That’s me done on this one.

But that, I’m afraid, is bollocks. Again.

Ha ha.

Got me!

👍

Anyway i predict a Tory win by some distance.

@oldmanmtb2,

I disagree, I can’t see the tories winning this by-election. It’s a win for Labour IMO.

I disagree, I can’t see the tories winning this by-election. It’s a win for Labour IMO.

69.57% Leave area.

Electorate very brexity.

Tory win.

Reading the first 1-2 pages of this post seems to me why Labour are struggling in the polls recently.

I have no political affiliations and I believed in the past that you should vote according to the issues of the day and on possible solutions. Many people choose their political affiliations and adhere to that for the rest of their lives (like following a footie team), and there’s nothing wrong with that view. But reading the first couple of pages, and the sneering at the Hartlepool locals is where it’s going wrong, people feel abandoned by the ‘champagne socialist’ elite and their middle class hand wringing followers, and turn to whoever else is talking to them. Remember Emily Thornberry’s white van man remark a few years ago? Well some of you have have repeated that with your attitudes.

I would really like a stronger left in this country as we are so unbalanced politically at this moment but we are not going to get it anytime soon. Labour has tried for many years to make inroads into the Tory strongholds of London and the home counties that they have now been absorbed into them, as a result I feel the people in deprived areas feel they have nobody fighting for them. To simply pass them off as racist scumbags is wrong, education (in whatever form) is key. Racists don’t always stay racist, you can change people’s opinions, usually by giving them hope.

Labour have been the leading party in London for over thirty years now… it’s a long time since London was a “Tory stronghold”, if it ever was (arguably it was only under Thatcher).

The genius is, those areas that allegedly feel “let down by Labour” have moved to voting Conservative while the country has been run by the Conservatives. They may well feel left behind by “those running the country from London”… but that’s under Tory rule… and then they reward the Tories by voting for them.

education (in whatever form) is key

A simple comment, that is no doubt true. The next step… what actions should it inform, and who will carry out those actions?

@kelvin London and the home counties, not just London.

My missus is from the North (a large council estate in South Leeds), and I’m from a very less than affluent background in East London, so I’ve seen it from two very different perspectives over the last 40 years. When I first started going to Leeds in 1979 I was appalled by how racist the ordinary people were and it changed enormously over subsequent years, and this is why I feel just labelling Hartlepool residents is unhelpful.

A simple comment, that is no doubt true. The next step… what actions should it inform, and who will carry out those actions?

I wish I knew mate, I’m not that smart (the result of a poor education?), but I hope someone else is smart enough!

I would really like a stronger left in this country as we are so unbalanced politically at this moment but we are not going to get it anytime soon. Labour has tried for many years to make inroads into the Tory strongholds of London and the home counties that they have now been absorbed into them, as a result I feel the people in deprived areas feel they have nobody fighting for them. To simply pass them off as racist scumbags is wrong, education (in whatever form) is key. Racists don’t always stay racist, you can change people’s opinions, usually by giving them hope.

Hallejulah! Someone else who gets it. Be careful though, when I raised this on the old brexit thread I was called a nazi sympathiser 😏

What we’ll see in this by-election is confirmation of labour’s failure in these areas. Instead of listening and taking the issues which affect people seriously and proposing concrete solutions, Starmer thinks all he has to do is not talk about brexit and wave a few flags to get the jingoistic juices flowing. What he needs to do is start setting out how he intends to help these areas and empower them to help themselves. It’s going to need a whole lot more than flags, british recovery bonds and 2.1% pay rises for nurses.

I wish I knew mate

I wish I did as well. Actually, I wish anyone did.

Actually, I wish anyone did.

Honestly the defeatism and negativity is shocking. There are loads of extremely qualified and experienced people and groups who have amazing ideas about how to solve this and other supposedly intractable problems. The problem is they’re almost all dismissed as dreamers, utopians, radicals, sixth formers, extremists or similar by people who have become so brainwashed by the ‘the way things are’ that they can’t bring themselves to imagine anything different.

If we’re going to solve these issues we need to try new ideas and allow them to fail or succeed on their own merits. Instead we get the usual nonsense that it’s not possible or affordable peddled by the very people who stand to lose from trying somethiing new. If the existing system fails to solve these issues and then obstructs new solutions, then it needs to change. If we’re going to sit around waiting for the likes of the labour party to rescue people then we deserve everything we get.

What are the actions to be taken, and who will carry them out? There are lots of good ideas out there… it’s getting them implemented that’s the issue.

Hallejulah! Someone else who gets it

I’m not so sure

London has some of the poorest wards in the country and that vote Labour, by some margin

I’m ever the optimist, so I reckon that a Tory victory is far from assured, especially if there’s local independents standing

Those that supported brexit have got their wish, they now want change for the better, the tories haven’t delivered that so far.

People don’t give a shit about foreigners when they’re not stressed about keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table.

I think you’ve got too many negatives in there, or too few. It doesn’t say what you want it to say. It currently says:

People give a shit about foreigners when they’re stressed about keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table.

You need an odd number of negatives, either:

People don’t give a shit about foreigners when they’re stressed about keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table.

or

People give a shit about foreigners when not they’re stressed about keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Happy to help.

Thegeneralist: I think it was right the first time. If you’ve got a generally ‘fairer’ and better off society where people feel they’ve got some control over their own lives as well as opportunities for them and their family then you’re less likely to have angry, disenfranchised people looking for a scapegoat.

London has some of the poorest wards in the country and that vote Labour, by some margin

All the major cities are Tory-free zones. All the cities also voted remain

This is the new divide. The former solid labour areas that look enviously at the cities for their investment, and contemptuously for their liberal, remainer, multicultural instincts.

The Tory’s are ruthlessly exploiting this. They were helped enormously in this by the living embodiment of all they were most contemptuous of in Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer is trying to change this but the damage done to labour over the last 5 years in these places was huge.

How bad does it have to be for people in these places to be open to the idea that a rich, privileged, entitled, establishment shyster like Boris Johnson is going to do anything for them?

He hasn’t so far and he won’t. He never planned too.

This by-election will hinge on how many people can see this

There’s a vast drain of talent to cities London being a case in point and also there very much a push in the poorest wards for advancement often from the very poorest who have come to the city from overseas, yes I know there’s pupil premium at work, there’s a drive in London in the poorer wards from new arrivals to make something for themselves in the city.

It seems that there’s a massive culture gap between say Poplar and Peterlee in terms of the view of educational attainment certainly this seems to be very much a post industrial thing, all of the very heavy industries had huge self improvement organisations that were always hugely popular.

I wonder if at the point of perhaps nearly 40 years that the imagination to do more has somehow died culturally. I do wonder if the job for life/big employer tradition has a lot to answer for particularly in say somewhere like County Durham.

Certainly from a purely anecdotal level I think statistics do back it up the level of drive by students in deprived wards in Newham is substantially greater than places I visit in the North.

Starmer is trying to change this but the damage done to labour over the last 5 years in these places was huge.

FFS man Corbyn didn’t make labour a metropolitan elitist party, Blair, Brown and Miliband did. Labour were f**** in the towns and shires long before Corbyn appeared, so please stop with the obsessive delusion that everything wrong with the labour party is the fault of your pantomime bond villain.

Those constituencies didn’t vote Tory when Blair was leader of the labour party.

Those constituencies DID vote Tory when Corbyn was leader of the labour party.

You can argue against my appraisal of Magic Grandad all you like, but thats the only stat that matters. If you set about designing a party leader to be the most electorally repellent to people in places like Hartlepool then you’d come up with someone very much like our Jezza.

I know you don’t like this fact. You and a few others. But it’s true. As the last election proved. In spades.

The labour party is now in a position of trying to repair 5 catastrophically misguided years. That is a monumental task.

So what kind of person IS electable in Hartlepool?

A casual racist who hates the EU?

Maybe the problem is actually insurmountable whilst there’s this vast gap between towns and cities, maybe we’re at the point where actually Towns have way to much electoral power.

Cities are actually just doing there think.

You could almost say that actually moving BBC/Gov Departments out of London is a way of enforcing this, if cities don’t get more electoral power, unlikely with the boundary review then Town power becomes even more pronounced?

If you live in a really down at heel town and you see a city close by thriving the politics of resentment are easy to stoke. It’s taking that and saying “look at that, you’re not far, you can be part of that and live where you are and it’ll be great”

No idea how that is done at all, with Hartlepool it’s super tough there’s nowhere with the exception of Newcastle that close by that’s actually thriving, and getting there is tough…

Electable in Hartlepool, I’d say white middle class male from a working class background who’s been decorated in the forces! Ideally born and bred in the town.

So what kind of person IS electable in Hartlepool?

Given it’s Hartlepool; **** knows. They’ve voted Independent, Tory Labour, some of the Independent councilors have become UKIP only to go back to being independents again…The local Labour party’s in a proper mess and that’s before the MP was accused of Sexual Harassment and ran away*  Tory’s were only 4000 seats behind last year. They voted for a man in monkey suit as Mayor before everyone got a bit embarrassed about the whole thing and abolished the post.

I think it’s easy to point at these local elections and say “First test for Starmer”  or whatever, but folk forget that locals have all sorts of reasons to vote either way…

*sorry, resigned with immediate effect…

What are the actions to be taken, and who will carry them out? There are lots of good ideas out there… it’s getting them implemented that’s the issue.

Getting them implemented requires getting elected, getting elected means getting more people putting their X in a box. That requires them to register to vote and to make the effort to do so.

If you don’t get elected you aren’t implementing your ideas

Those constituencies didn’t vote Tory when Blair was leader of the labour party.

Blair, Brown and Miliband were all losing votes in these areas before Corbyn. They didn’t vote tory in 2017 either. They did finally vote tory when the labour party spent 2 years trying to overturn their brexit decision at the behest of the current leader. They may not have liked Corbyn which is understandable given the efforts of the actual elitists in the party to smear and discredit him, but the collapse of labour support in these areas can’t be explained by your simplistic and hysterical anti-Corbyn bias. To paraphrase, that’s what the world is, rather than how you want it to be. You really should follow your own advice sometimes.

Ha, ha.

Loving the selective reasoning.

Yep, areas of inner cities are also desperately poor yet vote Labour. Funnily enough no one wants to point out that many of these Labour voting constituencies are above the national average for ethnic minority population %.

Yet take an equivalent constituency in economic terms but that is well below the average national % for ethnic minority population and UKIP/Tories do much better and these also tend to have the highest Leave % in the referendum result.

Similar constituencies with one defining difference that the apologists don’t like to draw attention to…

Sheesh….!

🙄

They did finally vote tory when the labour party spent 2 years trying to overturn their brexit decision at the behest of the current leader.

Boll.
Ocks.

Grandpa whipped his MPs to vote to trigger A50 as soon as possible. As if any of the ‘Red Wall’ were trying to mind-read Starmer.

Corbyn tried to pretend to be xenophobic enough to placate them, but the other side were telling them what they’ve really wanted to hear all along.

Racists don’t always stay racist, you can change people’s opinions, usually by giving them hope.

We bombed Germany into the stone age.

You’d have thought that would have learned them, but they were still massive anti-semites for decades after. When push comes to shove people don’t change, only generations.

Yep, areas of inner cities are also desperately poor yet vote Labour. Funnily enough no one wants to point out that many of these Labour voting constituencies are above the national average for ethnic minority population %.

Yet take an equivalent constituency in economic terms but that is well below the average national % for ethnic minority population and UKIP/Tories do much better and these also tend to have the highest Leave % in the referendum result.

Yup.

Could it be that these ethnic minorities value education as a way to get out of their situation as opposed to blaming others for their situation and voting Tory? It’s almost as if it’s easier to be a racist than get an education isn’t it 😀

So what kind of person IS electable in Hartlepool?

They voted for a man in monkey suit as Mayor before everyone got a bit embarrassed about the whole thing and abolished the post.

You don’t do justice to the monkey guy, he was re-elected twice and was in post for 11 years.

They voted for a man in monkey suit as Mayor before everyone got a bit embarrassed about the whole thing and abolished the post.

I know of a city that elected a clown as mayor twice, before they realised how daft he was

he even went on to be PM!

Thats a man in a honey monster suit

It’s almost as if it’s easier to be a racist than get an education isn’t it

Spot on, but it can be expanded further:

It’s almost as if it’s easier to be a racist or blame anyone or anything other than yourself and be led into doing it by shallow propagandists than get an education isn’t it

Hence the constant ‘othering’ and the ridiculous sight of Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson (wouldn’t have got anywhere in life without the old school tie, connections and the consequent ability to get away with lies) masquerading as a ‘man of the people’ who is ‘sticking it to the elite’.

I mean, come on, how can anyone with a more than three functioning brain cells fall for that shit? Really?

You don’t do justice to the monkey guy

Well, he did better than the current Labour MP that’s fo’shure…

You can argue against my appraisal of Magic Grandad all you like, but thats the only stat that matters. If you set about designing a party leader to be the most electorally repellent to people in places like Hartlepool then you’d come up with someone very much like our Jezza.

I know you don’t like this fact. You and a few others. But it’s true. As the last election proved. In spades.

Wrong there toryboy.
Hartlepool backed labour under Corbyn. 17 point swing to red.

Grandpa whipped his MPs to vote to trigger A50 as soon as possible. As if any of the ‘Red Wall’ were trying to mind-read Starmer.

Wow is it possible to have a more revisionist view of recent history? You’re even worse than binners. It’s a simple fact that labour’s doomed brexit policy at the 2019 election where they lost all those seats was the brainchild of Starmer. It’s also a simple fact that their previous 2017 policy didn’t result in the loss of those seats. What’s up for debate is not how damaging Starmer’s brexit policy was in 2019, but how labour would have fared if Corbyn had followed his pro-brexit instincts and rejected it. I suspect a lot of those seats would have remained labour had they done what many of the MPs in those areas were screaming for, which was to unequivocally support the referendum decision and get on with implementing it.

Utter bollocks.

Labour lost the Red Wall because the Tories appealed to their racism/xenophobia as that is their prime motivation. Not working class solidarity. Not a belief in a fairer system. Prejudice pandered to = Red Wall turns Blue.

End of.

I suspect a lot of those seats would have remained labour had they done what many of the MPs in those areas were screaming for, which was to unequivocally support the referendum decision and get on with implementing it.

Aka surrendering to the racism and xenophobia. Just as you’d like them to.

👏

It’s a simple fact that labour’s doomed brexit policy at the 2019 election where they lost all those seats was the brainchild of Starmer.

So much mental loop the loop involved in seeing the 2019 defeat as Starmer’s not Corbyn’s… Less a simple fact, more a koan.