Uk politics

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.

Even now, even following their historic thrashing in Copeland, Labourites still cannot face the truth. Sure, there are Twitter tears this morning. I’m sure the vibe in Corbyn’s office is skittish and fearful. There’ll be an explosion in ‘What now for Labour?’ articles. But they still do not get the yawning, abyssal depth of the crisis they face. They still don’t see that their party isn’t merely in trouble; it’s finished, over, kaput. Labour is a zombie party, a Frankenstein creature patched together from dead slogans and middle-class anti-Tory angst; a living-dead entity utterly incapable of making a connection with the living.

Polls have closed in the Copeland and Stoke by-elections. It is too early to say with any certainty what the results will be, but we’ll be with you on Coffee House until the results are declared. In Copeland, it is a two horse race between Labour and the Tories. The Tories aren’t predicting they’ll take it, but they do sound rather optimistic. In private, some Labour MPs are very pessimistic about this result. But this could be expectations management. If the Tories do take Copeland from Labour, it’ll be a staggering result: the governing party hasn’t taken a seat in a by-election in thirty odd years and that was in the middle of the Falklands war with the former Labour MP standing for the SDP.

It is almost always unwise to postpone the introduction of a big, scheduled tax change, but often tempting at the time. George Osborne, when Chancellor of the Exchequer in the coalition government, postponed the revaluation of business rates, when it was due two years ago, for obvious political reasons. So now it is happening, and it hurts worse than it would have then. The current rates are based on the rental value of business properties in 2010. Since then, the scene is transformed. The internet has called the whole concept of the ordinary, physical shop into question. Values have vastly altered and the political problem – as with the poll tax in the 1980s – is that losers are more vocal than gainers.

In normal times, by-elections are bad for governing parties and good for oppositions. But it is an indicator of how much trouble Labour is in, as I say in The Sun this morning, that they are the ones who are nervous ahead of Thursday’s by-elections. Some in the Labour machine seem almost resigned to losing Copeland to the Tories and are concentrating on trying to hold off Ukip in Stoke. Given that Labour is polling as low as 24% and Jeremy Corbyn’s ratings are worse than Michael Foot’s were at this point in his leadership, and the epic defeat Foot led Labour to in 1983 paved the way for 14 more years of Tory government, you might think that defeat in either contest would be the end of Corbyn’s leadership. But it won’t be.

I don't know about you but if I were to make a speech arguing that democracy should be abandoned, I probably wouldn't begin by saying 'I want to be explicit. Yes, the British people voted to leave Europe. And I agree the will of the people should prevail.' That's just me, however. When Tony Blair says this, he apparently means to encourage an anti-democratic insurrection. Which, I suppose, makes sense if you still suffer from an acute case of Blair Derangement Syndrome. Plenty of people evidently do. If Blair is really as toxic and irrelevant as his critics aver, there'd be no need for all this fury. Blood vessels could remain unburst and eyes unpopped. The reaction to Blair's speech suggests something else. It suggests that he must have a point.

Just as it seems that Labour has reached the bottom of the abyss, Jeremy Corbyn and his party somehow manage to find a new low. The latest nationwide poll puts them at 24 per cent, trailing the Tories by 16 points. No wonder Labour MPs look so boot-faced around Parliament, and an increasing number are hunting for jobs elsewhere. If a general election were called now, the Conservatives would win a huge majority. Labour would be further than ever from power, arguably even finished as a major parliamentary force. Polls are not rock-solid indicators of future electoral success or failure, but Labour’s ratings are so abysmal as to suggest a party facing an existential crisis.

Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. New figures, compiled by the Press Association, suggest that hate crimes soared to 'record levels' in the three months following the EU referendum. Only four police forces around the country recorded a decrease in hate crimes; the others saw a spike. And in the case of three forces - the Metropolitan, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire - the spike was significant: these forces recorded more than 1,000 hate crimes each post-referendum.  This is being held up as evidence that prejudices and madness were unleashed by Brexit. In truth, the hate-crime spike looks more like a classic crime panic, a constructed 'crisis'.

John Bercow is a curious little poppet. He's come a long way since his spotty days of undergraduate hangem'n'floggery in the Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation banned by Norman Tebbit for being too right-wing. Today he's more likely to be found welcoming one acronym or another to Parliament or accosting the word 'progressive' and roughing it up.  Bercow, now handsomely perched in the gods of the liberal establishment, has defied the axiom that we become more conservative as we grow older. (Then again, if you start out in the Monday Club and keep going right, you'll end up in Rhodesia by Friday.)  We need to understand this change of heart to appreciate the splenetic fury he inspires in the worst, most tribal brand of Tory.

The BBC again. A profile of the speaker, John Bercow, for Radio Four. His  pet cat is called 'Order' – hilarious! And he’s stood up for stuff like same sex adoptions and opposed the 'nasty' (qv- BBC again) tendencies of the Tory Party. What a lovely bloke! And he’s been bloody brilliant as a speaker! This was the conclusion we were invited to draw from Mark Coles’s profile, which ran on Radio Four just before 18.00 on Sunday. Aaah, you hold your heads in the hands and wonder. Mark Coles is a superb reporter and one of the most talented makers of radio packages I have ever come across – a dying art, incidentally. He is also an old friend who I haven’t seen for a long time but who nonetheless I like a lot.