Labour’s rout in Hartlepool spells the end of the politics of entitlement
Conservative Jill Mortimer Friday May 7, 2021.
Labour wasn’t defeated in Hartlepool: it was routed. The result sounds the death knell for a certain kind of politics: the politics of entitlement. The sheer size of the majority and the swing to the Tories — 16 per cent — was unexpected, but the message was clear. As the Conservative candidate Jill Mortimer said in her victory speech: “Labour have taken the people of Hartlepool for granted for too long.” As long as they ignore the settled opinion of the electorate in Brexit-voting regions such as the North-East, Labour can no longer expect to get elected anywhere. If this result were replicated in a general election, Labour would be reduced to a pitiful rump. The 2019 result was the party’s worst since 1935, but things could go from bad to worse. In 1931 Labour gained just 52 seats; that could happen again.
It is not just the loss of a seat that had been “safe” since 1964 — the year when Harold Wilson took office and Winston Churchill was still alive. What has been shattered at Hartlepool is the assumption that the party of the Left was entitled to the votes of “the many”, whom it claimed to represent, while the Right stood for “the few”. Of course, neither party was ever entitled to any votes, but of the two, it is Labour rather than the Tories that has come to be seen as out-of-touch. When Shelley coined the phrase (“Ye are many — they are few”) in The Masque of Anarchy some two centuries ago, it had at least the ring of truth: the majority really did want reform, though never revolution. Even when Peter Mandelson held the seat two decades ago, he had a majority of more than 17,000. Now, however, the Left’s claim to speak for the many rings as hollow as its other boasts. On the day that Labour lost Hartlepool, Gary Lineker, reputedly the BBC’s most highly-paid presenter and a fierce critic of the Tories, received a £5 million tax bill from HMRC — a delicious irony.
It should now be clear, if it wasn’t before, that Labour’s loss of the 2019 general election was not just a rejection of the far-Left ideology of Jeremy Corbyn. It was a deeper, more fundamental shift, turning away from the “soft Left” of Sir Keir Starmer no less than the hardliners. If anything, the voters have punished the new Labour leadership for its stubborn attachment to the European Union — reflected in their choice of a Remainer as candidate for a by-election in seat where nearly three out of four people voted for Brexit. Paul Williams had lost his seat in Stockton South in 2019, but was selected to fight Hartlepool without any competitive process. Though Dr Williams was chosen as a slick performer and a GP, his campaign was damaged by his earlier misogynistic posts on social media. Jill Mortimer, the new MP, was initially underestimated as “frumpy”, but came across as a down-to-earth farmer and mother with whom voters could easily identify.
It did not help Labour, of course, that “Super Thursday” happened to be the day when Royal Navy warships sailed to Jersey to protect the Channel Island against the threat of a French blockade. Reactions to this largely symbolic skirmish over fish reflect a broader cultural divide in Britain: those who dismissed it as a stunt belong to the socially liberal, highly-educated metropolitan class, while those who saw the naval intervention as fully justified are likely to be more conservative and less secure in their jobs. The entitled elites have scoffed for too long at the patriotism of those to whom they feel superior. Now the worm has turned. Anywheres may sneer at the Somewheres, but the latter are having the last laugh.
The Conservatives won — not only in Hartlepool, but in local authorities across the country, especially in the former Red Wall regions — for good reasons. They are seen to be delivering jobs in areas that have been neglected for decades, not least because EU red tape is a thing of the past. The Government’s mistakes in the early stages of the pandemic have been forgiven, thanks to the success of the vaccination programme. The horrors from India, now in the grip of a second wave of Covid that is taking an unknown but enormous death toll, are reminding people exactly why they should be grateful to be British.
Above all, we are already in the early stages of what is now certain to be the greatest economic recovery since 1945. The next few years will be tough, but the direction of travel is clear. The Boris Boom is only just beginning.
The Prime Minister will savour this triumph, having been talked down by the media and trashed by a trusted former lieutenant. The results in Hartlepool and in local councils are not only a verdict on the Opposition, but also on the attempt by the BBC and others to build up the “Tory sleaze” stories, spread by Dominic Cummings and other Westminster insiders, into a huge scandal. The public hasn’t bought it. They recognise a bitter man bent on revenge when they see one. They made up their minds about Johnson a long time ago. They elected him to do a job and they expect him to get on with it, once normal service is resumed. “Levelling up” will have to be more than just a slogan by the time he is next due to go the country in 2023.
Yet this is a personal victory, both for Jill Mortimer and for Boris Johnson, as well as a rejection of the politics of entitlement. Sir Keir Starmer will have to do more than reshuffle his team. He needs to sound less like the prosecutor he has been and more like the leader he aspires to be. But if Boris manages to prevent his boom ending in bust, Sir Keir will struggle to make himself heard above the sound of the Roaring Twenties finally getting under way.
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