UK Labour searches for answers after day of reckoning

[brooklynite]

Source: Politico

LONDON — The Labour Party will launch a root-and-branch review of its policies as it comes to terms with a devastating set of losses inflicted by the Conservatives.

Labour lost the parliamentary seat of Hartlepool — a traditional stronghold — on a massive swing of 16 percent to the Tories, at the same time as its strength was eroded on the councils of bellwether towns such as Nuneaton and Harlow.

After the Conservatives won the Tees Valley mayoralty by a country mile, they have only to secure the West Midlands mayoralty to complete a hat-trick of flagship electoral successes.

Keir Starmer, the party leader, said he was “bitterly disappointed” by the results and admitted that Labour had “lost the trust of working people”.

Read more: https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-labour-elections-hartlepool-england-keir-starmer/

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The UK electorate isn't looking for the policies of Jeremy Cornyn, but neither are they looking for no policies at all. I don't think anyone knows what Labour stands for today.

[Miguelito Loveless]

1. When you keep losing to Boris Johnson's party

Something is seriously wrong with your party and its candidates.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Elections 2021: Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner sacked as party chair

Labour's deputy Angela Rayner has been sacked from her roles as party chair and campaign coordinator following poor results in the English local elections.

The party lost control of several councils and suffered defeat to the Tories in the Hartlepool by-election.

Leader Sir Keir Starmer is expected to reshuffle his frontbench team in the next few days.

Ms Rayner will remain deputy leader of the party as it is a position directly elected by the party members.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57037839

She was blamed for her role in running the council and mayoral polls and the byelection in Hartlepool, but her allies said she was never given control over campaigns that were “run out of Starmer’s office”. As the chair of the campaign, her supporters said she was being set up for the blame.

One frontbencher said that blaming Rayner for the election results was “utterly ridiculous”, after Starmer had explicitly accepted personal responsibility in a statement on Friday.

Party insiders said they believed MP Steve Reed would take over as chair. Reed is close to Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and Labour’s general secretary, David Evans.
...
Meanwhile, senior Labour figures blamed the election fiasco on a failure to understand how Boris Johnson has changed the Tory party so it can appeal to working-class voters, as questions mounted over Starmer’s leadership.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/08/angela-rayner-fired-labour-keir-starmer-local-elections-polls

[Crowman2009]

3. When your party loses focus on what it was originally intended for,

then the voters won't support it. Going Tory-light and not booting out the Blair faction wound up being Labour's undoing.

[brooklynite]

4. Update: In the Hartlepoole By-election, the Brexit Party (now "UK Reform") got 25.8%...

...in a District Labour had previously held with outright majority.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. No, Brexit got that in the 2019 general election. Reform UK got 1% this time

Support for the Brexit Party, which registered 26% in Hartlepool in 2019, collapsed - the successor Reform party secured just 1% of the vote.

It looks as though the Conservatives picked up the Brexit Party's former support, in line with the proportion of Leave voters preferring the Conservatives to Labour to the order of 3/4 to 1.
...
Labour's vote fell 9 points to 29%, so the party clearly lost some of its 2019 support, as well as suffering from the movement of Brexit Party voters to the Conservatives.

Part of the explanation may lie in the success of independent candidate, Sam Lee, who won 10% of the vote.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57019456

Labour had an "outright majority" in 2017 (52.5%), but not 2019.

[Happy Hoosier]

5. Corbyn was a disaster for Labour.

They are lost for a generation.

I hope this is a harsh lesson that that old style of brash socialism isn‘t going to sell to a modern public. Especially when wrapped up with Antisemitism.

It‘s a lesson for us in the USA too.