KEVIN MAGUIRE: 'Turquoise Trumpism threatens Labour after destroying the Tories'

Turquoise Trumpism threatens Labour after destroying the Tories and Keir Starmer is to blame.

The Prime Minister pushed traditionally Labour working class voters into the dodgy embrace of trickster Nigel Farage. Runcorn was the revenge of ICI retirees on modest occupational pensions who lost winter fuel allowances.

Doncaster Labour Mayor Ros Jones blamed that and welfare cuts plus the impact of National Insurance rises on small firms for only narrowly beating Reform.

Labour massacred councillors in areas like Durham are entitled to blame Downing Street for lost seats. So what does Starmer hear when the PM says he gets it and will deliver change even more quickly?

Because his own goals were a big reason for Labour’s kicking by Reform and more of the same would produce worse results.

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Lurching further to the Right or seeking to out-Reform Reform would, as TUC chief Paul Nowack warned, just bleed votes to the Left and Right.

It’s clear Labour is doomed unless it delivers and champions for the very people the party was formed 125 years ago to represent. Thursday’s local contests were a national political earthquake in what is now a five-party system.

Farage and Reform were the big winners, obliterating the hammered Tories and Kemi Badenoch’s surely a zombie leader waiting to be put out of her misery.

Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats and Carla Denyer’s Greens have genuine reasons to be cheerful. Yet the main fight ahead is between Starmer’s Labour and Farage’s Reform.

Halting Farage’s bandwagon won’t be easy but is doable, not least because Reform can no longer criticise everybody else when it’ll be held accountable in seized mayoralities and councils. But first Labour must stop punching itself in the face and be true Labour.

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