For some reason, they appear to have taken their resounding majority at the last general election as grounds for extreme complacency and skewing pretty hard right. We can see how that's working out.
Starmer has no vision whatsoever and reminds me of John Major without the charisma and with fewer principles (my comment about charisma is an ironic joke, if people here are unfamiliar with Major, the one-nation Tory stopgap after Thatcher who unexpectedly won an election in his own right, and was the epitome of grey, despite his efforts to fend off the extremists in his party, which I have to acknowledge). Starmer's staffed his cabinet with loyalists who're generally useless, and don't even perform well on camera, while dissenting voices, largely on the left, have been purged from the party or sanctioned. He and his advisers are the least sure-footed politically the country's seen since Liz Truss.
In terms of Brexit, Starmer's dismissed the idea of running another referendum out of hand, preferring to try to "make Brexit work", so I can have no sympathy if Labour are now being blamed for its all too predictable effects, which some of the cabinet have tried to shift the blame for onto immigrants, which is utterly heinous.
Labour began its term by seemingly focusing on some of the most unpopular measures it could enact, e.g. refusing to take measures to address child poverty, removing heating allowances from state pensioners, and hiking National Insurance rates (placing more of a burden on small businesses and driving some of them to the wall) while point-blank refusing to contemplate taxing the better-off.
There are unsurprisingly deep rumblings within Labour to replace Starmer as Prime Minister, even before next year's council elections, when the incumbent party usually takes a spanking, and which will likely be catastrophic for Labour anyway.
The only saving grace is that, short of a wholesale rebellion and split within Labour, which is unlikely, it has a few more years before it has to face the electorate again.
Polling currently strongly flatters Reform UK, but that won't necessarily be reflected in a real-world general election, as the Caerphilly by-election last week showed, when Plaid Cymru handily beat Reform into second place despite polls showing Reform either in the lead or neck-and-neck with Plaid. The result was likely at last partially due to concerted tactical voting, plus the benefit of a very well known and respected local candidate for Plaid Cymru. But Labour's share of the vote fell to unthinkable levels, so other parties (like the Greens in England, the SNP and Plaid Cymru in Scotland and Wales, and possibly the Lib Dems in places where they still have relatively strong support) are more likely to benefit from any tactical vote to keep Reform out.
But something has to change ASAP, or we'll likely see a Reform government in a few years. Luckily, they have a habit of quickly falling on their faces whenever they get a sniff of power, sometimes even before that, but few of us want to see them get a chance to do that on a national scale.
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