Labour’s decline into irrelevance is gathering pace
NO amount of spin from Labour strategists can conceal the scale of their disastrous performance in last week’s elections. Across much of the country, their party suffered a spectacular drubbing as the so-called red wall crumbled further in the face of Boris Johnson’s Tory juggernaut.
Remarkably, after 11 years of Tory rule at Westminster, Labour was in retreat in its heartlands, losing over 250 council seats in all.
But the most striking results were in the North-East. This area, once safe Labour territory, has an iconic place in the party’s heritage. For generations, the annual Durham Miners’ Gala was a major event in Labour’s calendar and a symbol of socialist solidarity.
The first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, represented the Durham seat of Seaham. More recently, the region was a citadel of New Labour, with Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson among its MPs.
Today, the Tories are in the ascendancy there, not only in the landslide victory for Ben Houchen in the Teeside mayoralty with 73 per cent of the vote but even more dramatically in Jill Mortimer’s win in the by-election at Hartlepool – a constituency held by Labour since its creation almost 50 years ago. Hammered by nearly 7,000 votes, Labour’s dismal campaign saw the biggest swing to a governing party at any by-election since the war.
SIR Keir Starmer repeatedly says that he has “a mountain to climb” to bring Labour to power. Far from reaching base camp, he has fallen into a ravine.
His party now has fewer MPs than at any time since 1945. In the wake of this latest polls rejection Labour has resorted, as usual, to bitter recriminations, internal strife, and futile manoeuvres against the leadership, epitomised by the row over Sir Keir’s decision to dismiss his popular deputy Angela Rayner as campaign chief.
Labour has been here before. In 1931 the party looked doomed after winning just 52 seats in the General Election.
The outlook was almost as black in 1959 after three successive defeats, prompting some senior figures to seek a change in the party’s name, yet within five years, Labour was back in office.
In the early 1980s, the party’s future was threatened by the breakaway SDP on the right and militant radicalism on the left, led by Tony Benn. Again it survived and went on to flourish under Blair.
This time the crisis looks more serious, perhaps even terminal. Traditional loyalties are breaking down; old allegiances have been shattered. Scotland, once Labour’s most secure stronghold, has already gone. Now the party’s working-class support is collapsing in England.
As this trend accelerates, Labour’s core vote is no longer to be found in the industrial North but in the affluent South. Increasingly the Tories are the party of the workers, while
Labour is the privileged voice of liberal professionals and virtue-signalling students.
In two ways, Brexit has played a crucial part in this fundamental realignment. First it drew masses of patriotic, Eurosceptic working-class voters away from Remainer-dominated Labour and into the Tory fold.
AND second, it brutally exposed how so many middle-class activists, marinated in their worship of Brussels and contempt for Britain’s national identity, actually viewed their own core voters as bigoted xenophobes.
That chasm has widened since the 2016 referendum, partly because Labour’s pro-EU high command tried to thwart the democratic vote for Brexit and partly because of Labour’s embrace of the woke agenda.
In the divisive world of identity politics championed by hectoring social justice warriors, the working-class now find the values they hold dear, like freedom, flag and family, under systematic ideological attack.
Detached from its traditional base, Labour deepens its obsession with victimhood, offering nothing but grievance and despair.
Whereas the Prime Minister promotes an optimistic programme of regeneration and prosperity, Labour portrays Britain as a backward land scarred by irredeemable racism, rampant mental illness, mass deprivation, ruined public services and a shameful past.
Labour cannot be written off entirely. Their fortunes could change with new policies or more appealing leadership. The Tory Government might be hit by an economic downturn. But their prospects look grim. The decline into impotent irrelevance could gather pace.
As the Blairite peer Lord Adonis said at the weekend, no Labour seat outside London or the big cities “can be regarded as safe at the next General Election”.
‘Far from reaching base camp, Sir Keir has fallen in a ravine’