It has become apparent during the past year that Labour has refrained from criticising the government too much over the panedemic (it has attacked the government for its incompetence, but not for its corruption until recently) and has refrained from referring to Brexit. Labour has tacitly accepted (until the last few weeks) that most people would not accept the argument that the government is corrupt, or that Brexit could have malign consequences. Labour thus curtailed the space available to it for political manoeuvre and strategy. Labour has appeared to say nothing about policy because it did not give itself permission to say anything.
This failure to communicate anything stems perhaps from a desire to fight the last general election again. Labour was criticised for having too many policies (even thouigh polls showed most of them to be very popular ; it was only when pollsters associated them with Labour that they suddenly became unpopular). Starmer may have drawn the wrong conclusion : that appearing to have no policies at all would win votes.
At the root of this is a sentiment which is deeply rooted in the Labour Party, but unacknowledged: that it is not really entitled to hold power, but that the Conservatives are (a sentiment fully shared by the Conservatives). This accounts for the fact that only the Attlee government is responsible for many achievements of a specifically socialist nature (e.g. the NHS, legal aid, free school meals, national parks) and that the achievements of the Wilson governments were often of a more liberal nature. There is nothing wrong in that ; but it is right to pose the question : why did the Wilson governments not prioritise potentially popular measures, such as the nationalisation of land and of banks ? The economic policies were often 'firefighting' and reactive. To some extent this is understandable, but to have nationalised British Leyland, for example, and not land, gave public ownership a bad reputation from which it has never recovered. (In 1974, in his last book, 'Socialism now', Anthony Crosland included land nationalisation in a list of unfinished business for the Labour Party). If Labour is always so apologetic about its own principles, how can it hope to gian support ?
Labour's reaction to any serious defeat is to embark on another fatuous 'Labour Listens' project (as launched by Neil Kinnock in the late 1980s, with no discernible results). The Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to know instinctively precisely the things which crucial constituencies of the electorate want. Alexander de Pfeffel may be very bad at governing, but he is devoted to campaigning, even when he should be governing. The comparisons with Trump and Modi are instructive.