Starmer’s squandering of a historic election victory is a tragedy nearing its finale | Rafael Behr

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

38% : As Shakespeare has the banished son of the blinded Earl of Gloucester say in King Lear: “The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’.”According to Edgar’s law, there is no opinion poll so gloomy for Labour that it can’t be followed by one even bleaker; no fiscal forecast so bad that the Treasury can’t aggravate it with contradictory signals on tax; no misgivings about Keir Starmer that can’t be amplified by malevolent briefing about a leadership challenge; no social policy so nauseating to the party faithful that it can’t be made grosser still with a relish of cruelty.In that context, this week’s announcement of plans that aim to limit the number of refugees admitted to the UK, modelled on a notoriously mean Danish system, went down less badly with Labour MPs than might have been expected.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.