THE Batley & Spen by-election tomorrow has been pitched as a crucial test of Labour leader Keir Starmer.

Starmer insists he does not see it that way, with Labour dismissing the idea that losing the constituency might prompt his resignation.

The party’s recovery from the 2019 general election defeat will take years, they argue, without quite acknowledging that from Hartlepool to Chesham & Amersham, the evidence so far is that it has lost a great deal of ground even since then.

Labour’s candidate Kim Leadbeater has also resisted attempts to portray the contest as a national one, stressing her local roots and placing a marked emphasis on the importance of local democracy and devolved decision-making. 

But the reality is that the Batley & Spen contest does raise many of the issues losing Labour support across the country.

Conservative candidate Ryan Stephenson plays openly on the fact that his party is in government. Having a government MP will make it easier to get the investment that the constituency needs to develop economically, he argues.

Since there is plenty of evidence that the Tories do spend public money disproportionately in their own constituencies, there is not much any Labour candidate could do about that. 

But the bigger problem is that Stephenson’s pitch is linked to a wider narrative of the Boris Johnson government: that the days of spending cuts and laissez-faire are over — Johnson even laid into the “mistakes of the last great crisis,” the bankers’ crash, at the recent G7 summit, attacking policy choices which meant “the recovery was not uniform across all parts of society,” a thinly veiled repudiation of his own party’s austerity agenda under David Cameron.

The Tories, the new mantra goes, are the party of “levelling up.” To this end they will open the purse strings and rip up the rulebook. 

The Subsidy Control Bill announced by Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng today develops the theme: the Conservatives will “empower public authorities across the UK to deliver financial support” by abandoning the EU’s restrictions on state aid.

In “the most important piece of post-Brexit legislation yet” it will “back new and emerging British industries [and] create more jobs.”

It is ironic — given it was the Blairite “third way” that claimed to be moving beyond the old categories of left and right — but Labour’s right-wing leadership are hobbled by an inability to read Britain’s tumultuous recent politics except on a two-dimensional left-right axis that obscures important realities.

Johnson has taken the Tories right, they conclude, based on their more openly aggressive nationalism and attacks on civil liberties.

Meanwhile, Labour was further left under Jeremy Corbyn and lost badly to Johnson. So Labour needs to move to where the people are — to the right.

What’s missing is the appeal of Tory economic nationalism — the promise of renewed national and regional insulation from what the great British Communist Rajani Palme Dutt called “the mad whirligig of capitalism,” the chaotic rule of the global market associated with a loss of industry, meaningful work and agency as people with control over decisions affecting their lives. 

This is how the Tories responded to the huge increase in Labour’s popularity under Corbyn when it promised renewed investment, economic planning and redistribution of wealth — something the Labour right will not acknowledge or understand. 

If Labour lose, it will blame “long Corbyn,” or perhaps George Galloway.

It would do better to acknowledge that despite its sleaze, gaffes and even its genuinely catastrophic failings, the Conservative government is a formidable political opponent still showing a keener grasp of public anxieties and grievances than Labour does — and thus still able to mendaciously pose as the party prepared to shake up a system stacked against ordinary people.