Hartlepool, a By Election massacre

[Suff]

So we know that by elections do not reflect the real state of play for the voters, however the Tories won it and won it convincingly.

I've been poring over the old results on wikipedia and some things stand out. Only one prior by election, when Mandelson stood down. Voting % has been falling since 1997. The turnout was very close to the last by election, 45% after Mandelson and 42% now. However the last by election was a full 3 years after a normal election. No election fatigue with three general elections, a referendum and a by election all within 6 years.

The result is pretty damning though. The results are worse than upside down from the 2019 GE. The Tory candidate got very slightly more than Labour got in 2019, but Labour got 3,000 votes less than the Tories did in 2019. That was with the Brexit party taking 25.8% of the vote, from both Tory and Labour.

This can only be seen as a catastrophe. Yes, they have a chance to overturn this at the 2024 GE, but it is not a good position to start from. In the last by election the Tories got less than 10%. But voters moved from Tory to Lib Dem under the Blair years, only to move back again after Brown lost his only election.

The narrative has been so one sided. Bojo is a clown, Bojo can't run the country, Starmer is so much better than Bojo, Bojo is a liar, Bojo is useless, Starmer is so much more popular than Bojo. I wonder if the people of Hartlepool decided they've had enough of that narrative and decided to show their dissatisfaction with the press, Labour and all the rest of it?

Now the story is "Starmer lost Hartlepool and the clown won it"! I shall be watching closely to see how they spin that one.

[Suff]

Council woes too.

The Tories have taken Northumberland, Dudley, and Nuneaton and Bedworth councils from no overall control.

And Labour have lost Harlow - traditionally seen as an indicator of the national mood - to Boris Johnson's party.

[Workingman]

This might actually be the result that Labour, and other parties, needed.

It could get them to dial in on what the people really want, and not what their comfortable think tanks and focus groups in their brightly lit air conditioned or centrally heated meeting rooms, 'assume' they want.

In the longer term it could be a game changer for British politics - we desperately need it.

In my election I voted for independents and IMO we need more of them than party functionaries.

[Suff]

Agree WM. They need to be beaten round the head until they cheer up and start doing what we want.

Or was that a crack dream?

[Suff]

Khalid Mahmood, Labour MP.

My view is simple: in the past decade, Labour has lost touch with ordinary British people. A London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors, has effectively captured the party. They mean well, of course, but their politics – obsessed with identity, division and even tech utopianism – have more in common with those of Californian high society than the kind of people who voted in Hartlepool yesterday. The loudest voices in the Labour movement over the past year in particular have focused more on pulling down Churchill’s statue than they have on helping people pull themselves up in the world. No wonder it is doing better among rich urban liberals and young university graduates than it is amongst the most important part of its traditional electoral coalition, the working-class.

A bit of superficial flag-waving – reinforced by urgent memos from party HQ – isn’t going to fix that. We have to recognise that the patriotism of these voters runs much deeper than that. They are more alert to rebranding exercises than spin doctors give them credit for. Their patriotism is about historic pride in their places, the heritage and stories of those places, and the Britishness and Englishness of the people and families that call them home.

Quite.

[Workingman]

Not a crack dream.

What Mahmood says is basically what I told the Conservative pollster at yesterday's election - Listen to US and NOT to your focus groups.

There has to come a time when politics is taken back by the people otherwise we lose, all of us lose. I just hope that we wake up before it is too late - I am not hopeful.

I want my MP or Councillor to work for me, or the majority, and not for themselves and their mates - it is not happening. My councillor and his wife, also a councillor, have been in post for almost thirty years. They have become far too chummy with the agenda driven wonks in council who we employ but who work against us.

We need a new system.

[Suff]

We need a new system.

Or new people.

[Workingman]

We need a new system.

Or new people.

That went down well when I mentioned it.

Nobody anywhere in politics should serve more than three terms in office, and no more than two consecutively. Witness the sharp intakes of breath - ah but, no but.... we need continuity. Bless.

[cromwell]

There are lots of reasons why Labour are crashing and burning.
One of them is that they have essentially turned themselves into a minority party.
If you were to mention intersectional feminism just about every Labour MP would know the subject. Nobody down this street would.
Decolonising the country, kneeling for black lives matter, transgender rights - Labour would be all over these.

But in the everyday lives of everyday people these things barely register.
A job, or the chance of one. A certain standard of living. A good school for their kids. Safe streets. These are the sort of things that the majority care about, and that Labour never seem to mention.

In 2019 in our constituency Laboue squeaked in with a majority of 1,180.
In the February 1974 election the Labour majority was 34,941. Those were the days of weighing Labour votes, not counting them. The area has changed. No longer wall to wall pits but smart new housing estates.
Labour has changed as well, but into a party that seems to have lost itself.

[Workingman]

Get your lump hammer and hit those nails, hit them hard!

The party has lost its way since the days of Blair and Brown. Under the weak Miliband Momentum infiltrated the party, they might even have been instrumental in installing Ed knowing that he was weak and could be manipulated. Ed lost badly, as they knew he would, so they then they got Corbyn in and moved it leftwards.

It nearly worked and we ended up with a hung parliament with the Cons getting into bed with the DUP. It could have been a whole different coalition had the SNP not lost so many seats.

Of course Corbyn and Momentum got the blame and a whole new swing occurred. The irony is that the woke social media warriors Khalid Mahmood talks about as taking over the party are more natural bedfellows of the LibDems, but that would be political suicide and they know it.

It is bad for the country as it always needs a strong opposition regardless of which party is in power. I never have and never will vote Labour but like them or not there are some strong players on the Labour side - Benn, Reeves, Cooper, Burnham, Balls, Jarvis, Kendall, and others - it's such a shame they chose Starmer as leader..