Hartlepool by-election: Looking past narratives, calling out lazy generalisations and assessing the actual voting data
It looks like the Conservatives may well take Hartlepool, with Labour losing another so-called heartland. Looking ahead to the by-election, I’ve set out some thoughts on the psephology of prior results, plus watching out for false narratives and lazy generalisations.
1) Hartlepool did not go Tory in 2019 despite disastrous Labour 2019 campaign which lost lots of traditionally Lab seats across UK, but Lab’s healthy majority of about 7,000 was cut by nearly half to 3,500 with a swing to Cons.
2) However, without the Brexit Party taking votes from Cons in 2019, it is likely that Tories would have at a minimum squeaked a victory and perhaps even delivered a healthy ish 2,000 or so majority. Therefore, Lab didn’t hold Hartlepool cos residents rejected Con’s 2019 GE message, nor voters siding with Corbyn’s Labour, no, the Tory / Brexit Party split vote LOST it.
3) The seat has been Labour even since its creation in 1974, with changes in voting patterns seemingly coming when separation of UK from EU in late 2000s starts to become a thing with Lib Dems, UKIP and then the Brexit Party amassing votes at different times…illustrating that generalising about voters calling areas as only Leaver, Remainer, Left or Right is lazy.
4) Hartlepool clearly had a huge majority for Leave with a 69.5% vote, but do not forget that 30% that voted Remain, nor the votes for Lib Dems before they tanked post-2010. Hartlepool had a total electorate of 70,000 people in 2016, 32,000 of those voted to Leave and 14,000 to Remain. What happened to the other 24,000? They might have been very Leave-y or potentially Remain-y who thought the Referendum to stay in was in the bag. We just don’t know.
5) Hence, if one doesn’t dig into actual voting results and the history of them it is very easy to make inaccurate generalisations about that Leave vote and also the seemingly impregnable Lab hold for last 50 years. And THAT is precisely the mistake Party leaders, strategists, media commentators, your mate Barry down the pub, your friend Flora who is a fully signed-up Corbynista etc etc make: they see the headline figures, they add their own narrative and take an interpretation which fits that. They see what they want to see, rather than what is actually happening.
6) Now let’s look at the current situation. If Lab lose — which looks very likely based upon current polling and what I said previously about Brexit Party essentially handing the win to Lab over Cons in 2019 — then a few things will happen: i) Corbynista folks will point fingers at Starmer and say this is evidence that his brand of Centre-Left politics isn’t working and should have stuck with Corbyn because he won the seat and ii) Tories saying that this win is a testament to their new appeal to working class voters outside their traditional South East homelands.
Both are lazy generalisations.
Firstly, Corbyn’s Labour would have lost this without a rival party splitting the Tory vote. So your Corbynista friend who asserts that losing Hartlepool now is evidence that Corbyn’s Labour was a better prospect for voters than Starmer’s or indeed anyone on TV / radio you hear saying the same hasn’t looked at these election results properly or they are setting a narrative to fit their world view and claiming it to be an objective truth…which is frankly poppycock.
Secondly, Cons claiming their brand is having a working class renaissance is -ahem- a stretch. The resurgence in their fortunes in last few elections have been on the back of a clearer Brexit message than Labour, with no real evidence that it is an embrace of Tory economic plans, policies or political cultures, nor that it wasn’t a rejection of the Corbyn brand. There simply isn’t enough historical evidence that those voters are now aligned with Tory values and policies.
Thirdly, now Brexit is done in voters’ minds, the next result can be assessed with one less variable. And by the looks of the polling with Cons about 10 percentage points ahead of Lab, that means Cons win is likely…therefore maybe my last assertion was wrong and this could be a renaissance in Tory appeal in northern seats then?
Ummmm ish and no. Because although we can now subtract the Brexit variable, we now have the Covid variable to input, not least the successful vaccine roll-out.
Fourthly, this by-election could not have come at a worse time for Labour. The party still cannot unite behind its leader and the voting public hates such public discord. The leader Labour chose isn’t charismatic nor has a good ear for capturing the public mood, he hasn’t found his feet in that nor have any of his lieutenants. The Covid vaccine roll out success and lockdown being lifted genuinely gives the public something to look forward to which is delivered by this Conservative Govt. People’s memories are short, so they will forget the Government’s mistakes during this pandemic and instead will see the UK as one of the leading countries vaccinating its populace. As Leader of the Opposition, that is a very hard thing to go against.
In conclusion, both sides and their supporters may well interpret the result inaccurately and likely spout disingenuous and fanciful BS on the airwaves to fit their narratives. Don’t believe it. Look at the results. Check the local newspaper and local BBC coverage. And above all, be very wary of anyone who talks sweeping generalisations about this seat based on their understanding of how votes go in their own backyard of the South East.
And finally an appeal to Labour for the sake of our parliamentary democracy: please sort yourselves out. Either unite behind Starmer. Or ditch him, but don’t let factionalism drive the next choice of Leader. For example, Starmer doing badly is not necessarily a cry for a return to more hard left policies from a bygone era, that is a lazy, narrative-fitting argument. Choose a leader who can unite your party, inspire voters, identify the issues which resonate with working class and middle class voters and then stick with them publicly as much as possible even if the Leader irks you. That is what Tories do and it works. Without a strong Opposition, our parliamentary democracy suffers, which means we all suffer. In my opinion, the UK hasn’t really had a consistently functioning Opposition since 2015 and the state we are in now on so many fronts is as much the fault of Tory policies as it is of Labour’s inability to do its job properly as the Opposition in holding the Executive to account.
Stop wishing for the kind of voters you want in the UK and start appealing to the voters we actually have.
