Labour’s big relaunch won’t solve its biggest problem: this government doesn’t speak human | John Harris

Farage and Trump are winning because they understand the politics of emotion, while Labour is lost in numbers and statistics

Keir Starmer’s people don’t like the word “relaunch”, but that’s what it is. On Thursday, the prime minister will give a set-piece speech about a “Plan for Change” that really should have materialised back in July. It will seemingly be based on “tangible outcomes” and the insistence that the government machine is newly focused on issues such as early years education and NHS waiting lists, briefed to the media in a blizzard of official statistics. What has triggered all this is not exactly mysterious: amid dire approval ratings and a general sense of malaise and mishap – the latest hiccup is the somewhat farcical departure of the transport secretary, Louise Haigh – his administration is palpably unpopular.

The truth, of course, is that the prime minister and his colleagues hardly attracted much acclaim and affection in the first place. In July, only one in five of the electorate voted Labour. Our electoral system might maintain the appearance of politics-as-usual, but a lot of us know what is really afoot: the UK’s increasing resemblance to any number of European countries, with two supposedly main parties competing for a declining share of the vote, while everything fragments and hard-right populists seize on people’s continuing resentments. As evidenced by Starmer’s recent acknowledgment that “very many people didn’t vote Labour at the last election”, the tension between his government’s parliamentary majority and its dearth of support in the real world remains its defining feature.

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