Labour party

Imagine going back twenty years in a time machine, when a young Tony Blair was about to be swept to power on a wave of optimism, and telling someone* that in 2017, Labour would be on just 16 per cent among working-class voters – and this despite having a leader several octaves to the left of Blair. Not only this, but that a number of Labour seats in the north and the midlands were ‘now in Tory sights’.  Imagine then telling them that this was happening while the Conservatives were making spending cuts in areas like education, and that there was an ongoing crisis in health and social care. You then let them

Tonight’s Parliamentary Labour Party meeting began with loud cheers. As with most PLP meetings nowadays, these weren’t directed at the Labour leader and nor was Jeremy Corbyn around to hear them. Corbyn had earlier sent his apologies that he was unable to make the first PLP meeting since the party’s defeat in Copeland due to a prior engagement. In his absence, Gareth Snell — the new Stoke-on-Trent Central MP — was given a rousing reception, as was Andrew Gwynne — the MP behind the by-election campaigns. When Gwynne attempted to take some of the blame for his party’s loss in Copeland, he was shouted down by supportive colleagues who said that he had done everything he could. MPs,

Copeland was a truly awful result for Labour. But as I say in The Sun this morning, the really alarming things for Labour is that things can get worse for them. Many Labour MPs have been operating on the assumption that the NHS will keep the party’s loses down to a manageable level in 2020. But Copeland suggests that this hope is misplaced. Labour went all in on the health service there and had no shortage of material to work with, the maternity unit at the local hospital is under threat. By the end of the campaign, Labour’s message was perilously close to vote for us or the baby gets

Labour’s famously vocal moderates have been awfully quiet today, given one of their number – Jamie Reed – has just been replaced by a Tory in a hugely embarrassing by-election defeat for the party. The centrist wing of the party, now almost exclusively a backbench club, has taken a vow of silence because it doesn’t want to be accused of salivating at the loss of a seat or of conforming to the ‘Bitterite’ stereotype of MPs undermining the Labour brand. This is particularly important given some Corbynites are still blaming last summer’s attempted coup by the Parliamentary Labour Party for any catastrophe it encounters, including losing Copeland. That coup didn’t

Never in recent years has a party deserved to lose an election, to be demolished by people’s ballots and fury, as much as Labour does in Stoke. The way Labour has treated this northern constituency is a microcosm of the metropolitan contempt it now feels for all the rough-handed, gruff-voiced non-Londoners who once made up its support base but who now irritate the hell out of it by doing stupid things like voting for Brexit and believing in democracy. Were Labour to receive a bloody nose from the people of Stoke it would be a wonderful day for British politics, and, who knows, possibly a wake-up call for a left

We’re told that the story of Stoke and other similar working-class constituencies is the advance of Ukip; yet more important is the advance of ‘none of the above’. Turnout in by-elections is notoriously low, and Thursday will be no exception, but even at the last general election fewer than half the electorate voted in Stoke. This was not always the case. Turnout in Stoke was barely six per cent below the national average in 1987, yet in 2015 it was 16 per cent lower. This is just a weak reflection of the growing divide in political participation among people in different social classes. While differences in turnout between rich and poor