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  2. I’m not amazed unfortunately.
    Johnson et al will throw money at them for as long as it will suit.

    The jaw-dropping amount of money lost to Cornwall through leaving Europe simply doesn’t seem to resonate on the street and here (for historic reasons I can’t begin to understand) the Tory boys are safe as houses… so guess how much of that Hartlepool money has trickled down to Camborne or Redruth. The square root of diddley squat, that’s how much.

    The people I blame are the people though. They want old Etonians running the country.
    I can’t bring myself to look at the local results, but it’s obvious that the well-fed ex-public schoolboy with the well-known family name (pro-hunting, of course) would have cleaned up down here.

    I said to one guy last year, “”they think you’re shite, you do know that?” Seems he likes it that way. Oh, and now we can all sabre rattle cos we stood alone when the French bottled it in the war apparently. Seen the front pages today? And they all listen to ABBA and the f***** Carpenters… still!

    The only time I went to Hartlepool my football team won 4-1 and pissed all over them. Quite apt!

    The public get what the public wants, but I want nothing that society’s got.

    • I’ve read the entire thread, and still this is the bit that rings true.
      Government contracts for your mates? People not bothered.
      Belfast in flames again? Indifference.
      Jenrick saving party donor Desmond £45million with a rushed through planning application? Eyelids unbatted. £45 FUCKING MILLION!!
      We are told that Brexit happened as a reaction to the political establishment – cheer led by an Eton/Oxbridge educated Tory MP who earned hundreds of thousands per year writing for the Daily Telegraph. How establishment is that?

      Enough of the people are still strongly onside with the Tories despite all of the above. Given that, I honestly can’t see what any opposition politician could do to make a difference. At the moment, the people aren’t listening or bothered.

        • The old cliche that it takes a good opposition to make a good government is true.

          One of the reasons why Bojo et al are getting away with all of this time and time again is that Labour has ignored the voters who were its electoral backbone and the party is now piss weak as a result.

          It’s easy to criticize Starmer for the shit storm that hit on Thursday, but the guy got dealt a shitty hand on both sides and has only had 14 months to try and turn it around.

          No party in history has ever come back from such a resounding defeat as Labour suffered 18 months ago to win the next election.

          The response from the likes of dinosaurs like McCluskey (Let’s get shot of Starmer, bring back Jezza and tack hard to the left again) tells you why Labour won’t be upsetting that particular apple cart any time soon.

      • This has been a chunk of Labour’s line for ages: in essence it’s “we were right but the voters are thick, selfish, apathetic wankers.” Deselect the electorate!

        Any political party which has a large part of its activist wing saying anything that sounds remotely like the above is going to be DOA. The Labour Party machinery is ruinously dependent on an activist wing which strongly dislikes the exact people it demands vote for it.

        As Gary quite rightly says below, no Labour leader can now get selected without the hard left. The solution isn’t to give them a leader who’s palatable to that constituency: it’s to expel the hard left en masse, establish that Labour is emphatically not a party for them, and let them take their prescription to the people without the scaffolding of Labour to shore them up. Starmer’s the only man who can do it, because his successor as it stands will be from the left of the party. He’s got to screw his courage to the sticking place and destroy them.

        Janice Turner is typically dead right here: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/for-labour-purity-matters-more-than-votes-2fmd6ss89

        • @hedgepig

          Yep, read that – excellent piece

          while I don’r normally care for his columns, Matthew Paris did a very insightful take on the Tories under Boris today, too.

          Well worth checking out if you’ve not already done so

        • That’s not what I said. I didn’t comment on what Labour’s line is or their attitude towards the electorate (and I am aware of deficiencies for sure). What I am commenting on, very specifically, is how the Tory party are governing. Venality. If the people aren’t concerned about that, I really can’t see what purchase any opposition politician can make. Again, I chose the phrase ‘opposition politician’ deliberately – Labour from any wing of the party, Lib Dem, Green, even unwhipped Tory grandee – I can’t see any of them getting any reception at the moment.

        • Mandy says
          “Believe it or not, not on one door that I knocked did a single voter mention Brexit to me.

          The one thing they did raise with me however is Jeremy Corbyn – he is still casting a very dark cloud over Labour. Labour voters are not letting this off lightly, he still gets them going on the doorstep.

          One person said to me ‘Sort yourselves out, sort yourselves out. You picked the wrong brother and you ended up with Corbyn so that’s goodbye to you. When you’ve sorted yourselves out, we’ll look at you again’.”

          • Well yeh but if anyone uses the construction ‘not on one door that I knocked did a single voter…’ while being outside the Home Counties you can officially ignore the rest of the sentence. It’s the law.

                    • One thing that will not get Labour in power again is being pissy about working class Tories, blue Labour, calling the person whose vote they want stupid, racist, “gammon”, etc; telling people who think critically about your doorstep pitch that they are deluded with “false consciousness” (nothing like the sunlit uploads of a Police State socialist paradise in the mid 20th century), telling the working classes what they need is to appreciate their white privilege and inhibit their micro-aggressions, asking what pronouns they want to be addressed by, and the activists still channelling the know-all student member of the Labour Club mentality as they wake up families who have to be up at 5am for tomorrow’s shift. Seems to me that Labour lost the working classes in the 80s, and like the bloke on the beach without trunks, when the sea goes out, suddenly you look exposed, having been able to conceal this previously. The funny thing is, they don’t seem to like it when they DID win.

                    • None of the long list of characterisations you mention are implied by my comment to working class Toryism above, by the way.

                      I am both alarmed and befuddled by ordinary people’s ability to blithely accept the – long understood – norms of the Tory party, as nicely set out by @thecheshirecat up the page, and at the same time profoundly disappointed to accept the likely veracity of Cummings’ analysis as @henpetsgi reports above.

                      And so I draw the conclusion that those working people who think “pro Brexit, anti-immigration, hang pedos, and wave the flag” are even worse when coming from the right than the left, because they are standing on the battlements of unearned privilege when they spout their nonsense and vote accordingly.

  4. Not looking good, is it?

    A lot of people, our Gary among them, are going to say that Labour would have retained a constituency with an ageing demographic of home-owning, Brext-voting, gunboats-in-the-channel, good-lad-Boris, I’m-alright-Jack, pounds-and-ounces proud patriots… by moving to the left.

    I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s not that.

        • If anyone can point me to a case where Labour have won an election by moving further left of the centre, I’ll just be over here not holding my breath.

          Of course the Tories are popular right now. We’re leaving lockdown, the end is in sight, it’s almost summer (albeit probably less so in Hartlepool). People feel pretty good. The government are able to take a lot of the credit for it, partly fairly.

          And Labour is still trying to find its way out of being seen as a party for blue-haired identity-obsessed teenagers who don’t like Britain or the British and use words like “dialectic” instead of talking about fixing the buses.

          • “If anyone can point me to a case where Labour have won an election by moving further left of the centre, I’ll just be over here not holding my breath.”

            Yeahbut, the more centrist leaders don’t seem to have done too well, neither. Out of the seven Labour leaders in my voting lifetime, Blair is the only one who’s proved a winner. And he moved so far right that he buddied with Dubya for a war, no less.

            • I suppose if you’re committed to understanding the Iraq war in terms of left and right, there’s unlikely to be much that will dissuade you from that approach.

              “One leader” rather overlooks the small matter of three back to back elections, resulting in 13 solid years of Labour government, which did a ton of excellent things. Those thirteen years presumably account for a non-negligible proportion of your life.

              And how many Labour leaders in your life have got to be Prime Minister by moving left? It’s almost as if you’ve argued that Labour is infinitely – mathematically infinitely – more likely to form a government from the centre left than from the Corbyn/Benn/Foot left.

              And yet your prescription would be “no more centrism”? The type of Labour which has never won, ever, would be preferable to the type which has spent 13 of the last 40 years actually in power?

              It’s a point of view, I guess.

              • I think the damage done by the Iraq war is the Blair government’s most overriding legacy, with all the suffering it caused, and I don’t think a decent left wing leader would have gone along with it.

                • That’s only the legacy because the no-hoper wing of the party won’t shut up about it, instead of talking about those governments’ achievements.

                  The simple fact is that half of Labour constantly tells the electorate that they are repelled by THE ONE LEADER THEY’VE OFFERED IN 40 YEARS THAT THE ELECTORATE ACTUALLY LIKED.

                  Can’t imagine why they keep losing.

                  • And what’s the legacy of the Labour hard left which is where Corbyn used to belong and who he supported? Years and years of unchallenged rule by the Tories with Thatcher and the rest. A legacy of unfettered Thatcherism. How could a leader with those discredited origins be accepted? A progressive candidate fine but not one tainted by the past in that way.

                    • We’ll never know what a Corbyn government’s legacy would have been, alas. Nor a Miliband’s. Nor a Starmer’s, I suspect.

                  • Labour votes in elections:
                    1997 13.5M 43.2%
                    2001 10.7M 40.7%
                    2005 9.5M 35.2%
                    2010 8.6M 29%
                    2015 9.3M 30.4%
                    2017 12.8M 40%
                    2019 10.2M 32%

                    Labour lost 4M voted between 1997 and 2010. 2.8M before the Iraq war.

                    • Not a party political point particularly,* but the total turnout in 2001 was ten million down on 1997.

                      Ten – fucking – million!

                      (*fetch a cloth, Granville)

                • Yet the current headlines for the Iraq ware would be along the lines of ‘Boris batters Baghdad, Iraqis capitulate’.
                  The truth is the first Iraq war was left unfinished with a nutcase in the region still causing mischief. Blairs mistake was using WMD as the pretext rather than bringing an end to Saddam’s destructive ways. The war maybe was wrong but if the first Gulf War was successfully prosecuted with a wide mandate no-one would have batted an eyelid.
                  Regarding this set of election results Starmer is an insipid leader whose idea of opposition is to back most of what the Tories decide to do. Bring in someone like Jess Phillips to shake it all up.

                • Hmm. I’m not clear that the UK’s involvement in the Iraq war led to *more* suffering. There is a reasonable case that it caused less suffering than leaving the US to go it alone would have done.

              • You can generally gauge what kind of progress you’re going to make with a corbynist by measuring the amount of time that elapses between “Hello” and “TONYBLIARWARCRIMINAL”

                Anything over a minute is pretty good.

                  • I don’t know which part he didn’t grasp, here are the results, you tell us.

                    Labour Vote
                    2019 15,464 37.7% Labour win
                    2021 8,589 28.7% Conservative win

                    • The departure of a left wing party leader would not in itself explain the swing in Hartlepool to a right wing government. The cry of the Corbynista always seems to be that the policies were what the people really wanted, but we just weren’t good enough at explaining them, rather than accepting that the policies themselves coupled with the party leader made Labour unelectable.

    • How quickly the left wing of the Labour party forgets – or, more accurately, chooses to forget.

      In common with a lot of lifelong Labour voters, I could not bring myself to back Corbyn and his momentum mates. If they’re that convinced that the UK electorate is gagging for what they promise, why don’t they simply set up a hard left party and see where it gets them?

      As the only two Labour PMs who have won elections in the last 60 years have both been centrist in their polices, you can understand why the Party swung away from Momentum and back towards the middle.

      While you have to feel a bit sorry for Starmer for the terrible hand he was dealt, he understood the scope and nature of the task he was taking on and should have been a lot more savvy in attacking Johnson.

      • ” If they’re that convinced that the UK electorate is gagging for what they promise, why don’t they simply set up a hard left party and see where it gets them?”
        I’m kinda agree with that, Jaygee. Except I didn’t find Corbyn particularly hard left. Just left. As opposed to “same old, same old” centerist. The centerists can have the Libs.

        • @Gary

          Unfortunately, as it’s in the interest of both the Tories and the Labour Party to keep FPTP ring-fenced, the Libs have zero chance of winning an election. The way Clegg shamelessly rolled over for Dodgy Dave on issues such as student loans during their last attempt at power sharing has also done them no long-term favors

    • @Chiz
      “A lot of people, our Gary among them, are going to say that Labour would have retained a constituency with an ageing demographic of home-owning, Brext-voting, gunboats-in-the-channel, good-lad-Boris, I’m-alright-Jack, pounds-and-ounces proud patriots… by moving to the left.”
      I’m not going to say any of that. On account of I know zilch all about aforesaid Hartlepool. I will mention that Labour won there under Corbyn though.

      PS. I like it when you call me “our Gary”. It’s kinda cute.

      • Ah my flamboyant rhetorical flourishes have let me down again. How about if I edit out the flowery stuff?

        “A lot of people, our Gary among them, are going to say that Labour would have retained (Hartlepool) by moving to the left.”

      • Labour won in Hartlepool in 2019 because a Brexit Party candidate split the nationalist vote enough for Labour to win a plurality. It’s a horrible result but essentially a catch-up.

  5. I don’t think it’s a matter of Right v Left.

    Hartlepool is the biggest Brexit voting constituency in the UK. Generally, the NE and Midlands voted in favour of Brexit. So far, Brexit’s ill effects have been swamped by covid and UKIP/imitators is pointless. Labour will do better in London and the South remaining areas. Even so, it’s poor. Labour needs to come up with a post Brexit strategy more than their current one of we’d-rather-not-talk-about-it.

    • How about a progressive alliance with the Greens? Promote a green based economy with apprenticeships, training, jobs, homes and security. Evidence based politics with honesty and egalitarian principles baked in. Just promote a bloody positive vision of the future not rooted in old socialist/capitalist arguments.

      • An alliance will never happen. Labour loves the first-past-the-post system as they see it as the only way they can win power (with a minority of the vote). Anything that leans towards alliances, coalitions, a fairer voting system will not be entertained until Labour is consistently in third place – and if you include the SNP, maybe they already are.

      • There’s nothing progressive about the Greens – a party that would rather children died from cystic fibrosis than have mice used in medical research to develop better treatments. I’d rather vote Tory.

        • Also their overall prospectus at the last election was batshit crazy, basically “we will spend loads of money”. No inconvenient detail about how to earn it.

          The Lib Dems are equally environmentally concerned and had a fully foster manifesto but many still living in 2010 scream “but your Tories” which is clearly bollocks. I really dispair at the moment. They are talking 10 years of Johnson and I wouldn’t be surprised at all, the combination of a sizable number of unthinking half wits in the electorate and a voting system which disenfranchises the rest will see to that.

        • They also don’t know what a woman is, which unfortunately doesn’t differentiate them much from the other “progressive” parties who have all taken that particular pledge too.

          • Yes. I recall during last year’s Labour leadership hustings, every candidate was challenged on their position on the subject, effectively backing each one to the wall. “That’ll play well in the red wall”, I didn’t think. “Just the focus and prioritisation that we’re looking for.”

  8. The theory which resonates with me most is that many people currently don’t identify themselves as Labour or Tory, so much as pro- or anti-Brexit. While the Tories continue to beat the Brexit drum, however performatively, and even as its failures pile up and industries collapse, they’ll continue to get the votes.

    In the meantime, it seems that Starmer is hogtied by Labour focus groups all saying that he should avoid the subject or risk alienating core Labour voters, so he stays quiet, and instead alienates the anti-Brexiters, who can’t believe he’s allowing the Government to get away with everything… it’s a massive conundrum, and I honestly don’t see a short-term way out, though an all-party alliance against the Tories would be a good starting point…

    • Agree. I’m sure that in strongly pro-Leave places they see Labour as the Remain party so they won’t vote for it whoever is in charge. It’s also that the coronavirus pandemic has thrown a smokescreen over the effects of Brexit, so we’re still not close to the stage where people will be fully confronted with the consequences.

      I’m generally on Starmer’s side, reckon he’s been dealt a lousy hand, although he does lack that touch of charisma that can get more people to listen to what he has to say. And agree that for Labour to have any chance next time around it has to come to an arrangement with the LibDems and Greens; and play a careful game in its relationship with the SNP.

  10. I’ll be interested to see how the votes went by age. My boys in their 20’s feel really disconnected to politics except the Green Party and treat it all with a bit of a shrug. The ‘older’ blue voter gets out and votes for good old Boris for all the reasons Chiz lays out. There is I think a huge number of young voters with no political home. @Martin-hairnet is spot on with a green agenda. It’s a differentiator and a route to those young voters. It may require years for Brexit to play out and unravel and every by election for a while will be influenced by it. A leader and policies that appeal to those young voters shafted by this government is required by an opposition. An opposition who is starting at rock bottom and needs to leave old irrelevant party lines behind and start again. Maybe as much as a 10 year plan….

    • Sorry don’t fully agree with that Dave. For starters Boris has quite cleverly played up his parties Green credentials so not sure what the Green party could bring to the table as a vote catching policy. Unless maybe the 4 day week that they toyed with at the last election.
      When I was in my late teens early twenties the UK was in a dire state – the 3 day week, energy crisis, 3 million unemployed. Politics mattered. It is easy to see why politics was more
      important to the young in those days than it is today.
      Even the seismic event of Covid and the alarming death toll has not dented the Tory party popularity. Pretty remarkable but undeniable.

        • Really?

          The UK£373,.000 Geoffrey Robinson “loaned” Mandy in 1996 was worth a lot more than the £58,000 Johnson borrowed to tart up his flat – even more when you consider the amount of inflation in the last quarter of a century.

          And if that weren’t enough, the stupid fucker went and got caught with his hand in the sweeties jar again with the Hinduja scandal four years later.

          No great fan of Johnson or the Tories, but Mandelson was no Sir Galahad

          • Mandy got what he deserved, but the difference with Johnson is that the latter never has his hand out of the jar. It’s not even his jar or sweets, but he’s having the lot.

            The £58k is just the bit that Brownlow got caught up in. The full cost is thought to be £200k with the Tory party coughing up a fair proportion of that. And then there’s the bills for the nanny.

            Mandy got into trouble twice but Johnson is a serial offender – already on a warning for failure to disclose a 20% share of a house in Somerset, and 9 other instances where he misssed declaration deadlines. Different league to Mandy.

  12. I seem to remember that back in the late 80s and early 90s there were similar sentiments that Labour had become completely unelectable, we’re no longer relevant to modern society and would completely disappear. But then Blair was elected in 97 and for the next ten years the sentiments were reversed.

    The one thing we can guarantee in politics is that nothing will stay status quo and we cannot predict the future intentions. Boris is definitely benefiting from the vaccine success and some of the positives of Brexit, for which the negative impacts have not really been felt yet. Will this still be the case this time next year? Probably not.

    I would hate to see a knee jerk reaction from Labour. They have to continue to build confidence in Keir Starmer as a leader. And whilst there is somewhat of a disconnect with the young and politics, I do think they will be ones that demand change…..

  13. I have voted Green since 1997 and I think the long game will prefer that party, if only in demographinc terms. I think that the twitter generation will drop Labour in favour of a centrist Green party like the fabled hot potato.

    And I hate to do it but can we talk about the deafening silence from Mr Corbyn on his successor? Does Starmer prefer it that he gets no visible support from JC? Is it a good thing?

        • Why should he endorse someone who tried to expel him? Starmer has turned out to be a twerp of the first order. Hope this becomes clearer as time goes on. Intellectually shallow with the backbone of a jellyfish.

          • Intellectually shallow = Post Graduate Degree from Oxford? Backbone of a jellyfish = the man I saw headbutt Jeremy Corbyn before kneeing Jacob Rees Mogg in the balls?
            He may lack charisma, he may be as bewildered and lost at sea as the rest of us left-leaning liberal tosspots are right now but , at least to me, he seems a decent man.

              • He does actually look quite hard – after all his main claim to fame since becoming leader has been being thrown out of a pub. I think he needs to play that up a bit. Turn up at the Commons in a cap-sleeved t-shirt, get a few skull tattoos. His first question at PMQs: “What some, lardarse?”

            • Calling a QC and former DPP, the son of a toolmaker, “intellectually shallow” after 5 years of a peevish, limited crank (whose failure ever to change his mind in 50 years and scraping of 2 Es at A level despite growing up in a Shropshire manor house may or may not be related) strikes me as… idiosyncratic.

            • I meant politically. I’ve no doubt he knows the law.

              But I don’t want to insist.

              BTW ‘decent’ is the word that was routinely used for Corbyn (damning him with faint praise no doubt), until he came close to winning an election. Then he became a terrorist, communist, racist, anti-semite. Politics is funny that way.

              • Fair’s fair. I’m pretty sure he’s not an actual communist. I’m equally sure he’s not decent, unless all the other epithets, which are true, can be overlooked when calling a man decent.

                I know Islington Labour of old. The second he was nominated for the leadership, everyone not Stop The War-adjacent who knew anything about him (and let’s not forget that no bugger other than political nerds had ever heard his name before 2015) were screaming warnings. The man’s never met an enemy of Western capitalist democracy he doesn’t like.

    • I’d love to be a solid Green voter. The main thing that stops me is their policy to ban animal experiments in clinical trials. Sometimes, despite their claims, there is simply no alternative. In the end, I favour helping children with cancer over protecting rats, for example.

  14. Bi-elections often produce strange results. It is the absolute definition of a target seat and can become the focus of one issue with often a low turnout. Next election they often revert to normal. It is a worry for Labour but not necessarily a sign that the whole country would go that way.

  15. Here in Madrid we’ve just lived through the most godawful swing to the (even further) right thanks to our own mini-(female)Trump and her one word campaign: ‘Freedom’ i.e. the god-given right to go out shopping and get pissed and turn Madrid into one big terraza (and just under the surface, Franco wasn’t that bad, immigrants, public health and education are crap ((due to lack of funding maybe, but that’s just a personal opinion)) etc etc). Just two villages in the whole region she didn’t win in… And we don’t even have a Brexit fig-leaf to hide behind.
    So I’m not massively surprised sadly. Just hopeful that we can all actually follow the US for once and there’s a swing back to something close to sanity after this shallow, detail-free and dangerous populist period.

    • Shallow and detail-free. A perfect summary of mainstream media consumption in the UK, as well as style of politics we seem to now take for granted, encouraged by having seen an even greater display of puerile leadership over the pond for the last four years. It also sums up the level of engagement a majority in the UK seem to have with even thinking about changing that reality. When I voted yesterday (Mayoral and PCC Elections), the Presiding Officer told me they’d had about 40 votes all day – from a village of around 300 on the roll. The public gets what the public can’t be arsed to change. I told him that if I had my way voting would be mandatory, a legal obligation. People died to get us the right to be fucking lazy and disconnected it seems.

      • I’m a great believer in the power and influence of the media. I know our Chiz doesn’t agree, but after seeing the absolute master of media-savvy politicians, Berlusconi, practically dictate public opinion for over a decade (and reading Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco on the subject) I remain convinced. I think dismissing that as condescending is very easy (because it undeniably is condescending) but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. It kinda reminds me of what we were discussing about tattoos recently. Nobody would say “I got a tatt cos it’s the fashion”, they’d understandably get a bit miffed at the very suggestion, and yet… it is undeniably the fashion. Likewise, no one is going to say “my opinion is pretty much dictated by the tabloids”, and yet…

        • I wouldn’t deny that the print media has an influence, but how effective it is depends how much you buy into the ‘dim Northerner’ narrative. Just as pernicious, if not more so, is the impact of social media over the last 10 years. Like having this month’s tattoo design etched into your arse, being dramatically outraged on Twitter is a prerequisite of tribe identity for the under 40s.

          It’s not the papers that are tearing Labour apart – they don’t need to. The Tories can just sit and watch all the different factions of the opposition shout the slogans of their separate tribes at each other. It used to be confined to CLP meetings, when you had six different ideologies all claiming to be Labour. Now that battle is fought out on public platforms which a lot of people consider to be their main source of truth. And unlike those party meetings, no one actually listens to the opinions they might not agree with, but they still want to shut them down anyway.

          Look at Starmer critic Owen Jones, a man whose entire contribution to the political debate is built on being offended by other people’s moral impurity. He’s got more Twitter followers than the Daily Mail sells copies.

          • That’s EXACTLY what a transphobic fascist would say.

            (That’s exactly what Owen Jones would say. 😉)

            I must admit I engage very little with social media and I guess I do underestimate its influence.

            As regards the infighting, I remember reading Ken Livingstone’s book ‘If Voting Changed Anything They’d Abolish It’* as a youngster and being very surprised that it was mostly about his battles with the right of the Labour Party rather than any battles with the Tories.

            *Or might have been ‘Livingstone’s Labour’. I can’t remember.

            • Not just Labour. I had a similar experience of reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail – which I expected to be about Nixon but it’s mostly about the internal wrangling of the Democrats.

              • I guess the Left is more prone to infighting than the right because it tends to contain more confliciting ideologies. And the insults come thick and fast from all of them. (Just look at all the insults hurled at the “hard left” from the “moderate left” on this thread. I imagine it’s a great deal worse on Twitter).

                • Certainly is worse on Twitter. It’s carnage out there. Labour needs to be more left wing. Labour needs to be more right wing. The pony being spectacularly missed all round. Johnson must be laughing all the way to his posh wallpaper shop.

    • The answer for Labour back then is what the Tories are learning now: give-em-what-they-want pragmatism, and never mind ideology. (Though Blairism was much more old-world-ideological than modern Borism.)

      At this point, hidebound political ideology – consistency for its own sake – looks more and more like rank naivety at best and irresponsible sixth-form posturing at worst. It’s an unbelievably complex world. Thinking that one approach to it, one consistent school of thought, can get the entire job done is surely just foolishness in 2021.

      There’s a piece in the Graun today that says Labour is basically done unless they clear the decks and start from scratch as a new party. I’d agree with that. I think ideological socialism is as much a cooked goose as ideological conservatism. The world the Labour Party was born into just doesn’t exist any more.

      The Tories won because they’ve realised their old monetarist, trickle-down, small state ideology was a needless drag on their prospects in the modern era. Labour may never have the equivalent epiphany, being – ironically – the more small-c conservative institution of the two.

    • Yes. In 1997 Blair had 56 seats in Scotland. Even in 2010 Gordon brown had 41 Scotland MPs, and the SNP just 6. The figure for Labour is now just 1 with SNP on 48. That’s a huge dent in what was a core element of Labour’s parliamentary make up. It’s hard to think that they will ever be able to make up that kind of deficit in England alone.

  20. Some interesting points from all sides here. Like it.

    I think one of the things that cannot be stressed enough when explaining Labour’s poor performance is how pissed off many of their traditional voters were with the party’s attempts to ride roughshod over the vote for Brexit. The sense of betrayal felt by Labour Brexit voters is compounded by years of feeling ignored and having posh southerners parachuted into safe northern seats. (Hello, Ed Miliband. Got two kitchens in the Doncaster house you seldom see too?) It’s going to take a long time for that feeling to go away and for those voters to look at Labour again. If Boris Johnson gets it right ( a big if), the latter may never happen.

    • The additional, long-term problem is that Johnson has so personalised this government that if things go so badly wrong that the Tories have to replace him (Hello Gove, Hello Sunak) the party will bounce back. fairly quickly.

      Plus as somebody else said, if Scotland leaves the union that’s a thousand-year reich in England right there, under FPTP anyway.

    • I have to admit to being someone who was horrified by the Brexit vote at the time, and probably said some uncharitable and condescending things about those who voted Leave. Inveighed against what I saw as the cliche of the “liberal metropolitan elite”. You know the drill.

      The more I’ve seen since, the more I understand why it went the way it did. There *is* a liberal metropolitan elite which holds ordinary aspiration, patriotism, family and responsibility in contempt, and is vocal about how everyone is living their lives wrong, and should feel ashamed of it. The EU have done a cracking job recently at fulfilling many of Vote Leave’s wildest caricatures of them; Labour became a party of idiot students headed by a foolish anachronism, and now have an essentially decent man trying to hold together a party which is 50% people like him, and 50% people who wouldn’t know decency if it hit them in the face.

      I was wrong. Maybe not about Brexit itself, but I now get why it went the way it did. I get why Labour is repellent to Brexit voters. I get why Boris Johnson isn’t. It’s nothing to do with people being dupes and rubes who believe “MSM propaganda”: in fact, it’s the left saying shit like that which persuades them they’re right to be repelled.

      • @hedgepig acknowledging what you say is a massive deal. Social media throws together like minded people who tell each other how right they are and shout down anyone who raises an opposite view. Consistently sneering and shutting down someone else’s view on family, patriotism, history, music, comedians etc only stiffens that view and entrenches it further. Socialism can find a home and what’s left can find an identity that begins to make the right noises and at the very least make it appear like they’re listening and begin to create an opposition. It’s a long road back.

      • Another example of how little understanding Labour has of its once core voters is that the candidate the Party selected for Hartlepool (one of – if not the – highest Brexit vote(s) in the UK in 2016) is an arch remainer.

        Very, very insightful Analysis piece by Chris Lloyd, Chief Features Writer for the Northern Echo about just how out of touch Labour has become in today’s Times.

        If you can’t or don’t read the whole thing, the last sentence will tell you all you need to know;

        “While Labour could be about to begin another left vs right battle, the Tories have moved on, leaving their opponents to argue about labels that belong in a nostalgia museum”

  21. I think hedgehog just nailed it again. Any assault on people’s identity is repellent and doomed to fail.

    The question is: Can the Labour Party rid itself of these s**ts or is this equivalent to what happened to the UK’s Communist Party after ’56?

  22. Two weeks ago every newspaper, including The Mail, Express, Times etc, was speculating about how WallpaperGate was about to bring Bojo down. Today it’s all about “Ten More Years, Labour Party unelectable forever” etc etc etc.
    I’ve given up trying to understand The World right now. A world where a lying cheating piece of crap can become the President of America and a lying cheating piece of crap can become PM of the UK.
    The North East of England is the UK’s Rust Belt, decimated and empty wastelands where someone coming in and saying “Yup, we took away all your factories and shipyards and all your football teams are crap but now we are going to give you grants and local hospitals and free honey” (all of which you had before but we took away cost they cost too much money but now we realise we can demolish that Red Wall thingie) sounds so much better than “Let’s go to The Durham Gala tomorrow and celebrate The Wallsend Three”

  24. Hartlepool is my home town. It never gets in the news for anything good.

    I’m not based there anymore, but I’m back often.

    I think people make assumptions about party politics here, when there’s more going on locally that drives this. It regularly appears on charts as one of the most deprived towns in the UK. There is no investment and a severe lack of jobs. Having a Labour MP has not helped them. Whilst I’d sooner avoid a sweeping generalisation, I think the high Brexit and Tory votes are about the need and desire for something, anything, to change. I vote left, I’d class myself as a remainer and an idealist, but people can’t afford idealism in these places. They might actually get more investment if the town is now a marginal. The parties may actually do more to fight for it.

    Only 42% of the electorate in Hartlepool voted. Most are probably too disillusioned. The idea that this is called a majority is absurd. The Tory MP is neither from or based in the area. There is an interview going around where she demonstrates no knowledge of or plans for the town. I’m not sure the names on the ballet even mattered.

    I also find the rhetoric “oh they’re stupid, they hung a monkey” is rather lazy and unpleasant given the state of things.

    I’m absolutely gutted it’s turned blue. But I don’t think it’s about Johnson or Starmer. It’s desperation.

    • If you offer people money, they will vote for you. It’s the oldest story in politics.

      I have relatives in Hartlepool and they are not stupid. The fact that Labour – of various shades – have treated them as if they are for decades is shameful.

      If it’s any consolation, Hartlepool is going to get magic money thrown at it it big-style over the next few years, at the expense – literally – of any constituencies dumb enough to vote Labour (I think this thread has proved beyond doubt that anyone who has voted Labour since 2015 should kill themselves for the good of humanity).

      We have three Labour MPs in Hull and a Labour council. We’re going to have a great time over the next ten years, right commuters? Serves us right, stupid fucking communists.

      • PS.

        “Hartlepool is my home town. It never gets in the news for anything good.”

        Same with Hull, and will remain so while the Hull Daily Fail website is edited by an extremely militant LD activist whose current schtick is, “absolutely everything in Hull is awful, including murders – is the Labour council’s fault”. Delightful people.

    • Yeah. This is what the Guardian article I mention above was saying, even though I disagree with a lot of its conclusions.

      Some Boomers and older Xers in the “Red Wall” might be old enough to have the “my dad would turn in his grave” reaction to voting Tory, but the generational / emotional link to the industrial Labour movement is broken in those places now. We don’t really have a large industrial proletariat any more, and Labour still acts a bit like we do (while weirdly and simultaneously trying to jump on the modern identity politics bandwagon). The fetishising of the Durham Miners’ Gala is a good example of that. The last Durham mines closed thirty years ago. Expecting mining culture to have any electoral bearing on a Durham millennial today is like expecting me to have taken Suez into account when I started voting.

    • @slitherf2409

      Sad but true.

      Any gains Labour is making nowadays seem to be amongst well off and well educated younger voters in big cities whose values and concerns have little to do with its shrinking traditional base.

      Starmer really does have a mountain to climb if he’s to stop Labour from becoming as toothless and irrelevant in England as it has in Scotland.

  26. Someone with actual integrity, energy, ambition and charisma has the world at their feet post – COVID. I refuse to believe that we are trapped by all this and we’ll all shrug and say “ah well that’s the way it is …”. It’s not Rory Stewart – although he broke the circuit a little and showed that you don’t have to play the current game to make an impact.

    • Agreed. I find the “boohoo evil media” routine pretty defeatist and misanthropic and, a bit like the very online left in general, it shows no interest in actually changing anything – just verbally opposing and feeling superior to the normies. Things will ultimately be fine again. It just needs the right approach and the right communicator(s).

      • The big question is where are the young people with the passion needed to effect change going to come from? Fought between two old men in their 70s, the US election of last year was like a sad parody of the “progressive reforming 80 year olds” who used to hold power in Russia and China well into the 1980s (Not that the thugs and gangsters in charge of both countries today are any improvement.)

        Look back a few years and I bet many of us here over a certain age could reel of the names of quite a few members of Thatcher’s and Wilson’s front benches from 40 and 50 years ago.

        Don’t know about anyone else of that vintage here, but I’d be hard pushed to name more than one or two of the anonymous paper pushers who make up today’s Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet.

        • The turnout for the 2020 US presidential election was the biggest for 120 years. Those *octogenarians* managed to galvanise some people.

          Turnout was what in these elections? I’m guessing well below 50% for all of them, except maybe Scotland. If Labour can get people to care enough to go out and vote, they might stand a chance.

          Andy Burnham managed to get the vote out. He even won over people who voted Tory for the local council.

          • One of the biggest problems facing Starmer is that the Party has alienated large numbers of its shrinking traditional voter base in favor of young urbanites who lack the numbers needed to win elections

            What he needs to do is start devising some convincing policies that will succeed in persuading those who seem to have given up on Labour to get back out and vote for them again. This obviously isn’t going to happen overnight.

            With Scotland likely to remain a busted flush for English parties for the foreseeable future, it also ain’t going to be as straightforward as it was in the days of Wilson/Blair.

            Would imagine Andy Burnham might fancy his chances as a future leader when all of the dust from 2019 and 2021 has settled.

      • The media thing is factor that can’t be discounted, although we can debate to what degree.

        Let’s not forget two words that cause the majority of the media, especially the tabloids, will sway right: Leveson Two.

  27. I’m reminded of the fabulous Atletico Mince podcast with Bob Mortimer. They run a series of sketches about British managers who destroy and exit football clubs. Pulis, McClaren, Allardyce etc. Maybe Starmer has started the political wing…

    Steve McClaren – Destroy & exit complete (Athletico Mince)

  28. Well, if this is correct, there’s been an overall 3% swing to Labour across the country. It’s not over until it’s over as I understand they say in football. (Hope the link works).

  31. There are apparently another 30 once impregnable Labour seats where the Party’s majority is less than that of the now largely defunct Brexit parties.

  33. Momentum’s latest wheeze, a new political education program/mobilisation in order to facilitate a fully socialist government seems to be an exercise in giving the popular definition of insanity a proper run for its money, considering the wider voting public’s taste for the hard left. It seems that the Bullingstone Cop Circus in No.10 hasn’t a care in the world in terms of any effective balance/opposition. What a state of affairs.

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