In an Independant article today, John Rntoul write:

But overall, Labour has moved forwards and upwards from the pit of its worst postwar election result. Professor Sir John Curtice, the one-person national institution, has calculated that the English local elections would have translated into a Conservative lead in a vote across Great Britain of 6 to 7 percentage points. In other words, closing the 12-point lead at the general election by about half.

When the BBC put these numbers into its House of Commons model, it suggested that Johnson’s 80-seat majority would be all but wiped out. These figures are for illustrative purposes only, as they say on those pension-fund statements, and the new boundaries that will take effect in June 2023 will make the next election even harder for Labour to win, but it is not an impossible goal.


Rentoul was never a Corbyn supporter, and has generally backed Starmer, so I accept this is not an unbiased couple of sentences. But if John Curtice has been correctly quoted, progress in terms of electability has been made. Whether that has been at the cost of becoming Tory-lite is a matter of personal judgement.
   

Labour should in normal circumstances be doing much better, and to succeed in future it will have to do so. It will have to win in England, which it rarely does. So I would say that there is still a mountain to climb after the 2019 results. But Labour has made a little progress despite Hartlepool.

I think Kipling has it right about meeting "with Triumph and Disaster/And treating both imposters just the same."