to blunder into the issue.
On both issues — diluting green commitments and trimming on Brexit — Starmer seem determined to give voters reasons not to vote Labour at the next election.
These misjudgements loom large because of Labour’s determination to commit to nothing, to offer nothing and to say nothing beyond “we are not the Tory Party.”
After 13 years of disastrous Conservative rule, a ruined and exhausted country may find that enough. But a tidal wave of apathy is an oxymoron. A determination not to vote Conservative is not the same as a commitment to vote Labour. The ice could yet crack.
Which Ukrainians are remembered?
THE row over the scandalous welcome given in the Canadian parliament to an ancient Canadian-Ukrainian who fought alongside the Nazis in World War II, which has led to the resignation of the parliamentary speaker, obscures an important point.
The vast majority of Ukrainians who took up arms in that conflict did so against the Nazis. Around seven million Ukrainians served in the Red Army alongside soldiers from the rest of the multinational socialist Soviet Union.
Yes, it is those Ukrainian nationalists who fought for fascism who are now exalted in contemporary Ukraine and its Nato backers. But the wretched Yaroslav Hunka does not represent Ukraine’s part in the world war. The red flag flying over the Reichstag does.
