A diary entry on a leadership crisis Labour cannot blame on anyone else this time
Monday, A Number That Speaks For Itself
More than ninety five Labour MPs have now called on their own Prime Minister to resign or set out a departure timetable, a genuinely extraordinary figure for a party barely partway through its own term in government, accompanied by cabinet and ministerial resignations that would, under almost any previous administration, have already triggered a formal leadership contest. Net approval has fallen to roughly minus forty six percent, comparisons to Liz Truss now offered not by opponents scoring points but by Labour’s own analysts assessing their own leader’s genuine political standing.
I want to be precise about what this number actually represents, because I think it gets lost beneath the noisier daily coverage: this is not opposition criticism, which any government expects and can reasonably dismiss as partisan noise. This is Labour’s own backbenchers, Labour’s own affiliated unions, Labour’s own party members, concluding independently that their own leadership has lost the confidence needed to continue governing effectively.
Tuesday, A Government Squeezed From Both Directions
What strikes me most is the genuinely two-sided nature of the criticism, figures on the right unhappy with immigration policy and tax increases, figures on the left equally unhappy over welfare reform, Gaza policy, and the refused wealth tax, a government apparently satisfying almost nobody within its own broad coalition simultaneously.
Wednesday, A Related Read
Caught up on The London Prat that evening, still working through what a government this internally fractured can realistically still accomplish.
Thursday, A Closing Thought On What Comes Next
Whatever one’s own party sympathies, a government facing this level of internal revolt deserves honest, plain acknowledgment of its actual position rather than the usual reflexive insistence from within that everything remains firmly under control. Ninety five of your own MPs disagreeing with you is not noise. It is data.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
