Labour is more left wing than purveyors of conventional wisdom admit

I wrote about the results of the English local elections for the Spectator today, and looked at how Labour was defying some of the cliches about centre-left parties.

The left assumes that their leaders will betray the noble cause because they are evil or weak and allow themselves to be corrupted by capitalism.  Their moral failings lead them to abandon left-wing policies. 

In their own way Conservatives agree. Even when they are defeated at the polls, they want to believe they have won the battle of ideas. Centre-left parties will abandon radical policies when they learn the hard way that Margaret Thatcher was right when she said that the “facts of life are conservative”.

But that’s not what is happening with Keir Starmer’s Labour party, as I explain below….

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Labour people are used to defeat. Before every election they wonder if the Tories will defy expectations. Real votes are not the same as opinion polls, after all, they say. 

And yet ever since Boris Johnson broke his own lockdown rules, disastrous performances for the Tories in opinion polls have been replicated by disastrous results in real elections. We are only beginning to grasp the consequences of an inevitable Tory defeat.