Labour is in danger of becoming best known not for the policies it promotes, but for the pledges it has ditched and the ambitions it has diluted
‘I wake up every morning imagining the ways in which we could still fuck it up.” So a senior member of Sir Keir Starmer’s team recently confided to me.
Four consecutive defeats and 13 years in the wilderness of opposition have left deep psychological scars. Fear of another failure is also entrenched by Labour’s unfortunate history throughout the party’s existence of losing many more times than it has won. It is good for morale to enjoy a double-digit advantage in the opinion polls, but senior Labour people never forget how big leads have evaporated in the run-up to previous elections.
. If the party could lose a byelection that it expected to win, might that be a foretaste of a much bigger and nastier shock when the general election comes? This is the chilling thought that has shivered down the spines of Labour’s senior ranks. The party’s national policy forum at the end of July heard: “We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour party end up on each and every Tory leaflet. We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.
Some call this “getting the barnacles off the boat”, a phrase most commonly associated with the rightwing Australian campaign strategist,. Others describe it as a “small target” strategy, so-called because it is designed to suppress any contentions that might work in favour of the Conservatives while making it harder for them to hit Labour.
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