After all the talk of Labour having alienated much of its core vote, yesterday it went one better and alienated many of its activists.

Total change of direction needed.

These attitudes to rent seeking and environmental issues won’t surprise anyone whose spent time around right wing Labour councillors, btw.

Even setting aside the morality and thinking in purely cynical, electoral terms, is it good tactics to repeatedly ask when workers are going to be sent back to work to get Covid, suggest plunging renters into impossible debt and demand a bailout for big polluters?

I get that we need the Guardian-reading liberals lost between 2017 and 2019, but even if landlords/frequent fliers really are telling you they’re desperate to vote Labour and would do if it was more ‘aspirational’ or whatever, it might be wise to question their sincerity a bit.

Starmer claimed that he wouldn’t try to “score political points”, but he’s just playing the long game with a view to doing exactly that. What’s really distressing is that this approach deprives those most vulnerable to Covid of forthright representation in parliament.

In other words, Starmer is betting his activist base on chasing liberals and Tories. He may think they’ve nowhere else to go, but the Corbyn surge was real, Starmer shouldn’t mistake socialists for Labour loyalists.

Peter Mandelson famously said traditional Labour voters had “nowhere else to go”. That wasn’t true at the time, and certainly isn’t true now of the REAL Labour heartlands- young people and BAME people- now.

The Greens got a million votes in 2015, and potential Lib Dem leader Layla Moran is currently outflanking Starmer from the left. And there’s always the option of those Corbyn surge voters doing what they did before 2017- staying home.

Especially if Bridget Phillipson gets her way and the offer of free tuition is binned.

There is always the possibility for a coalition of hard left, soft left and liberals to win, but for that to happen, liberals- whose voices are disproportionately amplified through a media in which the left is barely represented- need to accept how small and weak they are.

Starmer’s victory has delayed that acceptance, despite him having achieved it by wearing the clothes of socialism.

There might just be a road map to a majority for Starmer, and millions of people want and need him to find it.

But this ain’t it. The maths isn’t there.