There’s a difference between climate and weather. Both change, but at very different tempos. Variations in the weather are seasonal and ephemeral. Alterations in the climate are longer-term shifts – epochal transformations – as we move from ages of warming to cooling to warming again. 

I’m writing the day before the country goes to the polls to pass a midterm verdict on the Labour government. I can’t predict with precision exactly what will happen in every Scottish parliament constituency or London borough. The electoral weather will vary from region to region. But I can tell you that our broader political climate has already changed and these elections, in aggregate, will confirm it. Britain is becoming daily colder. For the enterprising. For the young. For the aspirational. For the Jewish community. For genuine liberals. A harder rain is going to fall.

What makes the shift so remorseless is the eclipse of what used to be Labour’s organised right

What makes the shift so remorseless is the eclipse of what used to be Labour’s organised right

It may be the Prime Minister who feels most desperate and wrung-out this weekend. But whether or not Keir Starmer survives, the dynamic which will drive Labour for the rest of its time in government is clear – it is moving, injudiciously but inevitably and ineluctably, to the left.

It might seem illogical when Reform are the biggest winners of both seats and vote share for Labour to respond by becoming more Bennite than Blairite. But while defeat at the hands of Reform hurts Labour, the pain is nowhere near as acute as the losses to the Greens.

Labour is no longer a working-class party, heart and soul. It hasn’t been since Gordon Brown dismissed the Rochdale pensionerGillian Duffy as a ‘bigoted woman’ for expressing concerns about migration in the 2010 general election. There is, of course, an intellectual recognition among Labour’s strategists that they need Red Wall votes to sustain a majority, but there isn’t the emotional identification with their concerns that makes such an accommodation easy or natural anymore. Consider the vehement opposition which Labour backbenchers have mounted against the relatively moderate efforts by Shabana Mahmood to tighten migration rules. The very fact that Mahmood, the most intelligent member of the cabinet by some way, is considered a non-starter as a future Labour leader is telling in itself.

So defeats in Wakefield, Barnsley and Sunderland may be uncomfortable, but Green advances in Hackney, Haringey, Southwark and Lambeth and across inner London sear the Labour soul. Because these boroughs became the party’s genuine heartlands – the habitat in which Labour felt free from predators. Nowhere was........

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