A survey published this week shows that the Streatham and Croydon North MP is one of the least popular figures in the government – and that’s among his own party’s supporters. By WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor
Not liked: in six months, Steve Reed OBE has managed to alienate the nation’s farmers and anyone who has a supply of water
Bad news for Steve Reed. The Streatham and Croydon North MP is less popular than Keir Starmer. And that’s just the opinion of Labour voters.
Labour List, the in-house online publication of the Labour Party, published the results of a nationwide survey of members and readers this week, including an intriguing little survey of who is “in” and who is “out” of favour among Prime Minister Starmer’s Downing Street cabinet.
The poll, conducted by Survation, comes little more than six months since Labour’s overwhelming victory at the General Election, and it seems to reflect the abject disappointment with their approach in government so far.
So while Starmer is taking a battering in the (mostly right-wing) national press, his ratings among Labour supporters must be a massive cause for concern, with a “net favourability” rating of just +13.83, according to Survation.
It could be worse. He could be Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who has a “net favourability” rating among her own party’s supporters of -11.19. And that’s before this week’s Budget.
Or Starmer could be as unpopular as his environment secretary, right-whinger Steve Reed OBE, who scores a dismal +13.51. And that polling was done before his half-arsed appearance on BBC’s Question Time this week, when Reed demonstrated all the warmth and charisma of an amoeba.
Reed, who has been an MP since 2012, in the short time he has been in government has managed to alienate the nation’s farmers, who now protest in their tractors in Parliament Square on a regular basis, while also burdening a vast majority of the country’s households with massive hikes in their water bills, without cleaning the nation’s streams, rivers and waterways remain badly polluted by the privatised water monopolies.
The loss of confidence in Labour, and Reed’s, handling of the big utility firms has not been helped by the environment minister holding unminuted meetings with water industry officials, and accepting lavish hospitality and gifts from organisations closely associated with water companies.
Top of the flops: right whingers like Reed, and his boss Starmer, don’t appear to be winning people over, according to the Labour List polling
Reed’s unpopularity among Labour supporters nationally reflects how many party members in Croydon and Lambeth have felt for some time about the former council leader at Brixton Town Hall, who is known for being closely associated with Starmer’s chief of staff in Downing Street, Morgan McSweeney.
McSweeney’s influence over Starmer, and government policies, might have something to do with the Labour List polling finding that almost half of Labour members think the party is heading in the wrong direction.
More than one-third (40.6%) of respondents said that they thought that the Labour government is governing badly, while 48.9% of readers who said they were party members thought Labour “is heading in the wrong direction”, compared to 40.4% who answered that the party is moving in the right direction.
“It comes amid tension within the party over the government’s plan to reform welfare and wider government spending, and follows deep internal rows over aid budget cuts, WASPI compensation, winter fuel payments and Gaza,” Labour List reported.
Wrong direction: Labour’s rank and file have made their views quite clear
And Reed is clearly aware that, even in his own backyard, he needs to shore up his personal support.
In a remarkable, perhaps unprecedented, move last month by Reed’s Constituency Labour Party, they turned a local, internal election into a news story. Notoriously secretive and resentful of any reporting of their meetings, Reed’s CLP even released the voting figures following the re-election of the local party’s chair.
Labour List dutifully reported this as: “Reed’s parliamentary adviser has seen off a challenge to his CLP chair role in a contest against the suspended Labour councillor and Momentum official Martin Abrams”.
Unaccountable: Steve Reed OBE is able to tweet whatever he wants
MP Reed, or “Spreadsheet Steve”, has been known to keep a close check on the views and affiliations of the members in his local party, and has been accused of conducting periodic purges of leftward-leaning members in his constituency.
And he outraged many party members when, in 2015, he used social media to post a link to a Conservative-supporting columnist in the Torygraph who had written an article that carried the headline “the lunatic wing of the Labour Party is still calling the shots”. Given his party’s propensity for suspending members on the flimsiest of excuses for the odd tweet here and there, it is a wonder that Reed has never been held properly accountable for his own Twatter history.
And this sudden display openness and transparency surrounding Reed’s CLP activity probably had much to do with Reed’s own self-interest rather than any actual interest in accountability. Last year Oscar Harman, the chair of the Streatham and Croydon North CLP, managed to score a job working for Reed. Cushty!
Reporting the outcome of this internal party election was a deliberate display, by Reed and Harman, of their control and power over the local party, and an attempt to undermine Harman’s challenger, Lambeth councillor Abrams.
As an example, get this quote, published by Labour List, attributed to Harman: “The vast majority of members I speak with want to continue to campaign positively for Labour representation at every level – not talk our party down.”
Compare that to Labour List’s own polling this week… Perhaps Harman is just talking to the wrong people?
Abrams, who represents Streatham St Leonards ward, had the party whip at Brixton Town Hall removed last year after backing a motion calling for “an immediate ceasefire and the end to human rights atrocities in the Israel/Palestine conflict”.
Cult: nothing even marginally Stalinistic about this photo op after the re-election of a CLP chair
Before the CLP election, Abrams had hit out at a “serious conflict of interests in people ‘double jobbing’ with a CLP officer post whilst working for our local MP”.
Abrams had highlighted the inappropriateness of having “our CLP being chaired by someone whose main job is to run our MP’s office”.
Previously, MP Reed had also employed a Croydon councillor, Louis Carserides, who at the same time was made chief whip of the Labour group at the Town Hall – responsible for discipline among the party’s councillors.
Abrams, who works as an RMT union official, has accused Starmer, Reed and McSweeney’s government of “blowing that rarest of opportunities by continuing down the road of Tory austerity, cutting frontline public services and placing the financial burden of their ‘fiscal rules’ on the shoulders of working-class people”.
And judging by Labour List’s poll published this week, a large proportion of Labour Party members would agree with him.
Read more: Reed took £1,786 football tickets from water company owners
Read more: Reed group fined for slow declaration of £800,000 donations
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
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