Guardian Exclusive: Election strategy of ‘not being the Tories’ is a timebomb, says Labour-linked thinktank Compass
Keir Starmer’s focus on winning over voters from the centre-right has delivered Labour a large but fundamentally shallow electoral win and a weak mandate to deliver real change, a report from a Labour-linked thinktank has warned.
The report by Compass, titled Thin Ice, argues that Labour should be less worried about losing 2024 voters to Reform UK and the Conservatives than to the Liberal Democrats and Greens, arguing this is the greater electoral risk.
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The Compass report sets out what it says are the fragile foundations of this victory, noting that Labour won 131 seats with majorities below 5,000, and that its total of votes won in the 31 “red wall” seats taken back from the Conservatives was actually slightly lower than in 2019.
“They won [in those seats] because they were not the Tories, because Tory voters stayed at home and because Reform split the regressive vote,” it concludes.
Campaigner Gary Woollam and Garston independent councillor Sam Gorst after the council’s decision
Dirty tactics and diverted emails as council ramrods through permission for Veolia to process Flixborough-disaster waste chemical in vast quantities – with no benefit to locals
On Monday afternoon, Liverpool City Council’s planning committee approved plans for corporate giant Veolia to vastly increase its processing of a hugely explosive waste chemical, Cyclohexanone, in the middle of a residential area of some 30,000 people.
Cyclohexanone was the chemical involved in the 1974 Flixborough disaster in Lincolnshire, when a failure at an ICI plant processing some 47,000 tonnes of the chemical a year caused an explosion that killed 28 workers, severely wounded dozens of others and damaged buildings more than three miles away.
The new Veolia applications would see an additional 56,000 tonnes a year – broken down into two separate applications of 28,000 tonnes each, on top of a current capacity of around 56,000 (according to Private Eye). Government rules mean stricter vetting for applications of 30,000 tonnes a year. The company wants to take the waste chemical from Intel production facilities in Ireland.
During the meeting – described by veterans of Liverpool planning meetings as unprecedented in the number of councillors and officers in attendance – campaigners told the planning committee of the great risks and that one of the key recommendations of the inquiry into Flixborough was that Cyclohexane waste should never be processed close to residential areas. The council had already approved the processing of around 28,000 tonnes at the site – yet according to campaigners not a single document relating to safety issues has been filed by Veolia in its new or 2021 applications.
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Local independent councillors and residents accused the council of a complete failure to properly consult with local residents and health professionals. The area’s largest health centre has joined locals in objecting to the new development.
When campaigners asked for independent experts to assess the hazards, they were told that ‘we have to trust the [council] officers, they’re independent’. Last month, council officers were exposed diverting emails from campaigners away from their intended recipients – and Cllr Gorst has said that many emails to him and his independent colleague Cllr Lucy Williams had also been diverted:
