In attempting to win votes, Labour are ignoring voters.

Labour’s focus group first strategy seems to have turned to prioritising wealthy donors over swing voters.

I had hoped I’d be able to avoid writing another piece on the car crash of the Labour party’s current situation for as long as possible; considering only recently I wrote about how Labour was on the verge of positioning itself to the right of the Tories on tax and spend; and well, that’s now the case, and it gets so much worse.

The current strategy by Keir Starmer and his team isn’t just crap and a betrayal of Labour’s professed values, but it’s also unpopular, inauthentic and vacuous. There’s been an absolute role reversal from last Summer, when Boris Johnson was so unbelievably crap at politicking, and Keir Starmer was suddenly amazing at it, compared to now when Johnson has found his feet and Starmer has taken over the mantle of scoring political own goal after own goal while sinking in the polls.

If you want an evidence based assessment of why this is all going wrong, or proof that Starmer’s leadership has come apart at the seams and we aren’t all exaggerating or throwing stones, then look at the polling averages for approval ratings. Keir Starmer was a huge asset last year, and he himself as a figure and a politician was more popular with the public than the Labour party brand itself, with more people looking at voting Labour BECAUSE of Starmer. Now, Keir Starmer has sunk to the point of being less popular than the Labour brand, and his leadership is an active drag on the party.

This is no reason to go (Jeremy Corbyn had negative ratings prior to 2017 when they stabilised and rapidly turned positive), but the fact they aren’t improving, they’re getting worse and worse, is cause for serious worry. Keir Starmer’s popularity may have already peaked, and I can’t see him being the face of an election-time dramatic political insurgency in the way Corbyn was.

Labour have come out today and promised an “iron-clad commitment” to Trident, and to NATO. Now, Corbyn compromised on these things as leader in order to keep the PLP happy and attempt to reach out to wary voters, but the reality is, he didn’t do this. Labour isn’t reluctantly compromising (a position I think Corbyn was wrong to take, he should have held fast on scrapping Trident), it’s championing and glorifying the ability to bring about a nuclear apocalypse, in a way 77% of the public disagree with. Labour are chasing a parody of the “red wall” voter that doesn’t exist outside the 1950s.

Labour won’t shift votes by promising to be competent administrators of the ending of days, and the fact that needs saying shows how out of touch the Labour establishment is with the wants and need of British voters. The Tories are playing the game, and Labour aren’t even on the court; the Tories are serious about establishing a coalition to last into the 2030s, Labour are serious about pandering to lunatics. The vocal position on NATO shows complete lockstep with western imperialism (something Corbyn would have rethought as PM, even though he again compromised wrongly on NATO), and if these clowns think that prospective Labour voters care about transatlantic military alliances, they’ve lost their heads.

Meanwhile, we’re all set to be treated to a spectacle once unforeseeable, with the Labour front bench and PLP, uniting with David Cameron and the right of the Tory party, to vote against raising corporation tax to make the wealthy pay for the corona crisis, as the Labour left and Tory government vote in lockstep to do just that. This is an inconceivable turn of political events, and makes assertions that would have seemed like hyperbolic parody regards the rightward shift of Labour now seem like they don’t go far enough. Keir Starmer’s Labour is unequivocally to the right of the Tory government, and wholly out of step with current trends of public opinion.

Labour should never, in my view, simply tow the line on issues and compromise on values merely because voters have a different stance to their instincts; if you want progressive change in any way, you have to fight to shape public opinion, as Corbyn’s Labour successfully did, resulting in the economic policies of this government taking more than a few leaves from the taxation and capital spend policies of 2017 Lab manifesto. If you don’t shape opinion, then you’ll never do anything.

However, if the vacuous strategy of focus group line towing was Starmer’s political priority, why have Labour ditched it all of a sudden, in favour of something arguably much worse. We aren’t now pandering to, and patronising voters with doublespeak, and inauthentic third way garbage; we’re now out of step with the public on taxation, on national security, and on spending. How in the hell did it come to this?

I may find myself next week siding with Rishi Sunak over the Shadow Treasury on budget priorities, considering for once the Tories have found some economic pragmatism and literacy, as Labour furiously works to undo all the moves towards anti-austerity being the norm that they fought for during 2015–19.

The argument that taxes will choke off the recovery has plenty of credence, in the same way austerity cuts did this after 2010. But the thing is, it’s all about what taxes and where; Labour was right to say we should lay out longer term tax priorities something like a year down the line form here, when we actually have a recovery that’s covered ground, but short term there are various tools at our disposal, and they’re tools Sunak should, and may, utilise in the budget. We should see a windfall profits tax on those who’ve done so well during this crisis, a rise in business rates to minimum 25% (still lower than Germany or America) but under a progressive govt to 30%, raising billions to the Treasury without choking off the recovery, and with little opposition from the CBI. We also need a rise in capital gains tax. In the meantime, we must keep investing and put a £100bn stimulus package into the economy to keep demand stimulated.

Later down the line, once the recovery is underway, we need to look at a wealth tax, taking the big tech giants, and we need a tax rate of 55% on the top 5% of earners to pay for this crisis; the sort of thing the Tories won’t touch. Unfortunately, nor will New New Labour.