Labour’s persistent failure to address its electorate’s salient concerns is behind the protest vote, asserts DIANE ABBOTT
LABOUR goes into the Batley and Spen by-election with high anxiety. The retiring Labour MP, the screen writer and actor Tracy Brabin, was elected in a surge of sympathy and solidarity following the murder by a far-right assassin of the previous Labour MP Jo Cox. She built on a solid 17,506 votes in the by-election to win 29,844 votes in the 2017 Corbyn surge.
Now Brabin has won a convincing victory in the election for mayor of West Yorkshire and is compelled to resign as MP.
There is the usual squabble about who should be the Labour candidate. The Labour hierarchy have imposed Cox’s sister Kim Leadbeater, who has been hastily enrolled in the party and “selected” in clear abandonment of any pretence that the rules for selection — which entail candidates having a solid period in membership — need are followed.
From Gaza complicity to welfare cuts chaos, Starmer’s baggage accumulates, and voters will indeed find ‘somewhere else’ to go — to the Greens, nationalists, Lib Dems, Reform UK or a new, working-class left party, writes NICK WRIGHT
Reform’s rise speaks to a deep crisis in Establishment parties – but relies on appealing to social and economic grievances the left should make its own, argues NICK WRIGHT
With Reform UK surging and Labour determined not to offer anything different from the status quo, a clear opportunity opens for the left, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE



