Labour after the local elections: a lesson in crisis management?

A sense of momentum is crucial in democratic politics and a lack of it can be fatal for any government.

Labour’s response to the drubbing the party took in the local elections last week shows the team around Sir Keir Starmer have clearly understood that. It is quite something to announce two trade deals in the same week of the magnitude secured with India and Donald Trump’s US administration. The last Conservative government tried to get deals with both countries to show that they could make a success of Global Britain but could not get them over the line.

We can expect prolonged debate between the parties over whether the government made unacceptable concessions to break the impasse, but my guess is that many will accept that President Trump’s brutal tariff brinkmanship made urgent action imperative on the American front (the art of the deal, eh).

And in big picture politics, Labour strategists know how important these announcements were to help reset a deeply damaging narrative that was starting to take hold.

That narrative of Labour failure went like this: after winning by default, Keir Starmer’s government has wasted a year because they did not prepare properly for government and did not appoint sufficiently talented people to key positions, and now they are in deep trouble because the public never really liked them anyway, they just hated the Tories, and they can’t deliver the change they promised because the economy is so screwed, so they have made stupid mistakes in the name of balancing the books, and they are too cautious to countenance the properly radical solutions that could drive growth and stop the wave of illegal immigration that is driving people towards Reform.

Largely deeply unfair. But the thing is, this kind of stuff sticks when you are languishing in the polls and have just been thrashed by a party of amateurs who have never held power anywhere before.

Not only can it stick in the minds of the political commentariat, it risks getting embedded in the minds of Labour MPs who were overjoyed at entering the commons in the landslide last July but now feel they might be set to lose their seats to a political earthquake that sees the established parties decimated by a thoroughly disillusioned public. The veterans of the New Labour years will have clocked the seriousness of different factions forming within the Parliamentary Labour Party who are now prepared to question and criticise. It is a very different atmosphere from the discipline, hope and excitement in which they arrived less than a year ago.

So the government’s ability to put some genuine definition behind Keir’s pledge to go “further and faster” in reforming the country and sorting out the economy is highly welcome. But they will know that resetting the media narrative will count for little if changes they do set in motion do not flow through reasonably quickly to greater approval from highly disillusioned voters. Particularly the many millions who are considering throwing in their lot with Reform.

Turning this around will require more than trade deals, whose multi-billion pounds of benefit spread thinly across the economy can feel nebulous or even illusory to the vast majority of voters. It will require a clearer story and effective action on the longstanding problems of illegal immigration and the lack of integration in many communities on which Nigel Farage is getting incredible traction, telling fed up voters they have been ignored and failed by all mainstream parties.

Immigration is always an electoral challenge for the Labour party, given the way that the tough stance favoured by the majority of the public – and their traditional working class voter base - can sit uneasily with the party’s activists and MPs who tend to be much more liberal.

How to deal with the political challenge of immigration often causes tension between Labour’s senior strategists. There are those who advocate trying to dial down its salience as a political issue, crowding it out by dialling up issues where it is more comfortable and usually has a lead over its rivals, like the NHS. Others say they have to take the issue head on and embrace what the majority of their voters actually want.

In the past, the former camp – the ‘dial down’ crowd - has tended to win out. If Labour wants to give itself the best chance of winning a second term, this is the moment for the latter camp to come to the fore.

Large numbers of British citizens feel strongly they have been ignored by the political elite for decades, told they are racist for being unhappy that their town is now starkly divided, with whole neighbourhoods unwilling to integrate. They have had more than their fill of politicians who have said the right thing on stopping the boats but failed to do what it takes actually to get to grips with the issue.

This is a period of great peril for all the mainstream political parties. Labour is best placed to reconnect with the public, but the stakes are high and the path is not easy to define, or to follow. Keir Starmer need to ensure his regained sense of momentum takes him in the right direction.