Things can only get better

The Labour government has to improve its delivery, its management and its coherence in order to deliver its genuinely exciting programme.

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Here’s a question I am surprised I haven’t heard asked elsewhere this week (and forgive me if I missed it): why was the welfare vote scheduled for this week?

I don’t mean why did they press ahead when it became more and more obvious they don’t have the votes. I mean, why did they decide to have a vote that they must have known would, at best, be incredibly painful for backbenchers and lead to a fair amount of public handwringing if they did decide to vote for it, in the week of their one-year anniversary?

There have been more obvious examples of where Labour is going wrong in its political management over the last week. But as a comms person, this struck me as something worth asking.

Any anniversary is going to engender a certain amount of focus, score-taking and retrospective.

Labour did not exactly go into the start of last week likely to come out of that well, but could probably have had more of a mixed response to their first year in power if they hadn’t ended it with their worst week in power. With the Chancellor in tears, the lgovernment’s legislation and spending plans in tatters and a huge amount of the PLP in open warfare with Downing Street.

I have two separate theories as to why they scheduled the vote for last week. I don’t know which is correct, which is worse or if it’s a mix of both or neither. But that I think either is possible tells you both what I think is going wrong with Labour’s political operation and what is needed to fix it.