LIKE the British army at Singapore in 1942, Labour’s guns are pointing in the wrong direction.

Keir Starmer’s master strategist, Morgan McSweeney, is obsessing over losing voters to the hard-right Reform UK and adapting policy accordingly.

While the Farageist surge in the local elections last week has to be taken seriously, and it is indeed shocking to see Reform winning a council majority in County Durham, for example, that is not Labour’s biggest problem.

It is losing at least twice as many votes to the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats. The former is clearly to the left of Labour, while the latter now challenges the government with radical positioning on several key issues.

Yet on one question after another, McSweeney is looking to appease voters tempted by the hard right while ignoring the far more numerous men and women looking for a progressive alternative.

The reasons for alienation from Labour are pretty clear, and the latest survey from pollster YouGov spells them out.

Voters were asked for the reasons they had stopped voting Labour since the general election. The top five answers are:

• Cutting the winter fuel benefit to more than 10 million pensioners;
• Failure to act on the spiralling cost of living;
• Public services have barely improved;
• The government has broken too many promises;
• Labour fails to stand up to the rich and powerful.

And remember that Labour had already lost millions of voters between 2017, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, and 2024 after four years of Starmer in charge.

Those missing voters were disillusioned by Labour’s staid centrism, its status quo positioning and, of course, its backing for Israel’s Gaza genocide.

Chasing Farage’s tail over migration while slashing benefits is not going to win those voters back. It merely ensures that Labour will lose votes and seats in every point on the political compass.

It should not be assumed that McSweeney does not realise this. Doubtless, he can read the polls and the voter feedback as well as anyone.

The central problem is that he, and too many others in the government and Labour’s hierarchy, hate the left and socialism as a point of principle. It is their animating force  —  they have no other political values, and no aspirations to use their time in office to change the country for the better.

They would rather eat their own legs than make any political concessions to the left. Given that, they simply fit their strategy around their prejudices.

Only Labour’s affiliated unions, in alliance with the growing number of discounted MPs, can force a change in this regime.

It is, in fact, a myth that the artillery at Singapore was misdirected. At least three of the five largest guns could be rotated through 360 degrees. It was strategy and leadership that were lacking in 1942.

Changing that must now be the priority.

Kneecap are free-speech anti-imperialist heroes

IT IS wrong to call for MPs to be killed. Happily, there is no evidence that anybody has been inspired to act on loose language by Irish hip-hop group Kneecap in 2023.

However, rhetorical violence is fairly common in politics, particularly in the social media cauldron, and context is important.

Kneecap’s real offence is their militant anti-imperialism, and their strong support for the Palestinian people in particular.

The same MPs utterly indifferent to the British-backed slaughter in Gaza are now in a lather of indignation over a throwaway line at a pop concert.

They are demanding the effective cancellation of Kneecap’s career. The group deserve the unequivocal solidarity of everyone who can see the imperialist wood through the media trees.