On my way back from the shops yesterday, I passed two neighbours chatting in the street outside their houses. A woman in a hijab with her small child was bantering about ice cream with the bloke next door, who was audibly Eastern European. They obviously knew each other well, and got on. Friends, not starngers.

This is in Thurrock, an area that was Brexit central, with a 72.6% leave vote in 2016. I find that, nevertheless, this is an area that is converging with Brent, where I normally live, the most ethnically diverse borough in the country. My neighbours in both places are not simply diverse, they are also ethnically mixed. As is my family.

When I used to analyse the ethnic monitoring stats for the school I used to work at in Islington, the fastest growing group was “mixed”. So, far from immigration making us an “island of strangers” many of us are getting on well enough to be as intimate as you can get.

In this context, and in the wake of Keir Starmer’s pedestrian dog whistling about immigration on Monday, Labour List’s article Local elections: Reform took four times more Labour seats than other parties is disingenuous. It implies, without stating it, that the loss of SEATS to Reform must mean that there is a loss of VOTES to them. And what follows from that is that there is a need – in the framework of the sort of electoral pragmatism that cares not what platform a Party stands on so long as it wins on it – to “address the concerns” of Reform voters in order to win those votes back.

This is a fallacy for three reasons and one principle.

1. Reform has the momentum on the Right, and cannibalised the Conservative vote. Whether they will eat the whole Party before the next General Election is open to speculation, but it seems likely. These elections were held for the most part in Tory held areas that have been Conservative since the Jurassic and have now voted for a different, even worse, kind of Conservative Party (in the hopes of getting back there).
2. The Labour vote did not migrate to Reform in a big way. It mostly stayed at home. Feedback from the doorsteps in the Runcorn and Helsby by election was that it was the cuts to winter fuel allowance that was the biggest demobiliser; so people who voted for a change from austerity and “hard decisions” taken at the expense of the poorest last Summer, were now less than enthused by what the Party had to offer.
3. The government has been trying to cosplay Reform for some time, even to the extent of putting out ads boasting about how many people they have deported in Reform colours (which would be taken by most people as a Reform ad anyway, so self harm in more than one respect). The week of the elections saw announcements on a tougher line on immigration from Yvette Cooper on the presumption that the approach “Reform is right about immigration, we are trying to stop it, vote for us to stop Reform” would do anything other than legitimise them; and demoralise anti racist Labour voters. And, so it came to pass…

Tony Blair remarked after the 2017 General Election that if Corbynism was the way to win, he didn’t want to take it. Given the interests that have made him an extremely wealthy hollowed out husk of a man, this is hardly surprising. But the point applies in the opposite direction. Anyone even pretending to be on the Left who starts trying to exploit – and create – false divisions in our communities is doing the Right’s job for it. For the Labour Party, a lurch onto Reform’s xenophobic turf is a jump into quicksand.

The next lot of local elections will be in the cities. Reform is likely to still make the running on the Right. Labour, if it carries on trying to compete with it on its own terms, while presiding over austerity and an arms drive, instead of making a sharp turn to wealth taxes and investment in infrastructure, public services and green transition, will shed a collosal number of votes, to the Greens, to Independents (especially purged former councillors) even to the Lib Dems in some places, and many will stay at home.

Apologetics of the type that Labour List just published, will help drive that outcome.