Keir Starmer’s Labour may have come a long way since 2019, but not far at all since 2017. In January, Starmer warned of complacency. Now, despite voters having no clear sense of what Labour would be like, given the slightest whiff of winning, the Labour leader is telling his party to prepare for government (Labour staff told to prepare for No 10 after local elections success, 5 May). He appears hellbent on repeating the misplaced optimism of Neil Kinnock in 1992, who had also purged Labour’s left. Starmer should have instead built on the popular and practical economic policy in Labour’s 2017 manifesto, so voters would know that what Labour stands for is very different from the Tories.
When asked last week how to evaluate the recent local election results regarding the coming general election, Prof Sir John Curtice, renowned for his accurate political analysis, said to look at the total number of seats won. Now the results are in. Labour: 2,603 seats won; Conservatives: 2,217; the difference a mere 386 seats. It’s just about Labour’s still to win or lose.
David Murray
Wallington, Surrey
• One pattern is emerging from the local election results: the Tories have been rejected on all sides. Labour has benefited, but Sir Keir Starmer’s confident assertion that Labour will form the next government may be misplaced. Surely, given the notable successes of the Liberal Democrats and the Green party, there has never been a better opportunity for a left-of-centre electoral pact so that our next government can truly say that it has a mandate from a broad majority of the voting public.
Ian Ferguson
Pickering, North Yorkshire
• John McDonnell (What do the Tories’ dismal local results mean for the general election? Our panel responds, 5 May) is right that the 1992 Tory victory will be used to support the laughable contention that Rishi Sunak can still win a majority in 2024. It is clear, however, that the analogy is being weaponised by the Conservative party. Last Friday, Tories were on TV asserting that Labour had failed because it had only won a projected share of 35% of the vote. By inference, the Conservative share of 26% was deemed to put it in pole position. No journalist seemed willing to challenge this absurdity.
The intended message is that only the Conservative party can win an overall majority, even though, if the poll told us anything, it is that the party is significantly less likely to secure a working majority than Labour.
The party will hope that this narrative enables it to repeat David Cameron’s 2015 trick of alleging that a vote for Labour is a vote for the Scottish National party. Tory commentators have already began to play that line, claiming that Liberal Democrats will not support a Labour government. Circumstances are different from 2015, and Conservative fearmongering about a “coalition of chaos” is unlikely to have much traction.
Dr Chistopher Stevens
Canterbury
• Why is there so little reaction in the media or from politicians to the low voter turnout for the local elections? In Leeds, the average was 31.17%; some areas were as high as 48%, some as low as 18%.
Unions have to achieve an above 50% return of ballot papers to call a strike, by this criteria most of the local election results would be declared invalid. Why is there not more effort made to engage people?
Katharine Hardisty
Leeds
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