The party’s one-man self-destruct button strikes again
Agusty breeze is ruffling children’s hair and strewing drifts of foam across the shore at Seascale in West Cumbria. Walkers are bending into the elements, dogs are chasing balls along the silvered mudflats. It’s a familiar, enduring snapshot of any British beach – yet the winds of change are blowing through the political landscape.
Here, in the shadow of the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, electoral history was made this week when traditional Labour supporters switched allegiances and elected a Conservative, Trudy Harrison, to represent them in Westminster.
Concern over threatened cuts to maternity services and the safeguarding of Moorside, a major new nuclear power station, topped the official campaign agenda in Copeland.
But as the post mortem into Labour’s humiliating defeat begins in earnest, the party must face up to the fact that it wasn’t the NHS or the economy that lost it the election; it was Jeremy Corbyn.
“Jeremy Corbyn is a one-man selfdestruct button who is going to blow the Labour Party to smithereens,” observes Shaun Davies, 55, out walking his two labradors on his day off; like almost everyone in the area, he works at Sellafield.
“He has no understanding of this community and the importance of Sellafield to us. His anti-nuclear views, however he dresses them up, have alienated and insulted everyone here. Would we work there and bring up our children near by if it was unsafe? How dare he imply that.”
His views are echoed by Michael Pettitt, a taxi driver and lifelong Labour supporter until now.
“Labour no longer represents the working man; Jeremy Corbyn is a complete liability. I’d rather have voted for the Monster Raving Loony Party to show my disgust and anger.”
As it was, he registered his disillusionment by doing the next best thing and voting Ukip; one of just 2,025 people in this sprawling constituency who did so.
In the final count Labour won 11,601 votes to the Conservatives’ 13,748. Harrison is a local mother of four with an impressive can-do manner and a keen insight into local issues.
Corbyn made just one low-profile visit to Copeland, but time and again his name was summoned on the stump as a byword for all that was wrong with politics in general and the Labour Party in particular.
Elizabeth Foster, a Tory activist, had travelled up from London to knock on doors and canvass for Harrison. The visceral response to the Labour leader’s name surprised her. “In all my 40 years of campaigning I have never come across so many diehard Labour supporters who told us they were going to vote Conservative for the first time,” says Foster.
“I’d like to think it was all down to my persuasiveness, but I think we owe much of our success to the Jeremy Corbyn factor because people would rather change the habits of a lifetime than endorse him in any way.”
Perhaps it ought to be no surprise, given that the previous MP, Jamie Reed was one of his fiercest critics, claiming the Labour leader “sought to inject an unprecedented poison into our party”. Chat to any of the locals and it becomes evident that the Curse of Corbyn extends the length and breadth of a constituency that takes in a sweep of coastline and a swath of the Lake District.
Further to the north is the handsome little Georgian town of Whitehaven. With its interesting architecture and charming harbour it ought to be a tourist honey pot. But a lack of investment and poor road and rail connections have left it behind. It is this moribund infrastructure which has fuelled the outrage at proposed closures of maternity services. The 40mile journey to Carlisle takes over 70 minutes in antiquated two-carriage diesel trains and almost two hours by road; unthinkable for a woman experiencing complications in labour.
Yet no matter how emphatically Labour promised to protect the NHS, the doubts were insuperable.
By-elections are usually viewed as an opportunity to cock a snook at the government of the day, but what is striking about the Copeland campaign is the extent to which the Labour leader was vilified. It was his personal views, to some degree his personality, that prompted the backlash against his party. Terms most often used to describe him included “stubborn”, “out of touch” and “just not interested in what goes on outside London”.
As a way of differentiating herself, not from the other candidates, but her own leader, Copeland’s Labour candidate, Gillian Troughton, took to parroting “I am pro-nuclear, no ifs, no buts”, so often it became something of a catchphrase, however lacking in catchiness. But the trouble was nobody believed that she was speaking for her party.
“There wasn’t much we could do once any constituent brought up the subject of Jeremy,” admitted one Labour activist who declined to be named. “No matter what assurances we gave, they just shook their heads and said they didn’t trust him and by extension, us. I’ve literally lost count of the number of times people said ‘I won’t vote Labour again until there’s a new leader’.”
The Labour win in Stoke will have ameliorated the loss of Copeland but there’s no disputing its significance.
Rank and file voters are clearly saddened – maddened – by the Curse of Corbyn. He may yet self destruct. The Labour Party must urgently decide whether or not to join him.