bellaozzydog
rolling turds in glitter
NE has plenty of brass bands also
Hartlepool by-election
- Thread starter PR1Berske
- Start date
NE has plenty of brass bands also
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
this is a product of longer term decline as much as recent tone-deaf remainerism in particular. Thats combined with making it quite clear to the new young/returning old left vote that they can fuck right off. To my eyes they're acting like a party still coasting on the back of a legendary landslide rather than clapped out wankers selling means tested ideas that shouldn't have survived 2008. 'Oh just parachute this Doctor in, they love a doctor and they'll vote for us out of reflex anyway'.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Bang on the money. Labour has been losing millions of its core working class vote over a sustained period of time. From Blair’s high point in 1997 over 5 million votes, largely working class, have been pissed down the drain.
In a seat like Hartlepool the new reservoirs of support that has offset this decomposition aren’t present in huge numbers: no university for a start. Even among the new constituency, as you suggest, Labour are palpably shedding support as Jezza’s ‘legacy’ is disappeared and bland centrism re-emerges
For anyone who thinks this is inevitably temporary and that Labour is too big to fail....
The Rise and Fall of French Socialism
France was once the heartland of revolution. Today, its left is battered, and its far right is rising. To understand why, we have to look at François Mitterrand’s socialist government’s turn from radical reform to neoliberal austerity in the 1980s.
www.jacobinmag.com
Someone posted up an interview with Kieth on Channel 4 last night. After a disastrous few minutes of dribble the interviewer asked him if Labour was committed to a Biden style programme of investment (with all of its contingencies). His response was an unfathomable sequence of triangulation.
Scotland is gone. Working class seats across the deindustrialised towns of England are gone. Both if not for good then for the long term. The new core vote is increasingly alienated.
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Bus Honeygun
This week the score draws are plentiful
The bit I don't get is why with Brexit 'done' people in Hartlepool are still going to vote for the Tories and Johnson in particular.
I don't really know the area that well, but I'm guessing it's very largely Anglo-Saxon white and still mostly working class? Is it a Trump-style Culture Wars thing, whereby they see Johnson as a media personality, a warts and all type bloke, and identify with him rather than either the 'sandal-wearing Islington vegetarian' of Corbyn or the bland middle-classness of Starmer?
For all the talk of Labour losing the working class, it is noticable that they're still hanging on to that vote in the cities and larger urban areas.
I don't really know the area that well, but I'm guessing it's very largely Anglo-Saxon white and still mostly working class? Is it a Trump-style Culture Wars thing, whereby they see Johnson as a media personality, a warts and all type bloke, and identify with him rather than either the 'sandal-wearing Islington vegetarian' of Corbyn or the bland middle-classness of Starmer?
For all the talk of Labour losing the working class, it is noticable that they're still hanging on to that vote in the cities and larger urban areas.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Been working with Paul Embery and on his book and some stuff with Spiked.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
I'm not exactly sure about the ancestral makeup of Hartlepool but I am absolutely positive that Anglo Saxonism has little bearing on voting intentions.
belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
I can’t work out if this is a joke or not
Bus Honeygun
This week the score draws are plentiful
No, could have phrased that better, but a white population with a low proportion from white migrant backgrounds.
Blimey.
Labour's had it coming for years.
averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com
On Entitlement
When I was elected secretary of Stoke Central CLP 10 years ago, one of my first acts was to visit Geoff Bagnall, then general secretary of ...
averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
On your first point how did you imagine things might play out? Working class voters would lend their votes to the Tories and then dutifully trot back into the fold once Brexit was 'done'? That type of scenario, always an unlikely one, overlooks how the issue has been understood by some. Which is that not only was Labour's position a nonsense, but that it was both symbolic and confirmatory of a trend and a long run and growing cleavage between the Party and its previous working class base. As such it was a moment of departure. The breaking point. The mutual turning of backs with no turning round that had been coming for years and over matters - jobs, housing, the general fucking state of the place, the lack of opportunity for youth, the sense of being erased and/or sneered at - where Labour has been in local office and supported at election time for years.
On your latter point, I am not convinced that Labour is hanging on to that vote. It was a vote that mobilised and fused around a specific set of ideas and appeals embodied by Corbyn. it can be specifically periodised. As such that vote can easily fizzle out or diverge back into other parties if it not developed and nurtured. And the signs are that Starmer shows none of the energy or has a basic clue of how to 'hang on' to that vote either.
muscovyduck
Good IT skills and food hygiene competent
that blog has a really nice background image. just sort of satisfying to stare atLabour's had it coming for years.
On Entitlement
When I was elected secretary of Stoke Central CLP 10 years ago, one of my first acts was to visit Geoff Bagnall, then general secretary of ...
Bus Honeygun
This week the score draws are plentiful
I didn't imagine anything, not least that people would return to Labour. My question is why they are now voting for the Tories. Tories lead by archetypal Tory. Twice. Your post is more why they're not voting Labour.
Yeah, it's just continuing the steady decline that's been occurring since 1997, interrupted only by that blip in 2017.
Wrt the left/youth vote, it may be worth looking at first pref votes for Khan, Rees etc. They'll win anyway but I'm guessing that there'll be quite a bit of protest voting backed with a second pref for them.
Even in Hartlepool etc, that left/Corbynite etc vote that's been told to fuck off will be worth a few points off the vote. Not the whole story by a long shot but socialists do exist even in the Red Wall these days
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
The evidence from the polls/leaks suggests that a significant percentage of the Labour vote didn’t vote Labour last time and isn’t voting Labour this time either. That’s what the leak by their disgruntled staffers can be summarised as telling us. The result will tell us how many of those voters, who went Tory last time to ‘get Brexit done’ rather than simply not voting, have repeated the act a second time.
My guess is that, regardless, the segment that went LP/BP/Tory will decline and will continue to do so between now and the next GE. The real story of many communities is not ‘the culture war’ or new Tory converts: it’s the drift away from liberal democracy and a gaping absence of political representation.
andysays
Love and solidarity
I suspect that the Labour vote is being eroded to some extent in the cities and larger urban areas that @[62] is referring to, though perhaps in different ways and for not quite the same reasons as in the former heartlands of the post industrial north.
Areas like Tottenham in London have seen increasing support for the Greens, for instance, who in some ways can be seen as more radical and more relevant than Labour to a section of the population which might previously have voted Labour under Tony Blair.
This group is probably more middle class than traditional Labour voters, but my point is that they're losing significant numbers of them too, as well as the traditional wc voters.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
So what ?
PR1Berske
Alligator in chains by the park gates.
Will you be proven right?!
steeplejack
trapped lbw for a duck
Even if Labour win- somehow, they lose. If they win it will be by max 1,000 votes leaving Sur Kieth desperately trying to present a near-humiliation as business as usual, facing down the pundits, shaking lawyerly hand firmly on the bristling quill pen of leadership.
A Tory victory- well, you know how that goes. Screeching headlines for days about "crisis talks" at Labour HQ and leaks from poisonous watsapp / telegram chats being disparaging about a hopeless, out of touch leadership and sclerotic party machine. Meanwhile Johnson gets to bounce around the place like Mr Blobby on powerrful amphetamines, with the added bonus of not having to see any of his families for a whole 48 hours.
If the saintly "Dr Paul" were a Lancaster bomber at least two engines would be on fire and the crew would either be dead or taking to their parachutes. Only the candidate himself, half dead, googles smashed, face smeared in blood, will be half alive, desperately trying to keep the old wreck airborne.
Very likely a "missing presumed dead" telegram will be sent out in a few days time.
A Tory victory- well, you know how that goes. Screeching headlines for days about "crisis talks" at Labour HQ and leaks from poisonous watsapp / telegram chats being disparaging about a hopeless, out of touch leadership and sclerotic party machine. Meanwhile Johnson gets to bounce around the place like Mr Blobby on powerrful amphetamines, with the added bonus of not having to see any of his families for a whole 48 hours.
If the saintly "Dr Paul" were a Lancaster bomber at least two engines would be on fire and the crew would either be dead or taking to their parachutes. Only the candidate himself, half dead, googles smashed, face smeared in blood, will be half alive, desperately trying to keep the old wreck airborne.
Very likely a "missing presumed dead" telegram will be sent out in a few days time.
DownwardDog
Riding a Brompton with a power meter.
Because Johnson tells the English a story about themselves that they like. That they are special and are worthy of great reward having been put upon by outsiders.
This resonates particularly well in Hartlepool due to an older and culturally introspective population that experienced the deindustrialisation of 1960 - 1990. People also have a curious and utterly misplaced civic pride in the place. They know, as uncontestable fact, that decades of Labour MPs and councils have done nothing for "the town" but enable its decline and they are now going to vote tory as what they see as the only other option.
Or “killed in inaction”
steeplejack
trapped lbw for a duck
a wee bit sneery / strange: H'pool has come on a lot in the last twenty years from what it used to be in the late 80s/90s. It's not a bad town to visit for a couple of days now, plenty to do around.
Strangely Mandelson is quite well remembered / appreciated and a lot of the improvements date from his time as MP. However yes the local CLP is a toxic binfire and has been fragmenting for quite a while. Hence the number of small localist / Bonapartist groupuscules that have emerged in the last while.
Hartlepool is quite a specific electorate- working-class fiercely Brit nationalist / local, with an armed services / British legion culture firmly embedded. Quite similar in some ways to monocultures / ex-monocultures like Barrow, Workington, Blyth. Silvertongued lawyers and a local doctor stereotype from a low budget 1980s soap opera were never likely to play well. If the Tories had selected a working class candidate with an armed services background we wouldn't have even the slight doubts we have about the result today.
PR1Berske
Alligator in chains by the park gates.
There's definitely a reason why the local council had Veterans Party and For Britain members. They attract a working class and "in my day" voting base. Not necessarily racist, even if the parties themselves are. Just a voter that doesn't feel represented by the left even when their demographics would suggest so.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Results are going to seep in gradually over the next 48 hours due, apparently, to covid compliance at counts etc.
ChrisD
.
So I’ll not bother staying up late just for a bit of seepage.... I normally attend local count but for various reasons I’m not even going to 10pm verification. I guess it’s twitter for breakfast then.
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