Labour party

On Thurday's Question Time, there was one politician notably absent from the panel. For a second time, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, had to cancel his appearance -- this time putting it down to train delays. And whose fault is this? Well, the Conservatives obviously -- as if Labour were in power the trains would be nationalised: https://twitter.com/johnmcdonnellMP/status/839912841503199232 However, there's a problem. First, those flights sold out after Mr McDonnell had been booked on a flight - but he arrived at the airport too late and the gate was closed. So you can't really blame privately-owned railways for that. More importantly the delays in question were caused by a train caught up in overhead lines, and being left there for far too long.

Jeremy Corbyn now has more experience of responding to Budgets than the Chancellor of the Exchequer who he stood opposite today. So did the Labour leader offer a good response to Philip Hammond’s statement today? The answer will depend on how you evaluate Budget responses. If you’re expecting the Leader of the Opposition to look like a Prime Minister in waiting, then you’re expecting too much. If you’re measuring him against his own record, which remains largely that of an obscure and unimpressive backbencher who was never promoted for very good reasons, then this was a passable Budget response. It’s been a few years since we had a decent Budget response, to be fair.

If you want to judge the extent of the crisis that is paralysing the left, look at this morning’s Guardian. On the one hand you have an article from Abi Wilkinson, who tellingly doesn’t even mention the Labour leader’s name. Convincingly to my mind, Wilkinson argues that the May government ought to be in all kinds of trouble. May herself is an evasive and awkward politician. She is presiding over an NHS that has had more austerity than it can stand. The British Red Cross may have been guilty of hyperbole when it said the UK faced a 'humanitarian crisis' across the whole of its health service. But individual patients are finding that, as far as they and their families are concerned, a humanitarian crisis is exactly what they must endure.

Last week Dawn Butler used an appearance on Question Time to reveal that she hadn't actually gone up to campaign in Copeland ahead of the party's disastrous by-election result, as she suffers from... car sickness: DB: I didn’t go to Copeland as I suffer from car sickness and I heard the roads are really bad. But I did a lot of phone… DD: That doesn’t sound like a warrior… DB: I didn’t think I’d be much good to them getting there all green and sick. DD: Don’t you ever go by car any distance? While Mr S felt sympathy for the Labour MP's plight, Steerpike couldn't help but notice that Butler hasn't always been so averse to the open road.

Were I a Labour party strategist I wouldn’t be too distressed by the news that the party has lost 26,000 members since last summer. On the contrary, I would regard it as the possible beginning of a very long road back to power. Until Jeremy Corbyn came along there was a received wisdom that modern political parties were becoming isolated from the views of the public as a whole because their once mass memberships had shrunk to a few party faithful. Not only has Corbyn disproved this theory, his experience suggests that the opposite might be the case: having a large membership is a hindrance to winning elections.

Imagine going back twenty years in a time machine, when a young Tony Blair was about to be swept to power on a wave of optimism, and telling someone* that in 2017, Labour would be on just 16 per cent among working-class voters - and this despite having a leader several octaves to the left of Blair. Not only this, but that a number of Labour seats in the north and the midlands were 'now in Tory sights'.  Imagine then telling them that this was happening while the Conservatives were making spending cuts in areas like education, and that there was an ongoing crisis in health and social care. You then let them know that almost all the government's attention is by necessity focused on leaving the European Union.

Tonight's Parliamentary Labour Party meeting began with loud cheers. As with most PLP meetings nowadays, these weren't directed at the Labour leader and nor was Jeremy Corbyn around to hear them. Corbyn had earlier sent his apologies that he was unable to make the first PLP meeting since the party's defeat in Copeland due to a prior engagement. In his absence, Gareth Snell -- the new Stoke-on-Trent Central MP -- was given a rousing reception, as was Andrew Gwynne -- the MP behind the by-election campaigns. When Gwynne attempted to take some of the blame for his party's loss in Copeland, he was shouted down by supportive colleagues who said that he had done everything he could.

Copeland was a truly awful result for Labour. But as I say in The Sun this morning, the really alarming things for Labour is that things can get worse for them. Many Labour MPs have been operating on the assumption that the NHS will keep the party’s loses down to a manageable level in 2020. But Copeland suggests that this hope is misplaced. Labour went all in on the health service there and had no shortage of material to work with, the maternity unit at the local hospital is under threat. By the end of the campaign, Labour’s message was perilously close to vote for us or the baby gets it—and yet people still didn’t vote for them. The other thing that should really worry Labour is that the Tories’ Corbyn card will be even more potent in 2020.

Labour's famously vocal moderates have been awfully quiet today, given one of their number – Jamie Reed – has just been replaced by a Tory in a hugely embarrassing by-election defeat for the party. The centrist wing of the party, now almost exclusively a backbench club, has taken a vow of silence because it doesn't want to be accused of salivating at the loss of a seat or of conforming to the 'Bitterite' stereotype of MPs undermining the Labour brand. This is particularly important given some Corbynites are still blaming last summer's attempted coup by the Parliamentary Labour Party for any catastrophe it encounters, including losing Copeland. That coup didn't remove Corbyn. But what it did do was remove the ability of the moderates to speak out with much authority.