The UK just had their 2021 local elections, and once again Labour got kicked in the yarbles:
The Conservatives have continued to sweep aside Labour in its traditional north-eastern English heartland.
The party lost control of Durham County Council, which it has run since 1925, losing 15 seats as the Tories took 14.
This follows the Conservatives winning the Hartlepool parliamentary by-election and receiving 73% of the vote in the Tees Valley mayoral election….
So far, the Conservatives have made a net gain of 12 councils, while Labour has lost control of eight.
You may think “Oh, Labour lost some local elections, big deal,” but the wounds are deeper than that. The areas they’re losing aren’t marginal toss-up districts, they’re places that made up the Labour heartland for decades:
These are all seats held by Cabinet Ministers in Blair's first government. None are held by Labour today.
Sedgefield-Tory
Kirkcaldy- SNP
Edinburgh South West-SNP
Copeland-Tory
Ashfield-Tory
Darlington-Tory
Redcar-Tory
Hartlepool-Tory
Airdrie and Shotts-SNP
Edinburgh East-SNP— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) May 7, 2021
Labour’s traditional constituents continue to leave the woke, EU-loving, Brexit-hating, Corbynite-riddled Labour Party in droves due to the naked contempt that party now regards them with:
So, the working-class revolt against the Labour Party continues. The ballot-box uprising of December 2019 – when millions of voters across the Red Wall switched from Labour to the Tories – is still in full flow. Hartlepool, Labour since it was founded in 1974, has now fallen to the Tories, with a staggering majority of 7,000. Labour councillors in Derby, Dudley, Sunderland and elsewhere have been unceremoniously turfed out of power and replaced with Tories. The results so far are ‘shattering’, says Labour’s Steve Reed.
‘Shattering’ is the word for it. What is being shattered is politics as we knew it, the alignments that defined political life in this country for generations. The Hartlepool by-election and the English local elections – at least what we know of them so far – confirm that the relentless realignment of British politics will not be halted anytime soon. The mass working-class defection to the Conservative Party; the colonisation of Labour by middle-class graduates; the transformation of Labour from a party of working people into a metropolitan machine more concerned with gender-neutral toilets and taking the knee than with what working-class people want and need – anyone who thought these historic shifts and quakes would be reversed by having sensible, forensic Sir Keir Starmer at the helm of Labour has just received the rudest awakening imaginable.
What Labour centrists must now admit is that their party’s travails run far deeper than the Corbyn effect. Another thing that has been shattered is the much gabbed-out idea that once Labour jettisoned Jeremy and the cranky trustafarians and Fisher-Price Marxists who made up his support base, then it would go back back to being a normal party with a shot at power. In truth, while Corbyn’s time at the top was undoubtedly disastrous – the anti-Semitism, the swapping of class politics for identity politics, the Britain-bashing – something far more profound is driving the working-class revolt against Labour.
To the fore is the issue of Brexit. These election results look like a continuation of working-class voters’ rejection of the Brexit betrayers – most notably Labour – and their lining up behind the party that at least promised to Get Brexit Done: the Tories. It still blows my mind that the political class thought it could try to stitch up the largest democratic vote in UK history and there wouldn’t be severe, long-lasting consequences. This extraordinary naivety was on full display in Hartlepool, where arch-Remainer Keir Starmer stood arch-Remainer Paul Williams in a seat in which 70 per cent of people voted for Brexit. Do they think working-class voters are stupid? The answer, as we know, is yes, of course they do.
A key lesson of the local elections – as with the 2019 General Election – is that working-class people take their vote seriously. They do not take kindly to the elite’s bigoted efforts to undermine their right to vote. Many working-class voters look at Labour and see a party of over-educated operators and activists who shamelessly devoted much of the past five years to frustrating the vote for Brexit. This is why they revolted against Labour in 2019, and why they revolted yesterday too – because democracy is important to working-class voters. They don’t have newspaper columns or a seat in the Lords or thousands of Twitter followers or some other means to make their voices heard. They only have the right to vote. You mess with that right at your peril, as Starmer and Williams surely now know.
Another problem is Labour’s embrace of identitarianism and its shamefacedness about Britain. From Emily Thornberry’s haughty sneer at a working-class household that was flying the English flag to Starmer’s taking of the knee to the regressive politics of Black Lives Matter, from Corbynistas’ claim that British history is one horrendous crime after another to Labour politicians’ rage against the Sewell report for daring to suggest the UK is not actually a racist hellhole – working-class voters clock all of this. Not surprisingly they do not feel enthused by the ideology of national shame now promoted by many in Labour, or by the snotty suggestion that loads of Brits are racist. A cartoon in Private Eye captured it well – it featured a Labour candidate doorstepping two working-class voters and asking: ‘Why won’t you racist fascists vote Labour?’
Following this most recent working-class revolt against Labour, there has been a shrill, unseemly spat between Corbynistas and Starmerites over who is to blame for Labour’s troubles. The disingenuousness from both sides is staggering. The truth is that these two middle-class factions have far more in common than they would like to admit. Both backed a second referendum; both looked upon Brexit voters as a misled, idiotic mob; both are repelled by the social and cultural values of working-class communities; and both are convinced that Britain and most of its inhabitants – Them, not Us – are potty xenophobes. The revolt against Labour is more than a reckoning with Corbynism or Starmerism – it is a democratic confrontation between working-class communities and a political elite who they believe, quite rightly, views them with contempt, disdain and pity.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Dr. Rakib Ehsan says that wokeness is killing Labour:
Last night showed yet again that large swathes of the country are sick of being treated with patronising condescension by Labour politicians and student activists. Labour was crushed in the Hartlepool by-election and suffered ward losses in multiple northern regions, with Conservatives gaining control of Dudley, Nuneaton and Bedworth councils.
These areas, with their high numbers of traditional blue collar workers, are leading the charge against a woke agenda that has almost destroyed their traditional party. Working class voters are sending a clear message: they do not need a ‘political re-education’, and they reject the fundamentally warped interpretation of British society held by some of the most vocal Labour representatives.
They see that too many Labour politicians are in thrall to a toxic racialised politics, the extent of this became clear when Sir Keir Starmer ‘took the knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter. The movement’s calls for the abolition of the police and a post-capitalist society reflect a crude identitarianism that carries no truck with the vast majority of Britons. Only one in ten of people in this country are in favour of reduced investment for local police forces.
Labour is also too comfortable with elements of the London elite that proudly vilify provincial voters who supported Brexit. It doesn’t help matters that Sir Keir Starmer was the chief architect of Labour’s second referendum policy – an exemplification of the metropolitan, anti-democratic tendencies which have taken hold of the party. It was, naturally, electorally disastrous.
It seems the primary distinguishing characteristic of the Labour Party days is unbridled, withering contempt for actual laborers. A party consisting of a woke urban elite pushing victimhood identity politics and condemning anyone that disagrees with them as “Little Englanders” will never enjoy the support of a majority of voters, no matter how many times that call Boris Johnson horrible, racist and xenophobic. Labour can continue to cling to the religion of wokeness, or they can be a competitive political party. They can’t do both. Until Labour realizes this, it’s just going to keep committing protracted, slow-motion suicide.
Speaking of which, I chuckled:
— James Moran (@jamesmoran) May 8, 2021