Hartlepool heartbreak
In Labour’s ‘traditional’ heartlands, the party’s decline has some way yet to go.
Photograph by concrete&fells on Flickr
Keir Starmer’s first major electoral test as leader of the opposition has ended in disaster, as Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election. The County Durham town now has its first Conservative MP since 1959. It is only the third by-election in 60 years when a governing party has taken a seat from the opposition. Moreover, Conservative Jill Mortimer did not just win, she won big, with a 23 point lead over Labour’s Paul Williams.
The response from Starmer loyalists has been awfully predictable: this was always going to be a tough election, held in a seat with a large Brexit Party vote and at a time when the government is getting huge credit for the vaccine rollout. The new leadership has only just begun to clean up Corbyn’s mess, and the Hartlepool result shows that Labour needs more change.
This doesn’t quite make sense, however, certainly not when you are a party aspiring to win the next general election. Yes, the Brexit Party did well in Hartlepool in 2019 and, yes, it is not surprising that their vote has gone to the Conservatives. The problem is that Hartlepool is not an aberration. There are dozens more Labour seats with a similar electoral profile and dozens more former Labour seats.
As the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush has pointed out, even accounting for the Brexit Party vote, this is still a seat that Labour should be winning easily if it is on course for a parliamentary majority. Moreover, the Conservatives did not win merely by eating into the Brexit vote, the Labour vote also fell by about nine points.
The ‘vaccine effect’ likely played a part, but the scale of the Conservative victory means it was unlikely to be decisive. Neither is this Jeremy Corbyn’s fault. The former Labour leader did much to tarnish his party’s brand, but it’s been a year since he retired to the backbenches. Starmer’s office must own this defeat in full. They chose the date, picked the candidate and agreed upon the message (whatever the Labour message in Hartlepool actually was).
Naturally, the Labour left have come to their own conclusions. Momentum, the Corbynite campaigning group, claimed that Hartlepool could have been won with ‘a transformative socialist message’. Richard Burgon, secretary of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, tweeted that the party now needs to champion the policies in its 2017 and 2019 manifestos.
This… also doesn’t quite make sense. If the people of Hartlepool were desperate for socialism, they would not have voted Tory. Labour also did not exactly haemorrhage support to left-wing groups. The Northern Independence Party, a new darling of red rose Twitter, scored a paltry 250 votes.
What actually happened in Hartlepool? Just like Bishop Auckland, Darlington, Sedgefield and dozens of other seats lost to the Conservatives in 2019, this is a story of long-term demographic change which has eroded Labour’s support in the so-called ‘Red Wall’. They are places whose politics are increasingly dominated by older, socially conservative homeowners, as younger people who form the bedrock of Labour’s new coalition leave for major cities. It is part of a wider re-alignment in British politics, whereby voting preferences are defined less by class and more by education and a range of social values.
There are other factors to consider. Starmer will be hard-pressed to justify agreeing to this by-election taking place on the same day as Tees Valley is expected to re-elect its popular Conservative mayor. Then again, considering the magnitude of Labour’s defeat, that is unlikely to have mattered.
What does this result tell us about England’s changing electoral landscape? On its own, not much. Counting is just only starting in most of the 143 councils up for election this year, alongside some 13 mayoral contests. As always, it is wise to wait until we have a clearer picture. For now, as I wrote in this month’s print issue, it does appear that Labour’s decline in its ‘traditional’ heartlands has some way yet to go. While the party may end up making gains elsewhere, such as in the South West, there is no path to a future Labour government that does not lie through winning seats like Hartlepool.
Much has been written about where Labour has gone wrong. As for what the party is actually supposed to do, well, that is markedly thinner literature. At some point, Starmer better have an answer.
