Split The Left Vote? Thelma Walker *IS* The Left Vote In Hartlepool
Up for grabs is:
21 county councils
124 unitary, district and borough councils
13 directly elected mayors
39 police and crime commissioners (35 in England, 4 in Wales)
There are also elections in the parliaments and assemblies of Scotland, Wales and London, the last in conjunction with the London mayoral election.
But the one that has got everyone talking is the Hartlepool by-election, following the resignation of Labour incumbent, Mike Hill.
That’s “Hill”, not “Hunt”.
The Hartlepool seat has been held by the Labour Party since the constituency was created in 1974. 70% of the Hartlepool electorate voted to leave the EU, which was one of the highest margins across the country. The constituency is in part of what used to be called Labour’s “red wall”.
The Labour candidate hoping to hold on to the seat is Dr Paul Williams. He was running to be a police and crime commissioner, but then this golden opportunity to jump back on the Westminster gravy train presented itself, and ‘Saudi Paul’ magnificently battled his way through a shortlist of just himself to ensure he was selected to be the Labour Party hopeful for Hartlepool.
The Conservative candidate hoping to grab the seat from Labour is Jill Mortimer, a farmer and local district Councillor. She will be hoping to overturn a majority of 3,595, and with no Brexit Party candidate this time around, it puts ultra-Remainers Starmer and Williams in an incredibly tight spot.
The Brexit Party - and long may they never return - picked up more than 10,000 votes in 2019. How many of those 10,000 votes are likely to be afforded to Starmer, the architect of Labour’s 2019 catastrophe?
My unqualified guess would be not very many.
And here’s the thing the Labour Party *refuse* to take on board.
The decline of the Labour Party in the North isn’t a recent thing. This has been happening for decades now. The neoliberal Labour Party continued to take the working class vote for granted, much like they did in Scotland, and they have paid a heavy price for doing so.
The Londoncentric Labour simply doesn’t give two hoots for the opinion of the working class northerner. They might be good at platitudes, and if they are it’s probably the only thing they are any good at, but apart from a few damn good socialists, the rest of the Labour Party is an anti-socialist, anti-working class, tool of the establishment, they bear the torch for the metropolitan liberal elite. They are the attacks dogs of the rich and powerful.
We used to just call them “Tories”.
Jeremy Corbyn totally got this. Whatever you may think of him, and despite the fact he is himself an MP in London, Jeremy fully understood how we needed to reconnect in the North, and start building some bridges, bottom up, in the communities, but the Labour Party machinery wouldn’t let him.
If Starmer’s Labour lose this once-safe Labour seat where even Peter Mandelson could carpetbag the top job, then Starmer will only have himself to blame.
Starmer caused an inexplicable amount of damage to the Labour Party long before he bagged the over-promotion. Let’s not pretend otherwise. I’m not down with rewriting history.
Here’s a brief sequence of events...
Jeremy Corbyn increased Labour’s vote by a whopping 16% in 2017. The Labour manifesto promised to honour the EU referendum result.
Keir Starmer used Labour’s 2018 Party conference to go off-script and declare Labour hadn’t ruled out campaigning for remain in a second public referendum.
Now include the biggest and nastiest smear campaign ever unleashed upon a British politician.
Then the 2019 General Election arrives, and the Labour Party no longer promises to honour the EU referendum result - largely thanks to Keir Starmer and relentless pressure from the pro-People’s Vote Ltd MPs.
The Labour vote dropped by more than 14%.
That’s the history. That’s the reality. There will be no rewriting.
Hartlepool is a disaster waiting to happen for this Labour Party. They will not be able to blame Jeremy Corbyn, 18 months after the 2019 election catastrophe. They’ll try, of course, but that will just prove how out-of-touch they are with reality. This has been a long time coming.
So that gives you an idea of the very darkest corner of Hartlepool that the Labour Party finds itself in today.
While the Labour Party were reaching around in the dark for the light switch, along came the Northern Independence Party aka NIP with a proper socialist candidate, Thelma Walker, and she took the bloody lightbulb out and inserted it firmly up the Labour leaders backside, metaphorically speaking.
If Labour didn’t have enough problems holding on to this seat - won TWICE by Jeremy Corbyn against an avalanche of smears and malicious ‘incursions’ - they have now.
Thelma is a formidable opponent. A principled socialist, and she gets it. She served as the Labour MP for Colne Valley between 2017-2019, and she was a massive loss to the Labour movement when she lost her seat, and eventually resigned from the Labour Party following Keir Starmer’s anti-left repositioning of the Labour Party.
Thelma is the type of person that consistently voted for laws to promote equality and human rights while Saudi Paul was enjoying the hospitality of the Saudi dictatorship. She didn’t need to be embarrassed into this position, unlike Labour’s recent flirtation with the abhorrent Police and Crime Bill.
Thelma is the type of person that consistently voted for higher taxes on banks. Can you honestly see *this* version of the Labour Party voting for higher taxes on banks? Nope, nor me. It is *this* Labour Party that sits to the right of the Conservatives on corporation tax.
And they have the brass neck to call *us* Tory enablers while they’re making Rishi Sunak look like a student of Marxian economics? Do fuck off.
When they tell you how you are “splitting the left vote” they are wilfully forgetting to tell you that Thelma Walker *is* the left vote. This Labour Party isn’t ‘of the left’, and let’s not pretend it is.
It’s little wonder some 100,000 Labour Party members are reported to have abandoned the sinking red ship. Can you blame them? They didn’t sign up for this socially conservative blue Labour nonsense. They didn’t sign up for this wrapping yourself up in a flag shenanigans. And they certainly didn’t sign up to support this spineless wretch of a Conservative continuation candidate that is Keith.
Starmer has been utterly mugged by Sunak I’m afraid. It is much easier for the right to move left on economics than it is for the left to move right on identity and culture. Faux patriotism is easy to identify, and the electorate haven’t sucked up Starmer’s “I love my country” claptrap.
An exclusive Hartlepool poll commissioned by the CWU last night was putting the Tories on 49% and Labour on 42%, much to the annoyance of the centrist dad MP WhatsApp group. The same poll gave NIP 2%, but this is expected to grow when the movement hits the streets of Hartlepool, and people get to hear what Thelma Walker has got to say.
They will not be disappointed.
Will you or I end up agreeing with *every* single NIP policy or suggestion? Probably not.
Do you have more in common with a decent socialist agenda and a decent socialist candidate than you do with the charisma-free, fence-sitting, stand for nothing centrist Starmer, and his Saudi-backing, junket-grabbing candidate for Hartlepool Williams? Of course you do.
Our movement is broad, whether you are a Nipper, a socialist lost in the Labour Party, a TUSC backer, or even if you plan to back some of the lesser known parties with strong socialist values such as the Harmony Party, Breakthrough Party, or Resist, we are all part of one larger movement, and that is the socialist movement.
I think that’s enough from me for today, I’m off to enjoy a nice cup of tea and a bit of birthday carrot cake, ‘21’ today, you see.
Take care,
Rachael x
Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts, if you want to chip in towards improving my ongoing campaign, and it would cause you *no hardship*, you can do so here:
This is utter drivel: the last thing the working class needs now is *more* borders, *more" regionalism, *more* mini-nationalism. Brexit was a reactionary backwards step that the majority of the Labour rank and file were 100% correct to oppose. The last thing we need is this mini-nationalism from a bunch of petty bourgeois dilettantes who've given up on the class struggle.
ReplyDeleteTotally agree. There's no significant democratic socialism in Hartlepool aside from Walker. Your previous commenter misrepresenting a preference poll as "opposition" to Brexit just shows that old Blairite agenda. I preferred Remain, but I supported Corbyn's view of Brexit. Thanks to Blairite delusion that's off the table, along with all of Corbyn's policies and honesty. What the North needs is to absolutely avoid another decade of arrogant, complacent, disinterested, London-centric BS.from a party so far from its roots it's triangulated itself into another dimension. I hope Walker gets a chance to show that there's still an alternative, another way to do politics.
ReplyDeleteThis could have been written by JC himself it is that biased. Firstly the Tory councilor is not a local councillor in Hartlepool, but in North Yorkshire. Thelma Walker is an outsider too. Yes Jeremy Corbyn increased the Labour vote by 16% in 2019 but there is little doubt that it was because of him that the Lab vote plummeted in 2019 to deliver one of the worst Labour Election results in a long while. The left of the party has had its opportunity, but, like it or not, the British people rejected what they saw. That is why a new approach was needed because power can only be attained by gaining a majority of the Electorate, and not by carping from the side lines when things haven't turned out the way you wanted them to.
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