Andrew McKie: What can Starmer do to save Labour?

You may take that as an illustration that improving matters (or achieving your objectives, which might easily not be the same thing) is hard, because of unintended consequences, bureaucracy, the crooked timber of humanity, or some other excuse.

You may, in fact, take the unsatisfactory nature of reality and general cussedness of things as a further indication that Something Must Be Done. If so, you’re probably just temperamentally political; something – paradoxically – about which nothing can be done.

READ MORE: Andrew McKie: Is the conversion of political class to green issues all it seems?

But your average professional politician takes this a step further, with the kind of futile insistence on action that I mean. When it is crystal clear that not much can be done about a situation, they insist on doing something, anything, simply so that they can be seen to be taking action – as if that were, in itself, some sort of intrinsic good.

Which brings me to Sir Keir Starmer’s exciting reshuffle of his shadow cabinet. Personally, I doubt that the message being sent by the people of Hartlepool was that they wouldn’t vote Labour until Nick Brown and Valerie Vaz had been sacked and Angela Rayner either demoted or promoted or both, depending on who you speak to.

But even if Sir Keir’s rejigging of his senior team had been better handled, more ambitious or extensive, or done something genuinely useful, such as expelling every member of Momentum, it would still have been a largely pointless course of action. Because the conclusion which anyone would draw from the English election results – and which, since he is not an idiot, I suspect Sir Keir himself has reached – is that there are no circumstances in which Labour can win an election in the foreseeable future.

This doesn’t make all action a waste of time, but it makes it pretty well pointless for Sir Keir himself. He is in the unhappy position, similar to that of William Hague during Tony Blair’s first term in office, of being the leader of a party that stands no chance of returning to power until several things happen.

William Hague

The first is that the party changes profoundly, the second is that the public forgets what it has been like recently, the third is that voters get fed up with the Conservatives – currently, whatever the view looks like in Scotland, in the happy position of being both popular and lucky – and the fourth is that the demographics of the entire country shift.

The corresponding problems are that Labour currently has no idea how it ought to change: worse, large chunks of its membership remain unaware that it needs to and – again, rather like the Tories in the late 1990s – think that they ought to be offering more of what has just been comprehensively rejected.

That, of course, is an impediment to the public forgetting the electoral catastrophe that was Jeremy Corbyn’s period as leader, especially when he was on the radio yesterday bizarrely claiming that Labour’s principal problem was Peter Mandelson. The third problem will, as with all governments, eventually solve itself, though as the examples of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair show, it can take a very long time and isn’t in any case something within Labour’s control. And the same is true, with knobs on, for the last point.

The realignment of English voting, with the Tories picking up seats in the North and Labour’s gains coming exclusively in liberal, metropolitan seats, especially in London, has led some to speculate that there could simply be, over the next few years, a kind of reversal. The “Red Wall” of the North can be compensated for by Labour making inroads in a southern “Blue Wall”, according to these optimists, who have seized on the party gaining a few council seats in places like Worthing and Tunbridge Wells.

The trouble is that the arithmetic doesn’t work. You can’t win an English election on metropolitan votes alone, partly because they are geographically concentrated. In fact, almost by definition, any vote heavily reliant on the young, graduates and cosmopolitan liberals is going to be concentrated.

READ MORE: What does Scottish Labour's Anas Sarwar do next?

This is a psychological problem for Labour, too. Its most ardent supporters don’t know anyone like them, or who lives near them, who would dream of voting Tory, so they can’t imagine why anyone would. This makes it easy for them to conclude that they are morally superior, and that their opponents are wicked, selfish, racist or thick; probably all of them.

This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs because, even for those who don’t reflexively think the current Westminster government is doing badly or is ill-intended, it should be challenged robustly. This is true of all governments, of course, but Boris Johnson’s freewheeling style makes it particularly necessary. But his is also a free-spending government, so Labour’s usual approach – spending more on public services – isn’t really an option.

Though there is, as yet, little sign of Labour recovering here, the Scottish party may be in a better – or slightly less terrible – position than its counterpart south of the border. Anas Sarwar, just in the job, looks as though he could provide a personable and credible opposition, given a fair wind. Whether he does may matter to Labour at Westminster, because there is one caveat to my opinion about the arithmetic of English realignment, and it’s this: it doesn’t add up, unless you also have an awful lot of Scottish Labour MPs.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.