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Will Tanner is director of the Onward think tank and a former No. 10 adviser.
LONDON — The result was expected but the margin of victory in Hartlepool is enough to take your breath away.
In the four years since 2017, a 7,650 Labour majority has crumbled into a 6,940 Conservative majority. It is rare for governing parties to even win by-elections; a 16 percent swing toward the party of government mid-term is unprecedented.
Put another way, at the 2019 general election the Conservatives underperformed what statistical models based on demographic characteristics like age and employment predicted by 11.7 percent; in 2021 the Tories overperformed those same models by 11.3 percent.
Yesterday was, without doubt, a historic victory for the Conservatives and a historic humiliation for Labour. But the most important insight is not about what it means today but what it means for the future. Hartlepool — and overnight gains in Northumberland and Dudley plus expected victories in the Tees Valley and West Midlands mayoral races — confirms that the collapse of Labour’s “red wall” heartland in 2019 was not a Brexit anomaly but part of a deeper realignment that will continue.
The kaleidoscope of British politics has been shaken. The Conservative Party has a new base. And of the 63 original red wall seats where the Conservatives underperformed electoral models in 2017, there are 31 yet to fall: political gravity is pulling them towards the Conservatives, unless Labour can start to offer a genuine alternative.
The knives out for Keir Starmer fail to distinguish between tactics and strategy. Clearly his tactics of calling out “sleaze” and trying to appear “competent” have not resonated in Hartlepool and other areas like it. But that does not mean the strategy of moving Labour from a narrow metropolitan (in geography and values) base to a broader occupation of the common ground is wrong. It is in fact the only way he can win a majority.
The point is that he will have to overpower his party’s and his own political baggage to do so. It is not yet clear he believes in that project enough — or has the policy imagination to prove it — in order to be successful.
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