Although parliament is in recess and Westminster is relatively quiet, British politics continues ahead of local, Scottish and Welsh elections on May 7. Yesterday, Keir Starmer was in Wolverhampton to launch Labour’s campaign for English locals. Labor is currently predicted to lose around four in five standing councillors, with voters moving either right, towards reform, or left, towards the Green Party. There is just over a month of campaigning ahead, and the Prime Minister made his speech with that in mind.
For Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, he has, for now, settled on a clear line: that they are dangerous and frivolous, and that their initial reaction to the war in Iran showed as much. “If they had been in government, we would have been in a war without a plan,” he said.
But on the left, the threat from Zack Polanski and the Green Party still leaves Labor unsure how to respond, a month after Gorton and Denton. Are the Greens a frivolous protest vote who at worst risk letting Reform in? Or are they dangerous populists? – faragists left?
Workers cannot consistently argue both. However at Wolverhampton yesterday, both lines were on trial. Lucy Powell, Labour’s Deputy Leader, confronted the Greens with a lie about Polanski’s past as a hypnotherapist, while also attacking their record in local government. She said: “As for Zack Polanski and the Greens, look everyone in my eyes, look deep into my eyes and I’ll let you in on a little secret: the Greens are not good at giving advice; their hypnotic promises are just an illusion. So let’s remember that.”
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Moments later, in a whiplash rhetorical attack, Starmer spoke ominously of Polanski in 10 Downing Street, leaving Britain “weak and exposed” to Vladimir Putin’s predations. “He thinks that, with a war on two fronts, now is the time to give up our NATO membership, now is the time to start negotiations with Putin about our nuclear deterrent. We would be left so weak and so exposed if any of those individuals were in government,” Starmer said.
Does anyone who votes Green on May 7th think Zack Polanski will become Prime Minister? Does anyone who has switched from Labor to the Greens rank defense and security in their top three issues? Does anyone vote in local elections based on the parties’ relative positions on nuclear deterrence?
I suspect the answer is no, no, and no. However, the Prime Minister is getting into the habit of continuing with these convoluted lines of attack, even as the Greens’ poll numbers continue to climb.
Think back to the drug attack on Polanski. It’s all gone now. At the start of the Gorton by-election, Labor strategists were optimistic that a campaign portraying the Greens as soft on drugs would persuade older and Muslim voters to stick with Labour. But while many of those voters may well have found the Greens’ liberal approach to drugs, it was never going to be a major issue in the by-election. – or in the national political conversation more broadly. Workers learned this the hard way when the third came out. Will he have to do it again on May 7?
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; get it every morning by subscribing to Substack here
(Further reading: Low sick pay is making Britain sicker)
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