Shattering election night must signal re-think for Labour Party

SOME wise commentators were suggesting, even before the polls closed on the Super Thursday elections, that what Labour needed least of all was a so-so set of results. Better, the political tea-leaf readers suggested, a crash-and-burn kind of night for Sir Keir Starmer than a middling performance that might mistakenly suggest the party was on the up.

Well, from early yesterday morning, when the scale of the defeat for Labour in once deep-red Hartlepool came through, it was clear that election day 2021 has been anything but ‘so-so’ for Labour.

The unfortunate Steve Reed, the Shadow Communities Secretary drew the short straw and was wheeled out onto the Radio Four Today programme to discuss the Hartlepool result. He described it as “shattering” and said the pace of change had not been fast enough.

But already the civil war between the left and the centre in Labour is breaking out again. Former supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, silenced by the disastrous showing for the party under his leadership in 2019, seem reinvigorated. Some were suggesting – ludicrously – that a move back to the left was the answer. It patently is not.

These results, with more bad news likely to build up over the next couple of days as more results from the polls on police and crime commissioners and late counts for councils come in, force Sir Keir Starmer to have a very careful re-think. And the way Labour shifts matters here in the South West as much as it does for the northern Red Wall seats, now pretty much smashed to smithereens.

Because Britain as a virtual single party state over a long period of time, with the Conservatives in an unassailable position is not going to benefit our region. At the moment Boris Johnson is still riding the wave of his stunning 2019 election victory and focussed on growth and “levelling up” as the pandemic crisis eases. It means peripheral Britain, including the Westcountry, is getting some much-needed attention and investment.

But just as Labour was accused of taking northern seats like Hartlepool, for granted, so the same could very soon become true of regions like our own.

We need healthy competition, whether from Labour or the Lib Dems, Greens or Independents, to make the party of government sit up and take notice. So far it is simply not there, particularly when it comes to the main party of Opposition.

Labour has failed to take account of the changing nature of British society. Class-based politics is fading. Tory-baiting no longer works. Today’s aspirational voters aren’t put off by the idea of making money and don’t hate Boris Johnson just because he went to Eton and Oxford. They like him for his patriotism, his gung-ho approach to Brexit and, of course, for his successful roll-out of the coronavirus vaccine programme.

Labour has a choice; go for broke and target even more assiduously the woke, university educated millennials who backed them so strongly in London, perhaps promising to take Britain back into the EU, or try to win back old supporters in seats like Hartlepool? One thing is clear, however, these shattering results mean they must do something.