Politics

Part superficial and part dead serious, what does the Hartlepool result mean for Labour now?

There is a whole jumble of explanations for this by-election defeat but one thing is clear: the last thing the party needs is another civil war

May 07, 2021
Starmer leaves his home in North London this morning. PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
Starmer leaves his home in North London this morning. PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

The Hartlepool result is both more profound and more frivolous than it seems. As a pole-axed Labour Party sinks into yet another bout of sectarian bloodletting it risks missing both halves of this.

There is no arguing with the seismic arithmetic of the result. Against the baseline of the miserable win eked out amid Labour’s crushing national defeat in December 2019, the party lost getting on for half its total number of votes. The Tories, meanwhile, increased their absolute vote, mopping up virtually all of the large local vote share for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party to cruise home with an outright majority of the ballot.

The total swing to the Conservatives, now 11 years in power, was 16 points. That is the sort of number a functioning opposition can normally expect to achieve against the government in mid-term. It is more than twice the swing suffered by Jeremy Corbyn’s party at Copeland in 2017 at the height of another of Labour’s nervous breakdowns. That defeat had itself immediately entered the record books because, barring special circumstances such as an MP resigning and seeking re-election under new colours, no governing party had snatched an opposition seat with a meaningful majority since a splendid night for Disraeli at Worcester in 1878.

Soul searching, then, is certainly in order for a party on the wrong side of such a calamity. Unfortunately, however, in the Labour Party soul searching reliably lapses into solipsism and civil war. Interviewed in succession on Radio 4 this morning, John McDonnell for the party’s left and Peter Mandelson for the right settled old scores with rival interpretations.

McDonnell blamed the failure on Keir Starmer’s lack of “vision,” and brushed aside Britain’s big thumbs down for Corbyn’s red in tooth and claw 2019 manifesto with the single word “Brexit.” Mandelson said voters had, for a decade, looked at Labour and thought “you picked the wrong [Miliband] brother,” and reduced the party’s rare electoral successes to the words “Blair, Blair, Blair.” If McDonnell seemed unable to own up to just how unpopular Corbyn was in places like Hartlepool, Mandelson seemed to have forgotten that at the height of his hero’s national command, this town—which he then represented—was already sufficiently out of love with Labour to elect a man in a monkey suit as its mayor.

The interesting thing, though, is not what divides the Mandelson and McDonnell readings, but want what unites them. Namely, the assumption that the result is all about what Labour is doing and the positions it takes. Labour’s capacity for puritanical self-absorption is hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t spent time in and around the party. For Bevanites, Gaitskellites, Bennites, Blairites and Brownites in turn, while the opposition may have lain across the floor of the House, the real enemy has been found within. Who now can even remember what the last two were arguing about in the simmering row which dominated the first political decade of this century? The contrast with the care-free cavalier culture of the Conservative Party, in which the Europhile bon viveur Ken Clarke once chanced his arm on a pact with Europhobe Vulcan John Redwood, is extraordinary.

Conflict always commands attention, and Labour factionalism is a gift for headline-writers. But in Hartlepool—as in Scotland before it—it is a distraction because Labour’s collapse is not principally about anything that is happening inside Labour at all. Since the serious rot set in north of the border in the 2011 Holyrood elections, Scottish Labour has tried every flavour of leader, from trade union leftist Richard Leonard to Blairite outrider Jim Murphy, along with various semi-political modernisers and machine fixers. None of it has made any difference, because some things—in this context, nationalism—are simply bigger than Labour.

On this serious reading, what risks being missed in Hartlepool is less political than sociological: the accelerating reorientation of politics away from its 20th-century faultlines. In the years since 2015, even away from Scotland, British politics has existed in two parallel countries. Steve Fisher of Oxford University calculates that over the last two general elections, in those seats—including Hartlepool—that backed Leave in the referendum, opinion had swung by almost 5 points to the Tories, while in Remainia it had swung towards Labour by nearly 4. Brexit is now “done” and no longer dominates our day-to-day politics, and yet what the Hartlepool result really suggests is that this realignment continues. Which might suggest it wasn’t really about Brexit at all.

Labour’s first task ought to be to track down the true root of the trouble. The grimmest analysis is that—exactly as happened long ago in many places in the US—communities that have broken economically are eventually fated to embrace a flag-waving politics of nostalgia, which nurses identity instead of offering solutions. But that’s not the only reading. The patronising presumptions of the successful professionals in big cities about older, shrinking and less-educated towns may be another: analysts like Will Jennings have traced divisions on such lines back to at least 2005. A different analysis again—which will be both more intelligible and more comforting to the left—is that property ownership is the new great divide. Incomes may be low in places like Hartlepool, but people on ordinary wages have a chance of owning a home in a way unimaginable in London.

After a calm and forensic diagnosis of the root of its troubles, the next task for Labour is—or should be—some cool calculations about the shape of a new potentially winning coalition. It will involve taking back many lost heartlands, but maybe not all. Look to the US, where Biden won nationwide last year while being crushed more than two-to-one in that traditionally safe Democratic state of West Virginia. Another feature of Labour’s insular gloom is that the crumbling heartlands command far more attention than the gradual trend towards improving performance in London, other big cities and university towns.

But enough of the earnest analysis—the other big thing about Hartlepool is that it was the triumph of a chancer. The single most stunning statistic about the by-election is nothing to do with Labour: it is the way that the Conservatives have marched from a vote share of just 10 per cent in the town’s last by-election, to replace Mandelson in 2004, to 52 per cent today; they continued to languish on the floor there as late as 2015, amid a national Tory triumph. As well as everything else that has changed, let’s not forget Boris Johnson. His clowning on the national stage appears to provide the same welcome cheer that Hartlepool once found in monkey mayor H’Angus. The man inside the ape suit, Stuart Drummond, was elected three times before locals finally gave his job the boot in a referendum. Will Johnson’s luck last so long? Who knows, but it is worth noting that after those last two great government by-election gains—in 1878 and 2017—both Mr Disraeli and Mrs May ended up stumbling at the general elections that followed.