Though parliament is in recess and Westminster is relatively quiet, British politics continues in the run-up to the local, Scottish and Welsh elections on 7 May. Yesterday, Keir Starmer was in Wolverhampton to launch Labour’s campaign for the English locals. Labour is currently projected to lose around four in five of the councillors standing, with voters moving either to its right, towards Reform, or to its left, towards the Green Party. There is just over a month of campaigning to go, and the Prime Minister made his pitch with that in mind.
On Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, he has, for now, settled on a clear line: that they are dangerous and unserious, and that their initial reaction to the Iran war demonstrated as much. “If they had been in government, we’d be in a war with no plan,” he said.
But on the left flank, the threat from Zack Polanski and the Green Party still leaves Labour uncertain about how to respond, a month on from Gorton and Denton. Are the Greens an unserious protest vote who, at worst, risk letting Reform in? Or are they dangerous populists – the Faragists of the left?
Labour cannot sustainably argue both. Yet in Wolverhampton yesterday, both lines were in evidence. Lucy Powell, Labour’s Deputy Leader, took on the Greens with a gag 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 into my eyes everybody, look deep into my eyes and I’ll let you into a little secret: the Greens are no good at running councils; their hypnotic promises are just an illusion. So let’s remember that.”
Moments later, in a bout of rhetorical whiplash, Starmer spoke ominously of Polanski in 10 Downing Street, leaving Britain “weak and exposed” to the predations of Vladimir Putin. “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 negotiating with Putin over our nuclear deterrent. We would be left so weak and so exposed if any of those individuals were in government,” Starmer said.
Does anyone voting Green on 7 May think Zack Polanski will become prime minister? Does anyone who has switched from Labour to the Greens rank defence and security among their top three issues? Is anyone voting in the local elections on the basis of the parties’ relative positions on the nuclear deterrent?
I suspect the answer is no, no and no. Yet the Prime Minister is falling into the habit of pressing on with these muddled lines of attack, even as the Greens’ poll numbers continue to tick upwards.
Think back to the drugs attack on Polanski. It has all but disappeared now. At the start of the Gorton by-election, Labour 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 off-putting, it was never going to be a high-salience issue in the by-election – or in the national political conversation more broadly. Labour learned that the hard way when it came third. Will it have to do so again on 7 May?
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Low sick pay is making Britain sicker]
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