Keir: more than just a lucky general | Tom Hamilton | The Critic Magazine

A slightly too wordy and too long article that I nonetheless basically agree with. Key paragraphs:

Starmer’s strategic sense has been impressive, from opening his leadership consensually with qualified support for, and constructive criticism of, lockdown, to encouraging Boris Johnson to get his denials of Partygate on the record and leaving them there, to, most of all, his relentless focus on the voters he actually needs to win, rather than the ones who make the most noise.

This, of course, is the source of the biggest criticisms of Starmer from the left: that he won the leadership by relentlessly focusing on the voters he needed to win within the Labour Party, and then pivoted towards the national electorate rather than sticking with a prospectus whose chief appeal was to people who had already been shown to be a minority of a minority. I am not wholly unsympathetic to this view: his ten pledges were mostly bad, and he shouldn’t have made them; but dropping bad policies is better than sticking to them, and winning is better than losing.

After all, Jeremy Corbyn didn’t keep any of his promises, which may be why a recent election leaflet endorsing his bid to be the independent MP for Islington North gives so much prominence to his role in saving the Number 4 bus route.