London (Bywire News) - For weeks Labour had been dreading the Hartlepool election, but even their most dire predictions fell short of the catastrophe which unfolded. The Conservatives outscored Labour by almost two to one. A seat which had once been a Labour stronghold is now as blue as blue can be. Various factions in the Labour party were left trying to decide who was to blame.
For Lord Mandelson the answer was clear. Speaking on the BBC he attacked those who had changed the party since 2010. You remember 2010 of course, when Labour was last in power and the only thing they had going against them was an illegal war, massive economic crisis and an impending election defeat. These are the good old days to which he would love to return.
Others felt the best way forward was to take a leaf out of the Jo McCarthy handbook:
Long thread alert! For @Keir_Starmer to set @UKLabour back on a path towards being a party of government again he must ditch his commitment to unite the party. He now must now set on a deliberate and muscular effort to divide it.
— Ed Owen (@Ed_Owen) May 7, 2021
Such an attitude displays the mix of arrogance, and ignorance which bedevils the centre. For so long they sniped from the side lines at Corbyn and his leadership team. Any other leader, they said, would be 20 points ahead.
Once they got back into control, they told themselves, they would bring back a sense of competence the left was sadly lacking.
Well, they have been in control for a year and the results tell their own story. In Hartlepool they are now more than 20 points behind. It is a similar story across the country as voters treated Labour candidates as if they were lepers. At the time of writing, sources are even suggesting Sadiq Khan is struggling to see of the laughable Shaun Bailey in London, Labour’s last remaining stronghold.
It was Mandelson who told Peter Hain to stop worrying about the working classes because they have nowhere to go. This week, his arrogance came back to bite the party and mostly damagingly, the Labour voters.
The story of the past year has been one blunder after another. There was the bungled nomination for the Liverpool mayor’s post as it barred three women from standing without explanation. There was a visit to a church which had advocated gay conversion therapy, as well as the famous altercation in the pub.
The Hartlepool campaign served as a microcosm of Labour’s problems all in one place. First, they imposed a remain supporting candidate on an overwhelmingly Brexit supporting constituency, from a longlist of just one. They kept going even after it emerged that Labour’s candidate has been on a paid jolly from the Saudi Government and has made a number of alleged misogynistic comments about female Conservative MPs.
The result was a candidate who managed to deter just about everybody. Keir Starmer has done something similar on a national scale. He has failed to attract former leave voters or moderate conservatives while alienating Labour’s remaining base of supporters.
Lessons learned.
So what now? What lessons, if any, will the party learn?
If this statement from the Labour party is anything to go by the early signs are not good.
“The message from the voters is clear and we have heard it,” they said. “Labour has not yet changed nearly enough for voters to place their trust in us.”
Starmer’s own response was not much better. He will, he said, ‘change the things which need to be changed and that is the change I will make’.
If that is the lesson Labour take from further electoral decimation, then the party truly are in potentially fatal trouble. This is a constituency in which 52% of people voted for Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. Even amongst the carnage of 2019 Labour still held onto the seat with a greater proportion of the vote than in 2015.
This disaster may well be down to Starmer and his team. They banked on tempting back socially conservative voters who abandoned the party over Brexit. They did this by getting up close and personal with the flag, saying nice things about the Queen and doing their best not to mention Brexit or any other policy. This is a strategy from 1997. The party is incorrectly focusing on an imagined centre ground which long ceased to be of relevance. Voters no longer seek identity in parties as they once did. Today, political identity is found in emotive issues, such as Brexit, the NHS, Immigration. A pollical party wins by reaching, with researched demographics, issue-led and focused voters. Not meaningless marketing rhetoric. The continued patronising and taking for granted of the electorate is frankly remarkable and stomach churning. How many defeats does it take to change a Labour leader?
This election showed the party’s strategy did not work. It will not work. If the strategy can’t change, the leadership must.
Tweets such as this one sum up the mood:
Keir Starmer went to war with his own core voters and abandoned Labour’s principles in order to curry favour with a handful of talentless columnists who haven’t been right about anything in a decade.
— Ronan Burtenshaw (@ronanburtenshaw) May 7, 2021
He deserves every bit of this. https://t.co/48TUNZ25CB
What they, and others needed, was a bold vision for the future. Hartlepool has been hammered by ten years of Conservative austerity and it is being hammered again by Brexit. Although people may be divided politically, they have much more in common than they would care to admit. They face the same pressures, the same fears, and the same worries about the future. They are crying out for change.
Instead, Labour delivered a vision so vague even their own candidate couldn’t get his head around it.
The result was low turn out across the country with Labour’s voters either staying home or voting for other candidates. Turnout on Hartlepool was the lowest on record according to some sources.
In 2017 Labour managed to inspire young voters and reluctant voters to the polls. They benefited from an army of enthusiastic volunteers who had been inspired by Jeremy Corbyn’s vision for a fairer future.
Under Starmer, there is none of that. He has taken the left for granted. Like Mandelson with the working classes, he assumed they had ‘nowhere to go’. They responded by staying home.
Meanwhile all his olive branches to the right have been slapped firmly back in his face. It was quite possibly the beating he deserves. As to whether he learns from it or not, time will tell.
Keir Starmer expressed his bitter disappointment on Friday:
"I am bitterly disappointed in the results and I take full responsibility for the result and I will take full responsibility for fixing things," he told reporters.
"We have changed as a party but we haven't set out a strong enough case to the country, very often we have been talking to ourselves instead of to the country and we've lost the trust of working people, particularly in places like Hartlepool. I intend to do whatever is necessary to fix that."
(Writing by Tom Cropper, Michael O'Sullivan, Elizabeth Piper, editing by Michael O'Sullivan, James Davey)