Thread by @shaunjlawson

Right now, and for the next few months too, Labour is completely and utterly at the mercy of events. That's partly not its fault; but it's partly its fault too.

These remain unique circumstances in which the opposition just isn't given a hearing - and politics is over Zoom.

The advantage that gives the government is enormous.

1. The media won't report the message even if there is one

2. Politics by Zoom is far too staid for anyone to get excited or enthused by anything really. It'd even prevent the public getting to know a good opposition leader.

That leaves the government and its incredibly pliant media apparatus constantly making the political weather. On everything. Against the backdrop of a public which just wants to get through this - but can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

None of this would've been easy for any opposition leader. But Starmer went WAY too far in supporting the govt for its own sake. He's removed his ability to challenge the many disasters of 2020 or even this year, in a way Yvette Cooper (who is genuinely forensic) wouldn't have.

It was her who was most effective in highlighting the many disasters of Brexit... and it's been her who's held the government's feet to the fire during Covid in a way Starmer simply has not.

We only stopped South American travellers because of what she herself said!

But Starmer's own blunders and wild over-timidity mean the Tories will get away scot free with everything they did last year: tens of billions for cronies, track and trace which didn't work, tens of thousands sent to their deaths in care homes, airports not closed.

They also mean that Coronavirus is now viewed as a triumph for Boris Johnson, because:

1. Rishi Sunak is wildly popular, which at least suggests most people have stayed afloat

2. Of the vaccine rollout: which when contrasted with the EU's shambles, has boosted Brexiteers hugely

It's really remarkable. Starmer has been so strategically inept, it's scary.

So then we come to what happens *after* the vaccinations are completed.

- What happens to the economy?
- What happens with the virus?

We have no idea on either front. But lost in the triumphalism around the vaccination rollout has been the following question:

"How long will immunity last?"

If the answer is, say, a year, are we going to go through this process every year? How long for?

Will the public have to keep wearing masks and keep facing social restrictions? Way too much certainty has been expressed by the government and ever-clueless financial markets when the truth is we just don't know.

But from the opposition's point of view, absolutely everything about the next election has been ceded to the government.

If the economy recovers, Covid is either defeated or becomes a much lesser issue, and Brexit works out passably OK, the Tories win... and they win big.

"Oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them" is a political truism - but I've never known it to apply in such an extreme way as it does now.

And that begs an instant question: what, exactly, is the point of Keir Starmer's Labour Party?

- Has it held the government's feet to the fire? No.

- Has it set out an alternative narrative? No.

- Has it won back Johnson Tories or floating voters? No.

- Has it pissed off and alienated many of its natural supporters? Yes.

- Is 'we are competent, honest!' an electorally winning strategy? Of course it bloody isn't. Close to one year in, we've not even left base camp.

We have to take the fight to the Tories. Starmer shows no sign whatsoever of doing so - or even knowing how to do so.

That's where the concerns over how wooden he comes across as really start to hit home.

How's he going to connect with the millions of voters we need to win over? How's he going to provide a distinctive, exciting message based on HOPE?

Even a lowest common denominator approach of "vote for us cos we're not them" is completely holed below the water line given how often Starmer's Labour DO look like them.

As I say: this wouldn't have been easy for any opposition leader. But he's failed so far. Pretty miserably.

His henchmen have drawn all the wrong conclusions about 2019; 2017 has been airbrushed out of history as though it never happened; Johnson and Sunak are even stealing Corbyn and McDonnell's clothes while Labour look on impassively.

Centrism offers NOTHING. Nothing at all.

Social democracy offers plenty - but very little about this incarnation of the Labour Party is remotely social democratic.

If we don't offer a clear, compelling alternative, we will lose and we will deserve to lose.

Climate catastrophe, stagnant wages, ever-growing inequality, the housing crisis and the student debt timebomb all demand big answers.

The status quo is not an option. A so-called party of the left pursuing it has a political death wish.