Hartlepool

Well i did not see that coming i mean come on it was bad enough at the last election when the town of LEIGH went Tory after never been a tory mp now the Hartlepool result is well !!!""*** earth shattering for Labour they say politics is a funny old thing well you can say that again ,Having worked in my time all up and down the east coast of England especially the northern side ,,and witnessing the deprivation, poverty, i am at an utter loss to think why have the good people of Hartlepool returned a tory mp??
The reason it baffles me is that i have had the opportunity to work all over this country of ours ,and seeing for myself the opulence down south and practically full employment it's just baffling .Don't get me wrong i do believe people have the right to elect whoever they choose ,but after the Leigh result ,hand on heart i cannot see what the tory mp has done for the town ..and i realise it will take time but up to press nothing has happened . Another fact that town of hartlepool voted to leave the EU too. So i guess it's watch this space ,finally one ask's WHAT NOW LABOUR???? G.B.

Well, it has been reported that Dominic Cummins, up until fairly recently, frequently told Boris, "You do not lead a Conservative Government, you lead a Vote Leave Government".

Maybe the English electorate also see it that way.

Jeremy Corbyn and his Momentum buddies still have too many fingers in the pie for me to vote Labour again.

GB, the “town of Leigh” hasn’t “gone Tory”!

GB, the “town of Leigh” hasn’t “gone Tory”!

A poll of NHS nurses has 42% backing the Tories and 32% backing Labour. Traditionally it’s the other way round.
It appears that we’re witnessing a realignment of the political landscape.
Tony Blair is the only Labour leader to win a General Election and be born in the last 100 years. He won three but was declared surplus to requirements by sections of the Labour Party.

Because he was too Tory for their liking!

I wonder if Blair could have got elected again if he had not given over to Gordon Brown. Granted he was very damaged by the lies promoting war (Iraq) but seemingly not fatally so. Gordon Brown never seemed to have the popularity which his predecessor at least one time enjoyed.

See the independent candidate in Wigan has beaten the Tory into third place, we'll done!

Not according to the results, Rio.

WiganCentral -

Lawrence Hunt Labour Party -2016 Elected
Joe Worthington Conservative - 938
Benjamin James Thomas Liberal Democrats - 243

WiganWest -

Terence William Halliwell Labour - 1664 Elected
Marie Winstanley Conservative - 572
Ian Dyer Liberal Democrats - 295

Douglas -

Patricia Draper Labour - 1535 Elected
Margaret Atherton Conservative - 495
John Donald MacNamara Liberal Democrats - 159

Bob Brierley won by only eight votes

I have never liked him

https://apps.wigan.gov.uk/ElectionResults/ShowWard.asp?WardID=377&ElectionDate=06+May+2021

Gareth Fairhurst was given a place in Labour's 'hall of fame', for letting them gain Wigan central by splitting the Tory vote!
Big Shoes Gareth!

GB....you say you're at a loss as to why Hartlepool voted tory, and in the same breath say you've seen the depravation and poverty for years when working in the area. Could the reason not be that Labour was in charge in that area but they didn't / wouldn't / couldn't do any thing about the situation you mentioned for too many years and folk just plainly got fed up.

A monkey sporting a red tie would get voted in Wigan elections.... Orrell Tory reign once again

FRECKY ;
I suppose your spot on with your analysis , but again frecky what about our town WIGAN? this town has only ever voted labour but i don't know if you will agree with me that labour has not done a lot for us in wigan ?? IT'S a tricky one but one thing i noticed when working all along the s/coast was the vast difference in those towns compared to ours ,both in jobs / and living conditions its hard for me to put into words what i experienced down there it was at the time of Thatcherism . Don't get me wrong i'm not advocating that in voting labour everything would be rosy ,would you agree that corbyn did a lot of damage ?? Nice to talk do you agree ? so stay safe ,GB.

".... what about our town WIGAN? this town has only ever voted labour ...."

Which, of course, is not true!

Wigan Central -

2004
Gareth Fairhurst (Con) -
Jim Davies (Con)
Henry Cadman (Con)
2006
Gareth Fairhurst (Con)
Jim Davies (Con)
Henry Cadman (Con)
2007
Gareth Fairhurst (Con)
Jim Davies (Con)
Henry Cadman (Con)
By-election, 18 October 2007
Gareth Fairhurst (Con)
Jean Peet (Con)
Henry Cadman (Con)
2008
Gareth Fairhurst (Con)
Jean Peet (Con)
Henry Cadman (Con)
2010
George Davies (Lab)
Jean Peet (Con)
Henry Cadman (Con)

GB..Corbyn was the tories greatest ally.....he has destroyed the labour party and it will be a while before they become a worthwhile opposition, because I think they'll be in opposition for a long time yet....Regarding Wigan, I don't think the council have done a good job overall...I worked for the council for 24 years and could not believe some of the things I saw but couldn't do anything about it....Take care.

Tonka according to BBC website Labour 57 councilors, independents 10 councilors, tories 8 councilors. When I went to school 10 was more than 8, hope it was the same at your school?

"See the independent candidate in Wigan has beaten the Tory into third place, we'll done!"

Is what you said.
And there's only nine councillors in Wigan.

wasn't Gareth another one who was driven off the site

Golden Bear this article from today's Sunday Times may enlighten you.

Labour’s humiliation in Hartlepool is a powerful reminder of a simple point: there is no guarantee that a political party will live for ever. Reduced to its lowest number of seats since 1935, plagued by infighting and now losing one cherished heartland after another, the strange death of the Labour Party is unfolding before our eyes.
Do not let anybody tell you that Hartlepool does not matter, that it is “only” a by-election in the middle of a pandemic. The last time a Conservative was elected in this area, Cliff Richard topped the charts with Living Doll, Ben-Hur was in the cinema, Winston Churchill was still alive and Tony Blair was six.
The Conservatives not only captured the seat after being in power for more than a decade but did so with the sharpest increase in the vote for any incumbent government at a by-election in Britain’s postwar history. Hartlepool is now the 55th seat that the Conservatives have taken directly from Labour in the past two years, 51 of which voted for Brexit.
The questions that now face Labour have been summarised by one senior figure, who told Times Radio’s Tom Newton Dunn: “To be honest, the party is so f***ed it’s not really a question of what leader. It’s more existential. What’s the point of the Labour Party?” Increasingly, the idea of Labour winning the next election looks implausible while theoretically the entire rationale for the party appears to be slipping away.
For Sir Keir Starmer to win the next election he will need about 125 seats, eclipsing the swings that Clement Attlee and Blair achieved in 1945 and 1997. Labour needs to be 12 points clear in the polls, surging through England. Today, it is 10 points behind and losing England.
This would leave Britain with the longest period of Conservative dominance since the early 1800s, before the onset of mass democracy, and cement the party’s reputation as the most electorally successful party in the Western world.
Ever since the successful rollout of the Covid-19 vaccination programme Labour has slumped in the polls and Starmer’s personal ratings leave much to be desired. After everything — coronavirus, Cummingsgate, cronyism, wallpaper — if you ask people who they think would be the best prime minister, Starmer trails Boris Johnson by an astonishing 15 points. Only this week, his approval rating slumped to the lowest since he became leader while Johnson still holds a 15-point lead among the working class.
Yet leadership is only a small part of the story. Starmer, like Jeremy Corbyn before him, is the latest victim of a much deeper realignment of British politics, which is also unfolding across many Western democracies. Hartlepool is merely the latest episode in a much longer story in the restructuring of politics that is leaving Labour on the wrong side of change, staring into the abyss.
The Labour Party was built for organised labour, for a politics that was based neatly on “left” versus “right”, where people’s class loyalties did much of the heavy lifting. But even then, it struggled to connect with a country that remains instinctively conservative. Only three Labour leaders have won majorities at elections and only one was born in the past 100 years. Take away Tony Blair and Labour has not won a solid majority for more than half a century.
This is why, in the 1960s, one unknown academic — Frank Parkin — suggested that the real puzzle in British politics was not why one third of the working-class consistently voted Conservative but why so many people voted for socialism, which was fundamentally at odds with Britain’s conservative roots. The only Labour leader in recent history to buck the trend was the only one who accepted and worked with this basic reality: Blair, who also shed Labour’s socialist clothes. And so its election record over the past 40 years, as Peter Mandelson pointed out last week, reads: lose, lose, lose, lose, Blair, Blair, Blair, lose, lose, lose, lose.
Today, Labour’s disconnection from the wider country is being amplified by a new fault line separating “cosmopolitans” and “traditionalists”, which has little to do with class and much more to do with people’s age, level of education and also their geography: it is values that are now doing the heavy lifting.
Cosmopolitans are the young, university-educated, middle-class Londoners and university-towners who think that Brexit is disastrous, support rising diversity, are passionate advocates for Black Lives Matter and other worthy causes and lean toward feeling ashamed, rather than proud, of Britain’s history. Traditionalists are older, working-class, lack degrees, live in small towns and industrial heartlands and want to see a far more robust defence of the nation, its history and culture.
This rift is giving rise to things that we have simply never seen before in British politics. Just look at the last election: 77 per cent of 18 to 24-year-old “zoomers” voted for socially liberal parties while two thirds of the older baby boomers voted for pro-Brexit parties. Johnson had a 30-point lead among people who left school after their GCSEs, while had only graduates been allowed to vote then Corbyn would currently be prime minister.
The Conservatives are more popular than Labour among people on low incomes while Labour is more popular among people on high incomes. The right is no longer the party of the rich and the left is no longer the party of the poor.
This shift has thrown Labour into chaos, not only because it has cut across the old left-right split but because the party spent the past 20 years investing in only one side of the culture divide. Cosmopolitans flooded Labour’s parliamentary party and membership.
The much larger group of left-leaning traditionalists in the Labour tent, people who lean left on the economy but right on culture, were pushed aside. New Labour walked into the casino of British politics and pushed all of its chips behind middle-class graduates. It paid off in the short-term but set the stage for the revolts of the past decade: populism, Brexit, Johnson, Hartlepool. All of them were driven primarily by workers, non-graduates and hacked-off traditionalists.
“Labour have taken people in Hartlepool for granted too long,” said the new Conservative MP Jill Mortimer last week, the first woman ever to be elected as MP for this town. “I heard this time and time again on the doorstep.”
There is no easy way out. As I explained to demoralised Labour MPs after the 2019 election, they are haemorrhaging blue-collar votes in the small towns and industrial heartlands to apathy or a Conservatism that leans left on the economy and right on culture, and liberal graduates and professionals to the Greens and Liberal Democrats.
Many Labour insiders have feared this nightmare scenario ever since the 2019 elections to the European parliament, when Labour was battered by the Liberal Democrats on one side and the Brexit Party on the other. The party, pushed on by Starmer, made the fatal mistake of falling in behind a second referendum and prioritising Remainia over Brexit Country. And by standing a Remainer in Hartlepool they showed they have still not grasped the lesson.
For the past year, Starmer and his advisers thought they could sidestep this deeper shift by downplaying Brexit and talking up the economy, competence and Tory sleaze. But Hartlepool has blown a big hole in the strategy.
Johnson, the Old Etonian and Oxford graduate, is the beneficiary of the realignment, tapping into the “C2” skilled workers — factory workers, mechanics, plumbers and the “Greggs Guys” — who desperately want to believe in Britain and not be told on a daily basis they are ignorant racists.
The quietly impressive performance by the Greens this week is a big hint that we may well be heading in the same direction as our European neighbours, such as Germany, where cosmopolitan parties are eclipsing the old centre-left.
Fast-forward ten years and I’d not be surprised to see the Greens or Lib Dems as a much bigger force, rallying zoomer graduates, middle-class professionals and city-dwellers in the face of a Labour Party that looks bewildered and lost.
This is why some argue that Labour should cut the cord with blue-collar Britain now, rip off the plaster and turn instead to the emerging “Blue Wall”, more than 40 seats that are filled with millennial and zoomer graduates becoming more liberal over time and trending away from the Conservatives.
But while this strategy might be viable in 20 years, it would be a fatal mistake today. There are nowhere near enough of these seats to compensate for Labour’s losses in northern England. The reality is that Labour is stacking votes in places where it does not need them, such as London, while losing votes where it desperately does, such as Hartlepool.
Here is one statistic that every Labour activist should keep in their heads: of the 44 most vulnerable Labour seats today, 39 are outside of London and the south. These are what I call the “Red Wall 2.0” seats and there is no route back to power for Labour that does not run through them and England, where Labour has still not won the popular vote since 2001.
The fall of Hartlepool, made possible by Brexit Party voters decamping to Johnson, suggests that at least another two dozen blue-collar seats could also fall to the Conservatives at the next election, such as Yvette Cooper’s
Normanton, Pontefract & Castleford, where her majority has been slashed from nearly 15,000 votes in 2017 to barely 1,000 today, or Dan Jarvis’s Barnsley Central, where his majority has crashed from over 15,000 to barely above 3,500.
To hold them, Starmer needs the modern-day equivalent of Blair’s “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, a message that can cut through with traditionalists while not alienating cosmopolitans. Yet spend five minutes on Twitter, where Labour’s “woke” progressives deride such moves as “racism”, and it becomes clear why Starmer is in a fundamentally different position from Blair. As Labour’s organisation has veered left, the flexibility that it needs to meet the existential challenge has diminished.
There are simply no easy answers for a Labour Party that was formed in a world defined overwhelmingly by economics and class, but which now finds itself in a world that is shaped far more by culture and values, leaving many voters like those in Hartlepool asking the same question: what’s the point of the Labour Party?

Matthew Goodwin is professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent

So, Gaffer, did they hang the monkey, or not?

Thank god for copy and paste!

Mathew Goodwin's article and theory may well be correct!
What is the point of the Labour Party-even the name is "old fashioned"
Not many people now "Labour" as they used to for a living. (That's not to say they don't work hard!) Greens and Liberal types will overtake them eventually as is happening elsewhere.
Ps What is Blue on the outside and Green inside? The current Conservative party! Fools!

It is like I have told that Whupsy, and I used to tell Fireplace, the Labour Party you and your ancestors voted for, it no longer exists.

And reading all that in that article, it has left me as a 'floating' voter, with more of a headache, than which is normal when it comes for who to vote for

I am sad to say that I did not vote in any of the elections last Thursday, because I could not make me mind up who to vote for, and in such circumstances, I normally vote for the candidate who is clearly an out and out lunatic, but I couldn't even grasp that this time