Starmer's catastrophic Reform-lite strategy isn't working

Keir Starmer's dismal attempts to woo Reform voters with Enoch Powell dog whistles isn't just failing to attract Reform voters, it's driving away huge numbers of traditional Labour voters

The latest YouGov favourability ratings paint a dismal picture for the Labour Party under Keir Starmer’s diabolical leadership.

Starmer isn’t just deeply unpopular with the public in general (minus 46) he’s also fallen into negative territory with 2024 Labour voters (minus 5)!

In the space of a month his unpopularity has increased dramatically (except with 2024 Tory voters for some reason).

By 2024 vote

Labour: -5 (down 34)
Lib Dem: -13 (down 12)
Conservative: -76 (up 1)
Reform UK: -94 (down 5)

It’s hardly surprising that Labour voters are disappointed and disillusioned with him.

He’s just delivered record-breakingly bad local election results, in which Labour lost 65% of the council seats they were defending, as well as losing Labour’s 16th safest parliamentary seat to Reform.

Instead of reading the room and changing course, Starmer belligerently doubled down on the despicable and deeply unpopular policies of mugging pensioners and impoverishing disabled people.

Then he decided to channel Enoch Powell’s racist "Rivers of Blood" speech in a transparently desperate attempt to woo Reform voters.

It hardly takes a lot of political expertise to grasp the idea that the kind of people who voted Labour in 2024 don’t want a continuation of the diabolical Tory austerity policies that delivered an unprecedented decade and a half of economic stagnation; failing public services; and collapsing living standards.

They don’t want a Labour government that economically sanctions pensioners, disabled people, and families, whilst maintaining lavish tax breaks and handouts for corporations and the mega-rich.

They don’t want a Labour government that outright refuses to deal with Britain’s debilitating infestation of privatisation profiteers in our vital national infrastructure and public services, and which refuses to even acknowledge the problem of idle buy-to-let slumlords buying up all of the affordable housing.

And they definitely don’t want a Labour leader who rabble-rouses against immigrants in a desperate effort to pander to right-wingers, who would never vote Labour anyway.

It’s obviously a desperate situation when more of a party’s own voters disapprove of the party leader than approve of him, but the real kicker is that he’s still extraordinarily unpopular with the Reform voters he’s been so desperately pandering to.

One of Starmer’s biggest problems is that he’s lied so often, and to so many people, that hardly anybody believes a word he says.

All reasonably well-informed Labour voters are well aware of the way he lied his way into the Labour leadership, and his litany of broken promises, abandoned pledges, and binned policies.

And it’s highly unlikely that a bit of performative anti-immigrant rabble rousing is going to make Reform voters just forget how Keir Starmer twisted Jeremy Corbyn’s arm into turning Labour into "the party of Remain" in 2019, before pivoting 180° once he’d succeeded in toppling Corbyn and taking the party leadership for himself.

Political annihilation is guaranteed as long as Labour keep on with austerity ruination; imposing economic sanctions on pensioners, disabled people, and families; deliberate underinvestment; siding with privatisation profiteers, property hoarders, and the mega rich; and pandering to people who would never vote Labour anyway.

And even if Starmer gets over his ego, sacks the right-wing ghouls he’s surrounded himself with, and commits to changing direction … who would actually believe that another screeching U-turn isn’t just around the corner?

He has no principles, and no integrity, and pretty much everyone can see it.

It’s amazing to see a Labour Party with their biggest parliamentary majority in decades heading for electoral oblivion, and the majority of Labour’s 400+ MPs sitting there gormlessly as Starmer drives their party towards the cliff edge, instead of doing what’s necessary to stop him before it’s too late.