It seems to have gone unnoticed that Johnson has been campaigning ever since he got elected. Also that the pandemic has enabled the government to dominate the media on a daily basis to an extent that no British government has ever managed before.

Millions of people have ONLY seen the government these last fourteen months. Millions have depended on the gov for financial support and...vaccines. Very difficult for an opposition party to be effective in these conditions.

Much of the time the opposition has been barely visible. Just faces on zoom. Debates in a half-empty HoC. Doesn’t matter how good Starmer is at PMQs. Most people don’t see these confrontations and don’t care.

Would Labour have done better if it had been more ‘socialist’? I doubt it, but baiting the left to please the rightwing media hasn’t gained them much either. This is a long term decay taking place, exacerbated by Brexit and the pandemic, which has the ability to wipe out Labour

as decisively as the Liberals were once wiped out. So we face the horrific prospect of a de facto one party (Tory) State. Only two possibilities that could counter that, to my mind 1) That the criminality, corruption and incompetence of the Johnson gang

become too much even for the new breed of ‘Brexit/flag/culture war’ nationalist voter to ignore and 2)A progressive coalition along the lines of what Biden achieved in the US, but unlike the US, it would have to be cross-party, perhaps based on progressive municipal coalitions

Eg. In Sheffield? Depending on how the new council plays out.

Otherwise we will continue to fall into the moral vortex that we have been trapped in ever since the Coalition came to power in 2010, used the crisis to attack the public sphere, and had a flutter at the Brexit Casino