How are you actually defining this?
Some of their Midlands results last month surely weren't bad in this regard.
They were impressive in what we might think of as upper working/lower middle class sort of areas, and that's very good for Labour for so many reasons (and, incidentally, isn't it interesting that the sort of people who are especially common in such places are unusually likely to be involved themselves or have family members involved in pay disputes with the government, one way or another?), but I wouldn't categorize those as 'ordinary middle class in Middle England', if you follow. Though there were a few wards here and there that match that description where Labour did win, but you always get a few random results, as you know. Now the LibDems and the Greens on the other hand...
I noticed this as well. Labour are really advancing from a 1983 position (London, Scotland and diverse/young Met seats etc aside) in swathes of the country to try and win a majority. What Labour needed to see was the type of inroads it made in the Midlands/North in the '87 and '92 which the locals confirmed. The Labour brand has been solidified enough to take most of these seats off the table. Labour has been helped by the fact the electorate is much more elastic.
My own view is that the psychological impact of 18 years of Tory rule has effectively been condensed into the last three years. Electoral behaviour has similarly followed both at locals and at by-elections.
The recent locals are most analogous to the 1994 locals, the last under Smith. It's comfortable. Not a landslide. And not Blair.
The difference (Scotland aside again) is that the South is undergoing a massive shift that the 2019 results have somewhat obscured. This is/was core Cameronian territory; what he was able to secure in opposition to ensure that the previous twenty years of Tory/Lib Dem tussling wasn't going to deny them. Sort of. They held out against residual 'Cleggasm' in 2010 but built their eventual majority in 2015 on the Lib Dems collapse.
Now they are estranged. They are at odds with the Tories on Brexit and the culture war proxy. This is where the next election could be a Saturnian apocalypse. What seats fall, and to which party, will undoubtedly be a partially coordinated ground game that won't reveal itself until election night.
