How many times has a majority of that size been over turned?
We’re talking a long time back, and we were dealing with serious oppositions. I like Starmer, but the public perception of Labour right now is too often of a bunch of crackpot Marxist loons…. I suspect the corbyn years won’t be forgotten in a hurry.
I wonder how much guidance the past can give on this. Political loyalties are clearly more molten than they used to be. Swings correspondingly greater. The FPTP system stymies third and fourth and fifth parties in a way it never used to (when the official opposition could lose a general election with 45 per cent of the popular vote), while creating undeserved opportunities for the two main contenders.
Then there's Covid. Think of it like a war. While the war is going on the popular vote naturally gravitates towards the government, regardless of how incompetent or venal it is ("the anyone can govern in a siege" principle). Once the war is over, and a decent amount of time has elapsed, the reckoning starts. The Labour party knows this. Its real breakthrough year was 1922 - not just in the parliamentary election but in local government elections too. The government that had 'won the war' (the Lloyd George-led, but essentially Conservative government) finally faced a proper reckoning once the war fervour that had returned them to power in 1918 had subsided and died. People gained their heads, asked the hard questions, and decided that things had been royally fucked up - corruption, profiteering, inadequate leadership both at home and on the battlefield, a disastrous peace policy leading to the mess at Versailles etc etc. Many millions looked at the Labour party, which had wanted wealth taxes on the profiteers and a non-punitive peace treaty for Germany, and said "You were right."
It's not inevitable that the British public will come its senses in the next two or three years, but it's a definite possibility. The Labour party needs to keep plugging away. Forget the loonies on the left, they are not needed. They are indeed a deadweight. Loud but insubstantial. Starmer is getting better at his job. The teflon is slowly coming off Johnson. The culture war is not turning out the way that the racists, the homophobes and the misogynists wanted. And, of course, the full effect of Brexit is yet to be felt.
Watch this space....