Winning’s great, but surely it has to be for something?

Art imitating nature is obvious. It’s when nature imitates art that things get interesting. That’s includes reactions to Thursday’s by-elections in England.

As it should be: art imitating nature
Camille Corot, Landscape with lake

For the small number of you who perhaps don’t follow British politics as assiduously as you might, let me explain that these elections were caused by Boris Johnson and one of his friends standing down as MPs, in protest at the gall Parliament had shown in demanding that Johnson account for lying to it. 

There was a third by-election, on the same day, to elect a new MP in place of one who’d got himself disgraced in yet another parliamentary scandal.

The outcome of the elections was one win each for the three main parties. That’s the Conservatives, in government, Labour ahead in the polls and likely to take over, and the Liberal Democrats, working hard to get in on the act. One win each may sound equitable, but all three seats had been Conservative with big majorities, so its two losses represent a major upset for the ruling party. 

That’s the ruling party in Britain for the last thirteen years. It has some startling achievements to its name: worse inflation than any comparable country, a major cost of living crisis, a health service on the brink of collapse and an economy falling apart as a result of that fine piece of national assertion, Brexit. ‘Taking back control’, the backers of Brexit proclaimed, making it ironic that economic decline now seems entirely out of control.

The controversial result of the three is the only one the Conservatives clung onto, in Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, by the slender margin of 495 votes over the Labour challenger. Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party – my own party, I’m a member still – is upset over the loss and knows exactly who should take the blame.

That would be Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London. He recently decided to extend what’s known as the Ultra Low Emission Zone, generally referred to by the melodious acronym ULEZ, to all London Boroughs. That meant it would in future apply to the area covered by the constituency Labour failed to gain.

The ULEZ requires anyone in an older and more polluting car to pay £12.50 for every day they enter the zone. That’s harsh and a lot of people resent it, something on which the Conservatives played in leaflets hammering out the message that this was a Labour measure. Enough voters in Uxbridge and South Ruislip were swung by this campaign to cheat Labour of what was expected to be a win that would have completed an excellent day.

“We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour party end up on each and every Tory leaflet,” Keir Starmer has angrily announced. “We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.”

Even his deputy Angela Rayner, often at odds with him because her roots in the party are far to the left of his, agrees with Starmer on this point. Labour lost the constituency, she claims, because it failed to “listen to voters”.

Here’s the thing, though. Unprecedented heat waves are sweeping huge areas of the world. Records are being broken with painful frequency, as the planet heats up, ice caps melt, and the mercury climbs to previous maximum values or beyond. People are dying – in Italy, for instance – and disasters abound, including fierce wild fires.

Fighting a wildfire in Greece as temperatures soar

It may already be too late to reverse the trend. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try. And the thing about the ULEZ is that it’s exactly that: someone trying to do something about a situation heading towards catastrophe.

In other words, Sadiq Khan’s action was the right thing to do. It may not be a vote winner, and may indeed have been a vote loser. But it’s still the right thing.

So what is Angela Rayner saying? We should be listening to voters even when they’re telling us to do the wrong thing? Is that what leaders do or is leadership about persuading people to do the right thing even when they’d rather not?

And this is what made me think about nature imitating art. It reminded me of a clever moment in that excellent TV series The West Wing. Josh Lyman, who will later help Josiah Bartlett win the Democratic nomination for President and, ultimately, the presidency itself, has yet to make that jump and is still working for a different candidate, John Hoynes. But not enjoying himself. He explains why:

I don't know what we're for. I don't know what we're for or what we're against except we seem to be for winning and against somebody else winning.

John Hoynes: unable to tell Josh Lyman what he’s actually for

Yep. That’s depressing. A political team that’s only for winning and against anyone else winning hardly seems up to leading us towards doing what needs to be done.

It just leaves those who think it’s urgent to do the right thing wondering “what the heck do we plan on winning for?”