Labour’s credibility is hanging by a thread – the defeat in Hartlepool is just the beginning
When Labour MP Mike Hill resigned his Hartlepool seat in March, many speculated that the by-election would pose a major challenge for Keir Starmer. Few would have believed the Conservatives would manage kind of landslide victory which was announced early on Friday morning.
Just for a government to gain a seat in a by-election is a rarity; to do so while almost doubling its share of the vote and achieving a swing of 16 per cent rips up the electoral rule book.
The Hartlepool by-election result is the latest evidence that tribal loyalties to political parties are a thing of the past and all the old certainties about voter behaviour have gone with them. The sheer scale of the Tory triumph also strongly suggests that the ability of Boris Johnson to cut through and dominate the grey landscape of national politics was an important dynamic. And that holds warnings for the Tories too, because those are fragile foundations for long-term electoral success.
But it is on Labour and Keir Starmer that attention is rightly focused. The loss of Hartlepool was just the most eye-catching element of an alarming picture of electoral disintegration which is emerging as the council and mayoral results are published in many former Labour strongholds.
In Sunderland Labour limped over the line after numerous losses to the Tories and even the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile it looks likely that they will lose County Durham, the epitome of a traditional mining heartland. These setbacks were not confined to the North East of England, either, with Labour losing virtually all its seats in Dudley, Nuneaton and even Harlow in Essex.
This is now an existential moment for Labour. It is not just that it is electorally impossible for it to win without MPs in these places; the party’s fundamental purpose is now open to question.
What is Labour for if the party which was formed by the trades unions to represent working people is rejected so decisively in the very communities most strongly associated with those people and the values which formed its cultural bedrock?
Many wise experts in the burgeoning speciality of Red Wall politics rightly point to the demographic transformation of working class Britain and the importance of newer divides such as ethnicity, property wealth and academic qualifications and their effect on the labour market. But dealing with demographic change is what political parties do.
Labour’s current plight is not because it has been caught on the wrong side of social change, it is because of political choices it has made. It is not demographic trends which have led Labour to enter the last four elections with leaders and policy programmes which, despite their undoubted merits, were actively rejected by many Labour voters. It is not social change which led Labour to elect a Eurosceptic leader nine months before the EU Referendum whose outcome more than anything else has exposed these divisions in its support.
While many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn are clamouring to point out that Labour won Hartlepool in both elections when he was the leader, it would be absurd to blame Starmer personally for the defeat. All the polling evidence suggests that he is a net benefit to the party and any opposition leader would have struggled to make their voice heard over the last year. To a great extent these elections are a hangover from the 2019 general election and have simply re-emphasised what we learnt then.
The weekend will almost certainly bring some more grim electoral setbacks and perhaps a few silver linings. But when it is all done and dusted the onus is on the Labour leader, after a year of trying to keep all parts of his party on board, to set out the political direction he intends to take, a process which is bound to create new tensions within his party. Perhaps the only beneficial legacy of the Hartlepool by-election is that at least he knows that a lot of people will be listening.