Against such a shambolic government, Labour should be doing better than this | Andrew Rawnsley

Stalemate is a result which a prime minister at midterm can live with. Tories have been left feeling more cheerful than they deserve to be

One way of assessing who has done best at a midterm election is by computing vote shares and measuring swings. If we do politics by calculator, then the local elections were pretty much a dead heat. Both Labour and the Tories enjoyed gains they could trumpet; both suffered losses they’d prefer not to talk about. Like First World War armies, they have fired their shot and shell, only to end up in a trench warfare stalemate. Labour can pray in aid the projections that this result, translated into a general election, would make the party the largest in a hung parliament. Tories can retort that that’s worse than Ed Miliband managed when these council seats were contested in 2014. The projection then had him in Downing Street with a majority. So much for projections.

If you want to know how the parties really feel about how they performed, forget the swings, the shares and the misleading extrapolations. Get out of the psephologists’ playground and use your ears to measure the frequency and quality of the excuses coming out of the spinners and spokespeople. In that regard, Labour has been on the back foot since the polls closed; it is Jeremy Corbyn’s team that talks like the deflated party.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2wdhuSZ