Perversely, a spectacular week for Labour somehow ended up with an assault on the party’s green policies, amid hints of internal wobbling. Despite a record Labour trouncing of a Tory majority in Selby and Ainsty, a 7% swing to Labour in Uxbridge and South Ruislip became a story about Labour in trouble, over a seat not even won in Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide.
Labour always struggles to make its narrative heard against the wall of sound from the massed foghorns of the Tory media, but the party needs more nimbleness to duck being defined by the enemy. Keir Starmer’s public rebuke to Sadiq Khan to “reflect” on his Ulez policy was a badly pitched red-on-red news story. Instead, they should have publicly agreed more generous car-scrappage schemes so that the cost of cleaning up child-killing pollution doesn’t have to fall on lower-paid drivers. Having also lost a council seat in Cambridge this month to a Conservative who stood on a platform of fighting a proposed congestion charge, Labour knows its green policies need to fall fairly on the broadest shoulders. Instead, it has allowed the Uxbridge result to distract from an electoral success that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago.
