Only a couple of months ago, the Tories and their media chums were predicting that they would win a landslide in the snap election, eating into Labour’s strongholds in Yorkshire, Wales, and elsewhere. We provide here a series of reports analysing the regional results, and how Corbyn’s Labour was able to defy all expectations.
Only a couple of months ago, the Tories and their media chums were predicting that they would win a landslide in the snap election, eating into Labour’s strongholds in Yorkshire, Wales, and elsewhere. We provide here a series of reports analysing the regional results in these places, and how Corbyn’s Labour was able to defy all expectations.
Yorkshire
Only a couple of short months ago, Theresa May staked her political future, and the stability of British capitalism, on a general election in which one of her hubristic ambitions was to conquer working class Labour heartlands by framing it as the Brexit election, and positioning herself presidentially as the Brexit candidate.
One of the key battleground regions was Yorkshire, where Labour has so many deep roots, but where many working class people voted for Brexit against the policy of the Labour Party.
If the apparent cleavage between the left-wing Labour leadership and the Brexit-voting base of the party could not be exploited in Yorkshire, where could it? So reasoned the Tory election strategists and their friends in the press. Certainly, UKIP had been exploiting discontent with Labour successfully over a period of years.
Their sights set on delivering fatal blows to the Labour Party, the Tories staged several high-profile campaign events – not least the launch of their manifesto –in Yorkshire. Repeatedly, May visited the region and pitched her pro-capitalist policies with the arrogant expectation that important marginals, as well as some safer Labour seats, would abandon their traditional party. Only a matter of weeks ago it was, after all, received wisdom that Corbyn’s leadership had made Labour “unelectable” and too “metropolitan” for Britain’s grim northern provinces.
But the best-laid plans of mice, men, and deluded Tory leaders often go awry. Far from being crushed by the Tories in Yorkshire, Labour won a series of remarkable victories. The results in these local contexts contain many lessons for the Labour movement nationally as we go forward, our sights set firmly and confidently on a majority Labour government in the future.
Shocks
The only Yorkshire region where few surprises were had was in North Yorkshire, which remains Tory territory. In this rural and wealthy riding, the only constituency to return a Labour MP was York Central, where Rachel Maskaell increased her majority by more than 20%. Nevertheless, some very good Labour campaigns were run, notably in York Outer, where the Tory majority was dramatically cut by 5,000 votes. Essential groundwork has been laid for future Labour victories in North Yorkshire.
Shocks came much thicker and faster elsewhere. In West Yorkshire, where so many Tory hopes had been placed and so many resources expended, their expectations were dashed. They lost the seats they held in Keighley and Colne Valley, and failed to win anything from Labour anywhere else in the county. This in spite of many projections that the Tories would do very well in towns such as Dewsbury and Halifax, the latter of which had a minuscule Labour majority of only 428.
Halifax was a key target seat for Theresa May, and as such was chosen to be the location for the launching of the Tory manifesto. But May’s stay in God’s Own Country was much less glorious than she hoped for. On arrival, May was greeted by crowds of jeering trade unionists who declared their preference for Labour “bringing us back to the 1970s” over May taking us to the 1870s. The manifesto that May launched has widely been regarded as among the most disastrous manifestos in British political history. And, in an ominous accident, her campaign bus broke down on her way out of town! In the end, not only did the Tories fail to keep their seat in Halifax, but the town swung decisively behind Corbyn’s Labour Party, increasing the majority by more than 5,000.
In each of these results, local factors coincided with national trends in ways which supporters of Corbyn’s Labour should find instructive. In Colne Valley, the key issue on the minds of many voters was a local one: extremely controversial – and, frankly, dangerous – plans to downgrade hospital services in Huddersfield, meaning the closure of the A&E in the town and its transference to Halifax. After a period of big local mobilizations, in which Labour’s candidate was involved, Labour won the backing of the campaign group. When Corbyn visited the area, he assured locals that he would look again at the proposals and highlighted Labour’s opposition nationally to the closure of NHS services. As a result, Labour in Colne Valley won a greater number of votes than any party ever has before in the area. Victories were also seen in all the neighbouring constituencies affected by the plans.
It is worth dwelling on this success, and contrasting it with the disappointing results of the local elections only weeks ago. Here, Labour’s national policy of opposing austerity and supporting public services intersected with a key local issue to produce an excellent electoral result. But, at the same time, Labour councillors are being instructed not to pass illegal budgets and have been told that their role is merely to carry out Tory cuts in as “fair” a manner as possible.
Clearly, the party must abandon this contradictory position, and must become an anti-austerity party in action and not just in words. Setting a militant and fighting example in the fight for local services, Labour councils can recover the ground lost recently and can contribute positively to the national standing of the party.
Representation
Transforming the party in this root-and-branch way – making it into a truly fighting organisation at the service of the working class – also raises questions about the kinds of parliamentary candidates Labour should be standing.
In Wakefield, historically a Labour stronghold, the campaign was fought defensively to keep the Blairite Remainer Mary Creagh in power in a strongly Brexit-voting area. In a letter to constituents, Creagh framed the local party’s difficulties as being a result of Corbyn’s leadership, “reassuring” prospective Labour voters that the party wouldn’t be in government after the election! In fact, as the UKIP vote collapsed and turnout modestly increased, both Labour and the Tories surged. Labour’s strong performance occurred very much despite local attitudes to Creagh, who is seen as an outsider and as not accurately representing the constituency on important issues.
To develop its electoral prospects further, not only do Labour need to guarantee the loyalty of its parliamentarians to the elected leader, but it needs to change the very composition of the parliamentary party. Career politicians must be replaced with authentic voices of the working class that the party seeks to represent. Principally, this is a question of changing the political composition of the PLP: the party needs candidates and MPs committed to socialist, not liberal, principles. But this transformation is also sure to involve a greater involvement of working class people themselves at every level of the party.
In this respect, the result in Sheffield Hallam should be seen as totemic. In Hallam, the liberal darling, coalition-former and pledge-breaker Nick Clegg was ousted by Jared O’Mara, a young, local-born, Corbyn-supporting candidate with cerebral palsy. The newly elected Labour MP celebrated his victory in a suit hurriedly bought from a Tesco supermarket, and immediately declared his intention to act as a tribune for the disabled. This is what the recapture of the Labour Party should look like – not the slimy professional politicians and identitarian tokenism of the Blair era, but real representation of the working class, with relatable articulations of socialist politics.
Students
In Sheffield Hallam and elsewhere, a decisive factor was the huge, unprecedented enthusiasm of the youth for Corbyn’s left-wing platform. Because of the energised, positive, and radical campaign run by Corbyn, young people nationally turned out in droves, and some of the most notable examples of that were in Yorkshire.
During the election campaign, when Corbyn visited the student-dominated Leeds neighbourhood of Hyde Park in the constituency of Leeds North West, an estimated 5,000 people stood in the rain and waited to see him speak. The cynics in the bourgeois media – and in the Labour Right – scoffed at such displays of popular support. Elections, apparently, are not won by mobilizing thousands of people in support of wildly popular policies. Such is the orthodoxy of “political science”.
Yet, contrary to received wisdom, that extraordinary afternoon of political spectacle did translate into an equally extraordinary electoral victory. Labour took the Liberal Democrat-held seat with a 14-point increase in vote share on a turnout of 68%. Many of these votes were from newly-politicised people: Leeds North West saw a greater number of new registrations on the electoral register than anywhere else in the country. This illustrates the active commitment of many young people to Corbyn’s Labour.
Lessons
It is therefore one of the many ironies of this election that, having established Yorkshire as one of the key battleground regions, Theresa May oversaw a polarisation in the region between her party and Corbyn’s Labour which clearly benefited Corbyn. The results in Yorkshire, like the results in many other places, have demonstrated the potential of a Labour Party which appeals to the young and the working class with radical policies, and by linking its national policies to local struggles.
At the same time, however, the challenge of transforming the party more fully, of recapturing it for the working class and for socialist policies, still has a long way to go. Crucially, the party must be united, consistent, and active in opposing austerity and building a fighting alternative to the cruel reality of Tory rule, whose chaos and apparent amorality merely reflects the cruel and chaotic reality of capitalism in crisis.
By Owen Walsh, Leeds Marxists
Wales
The recent election has caused a massive storm on the British Isles, and Wales was one of its main epicentres. Initial polls suggested that Conservatives for the first time in history were set to take a majority of the Welsh vote. This was clearly linked with the local elections, where numerous Labour councillors were punished for their complacency in regards to working class communities, reducing themselves to the role of managers of the cuts, barely distinguishable from other parties.
The only thing that stopped this continuous slide to the right was the Corbyn effect, which provided a clear alternative to Tory austerity. This led to Labour enormously increasing its majorities in south Welsh safe seats, as well as taking key marginal seats such as Gower and Cardiff North. This was despite many candidates running their own independent campaigns with no mention of Corbyn on any of their leaflets.
The selection process was limited to the NEC, allowing Blairite clones who have been very vocal in their sabotage of the Corbyn project – such as Stephen Kinnock, MP for Aberavon – to stand on a Labour ticket. The scoundrel Kinnock, for example, who less than a month ago criticised the “hard left” as being out of touch with the electorate and unelectable, has just ridden on the coat tails of this “unelectable”, “hard-left” programme and increased his majority by 7,000 votes, in contrast to his mediocre results in previous elections!
The social media, grassroots campaigns, mass meetings and efforts of Labour members, armed with radical ideas, provided a ray of hope for Welsh people looking for a genuine alternative, not a mimic, to the ruling government.
The atmosphere in Wales reflects the thirst everywhere for a fundamental change. As one of the poorest areas in the UK, and in fact in the whole of Western Europe, it was targeted by a bulk of investment projects from the EU. Despite that, the country has voted to leave the European Union, reflecting disappointment not with the lack of brand new office buildings, but with issues deeply embedded in the whole economic system.
No new management – including Labour groups in the Senedd and city councils – have been able to provide anything more than crumbs off the table. After the 2008 crisis, even these few concessions ceased, and austerity was rolled out in full force in Wales. This led to a polarisation of the political climate and resulted in the Brexit vote and a UKIP group in the Welsh Assembly – a desperate attempt to symbolically fight the status quo and the Establishment.
The leadership of the Welsh party is politically lagging behind the national party. This is reflected with pictures of constituency candidates and Carwyn Jones on leaflets – with no mention of Corbyn or his manifesto promises: “for the many, not the few”.
Socialist Appeal supporters throughout Wales have seen first-hand a disproportionate amount of conversations with local Labour supporters and members, both during canvassing and in public meetings, who were disappointed by Welsh Labour’s lack of fighting spirit.
It is more important now than ever to fight for a socialist Labour Party, which the working class needs and deserves. The Marxists in Wales are organising this fight regionally, and we urge our readers to join us in this fight to transform Welsh Labour: to replace the careerists and bureaucrats with socialists that will be able to struggle for a better society in Wales and along with our comrades in the rest of Britain.
By Maciej Krzymieniecki and Ryan Brain, Swansea Marxists
Southport
Situated in the North West, the town of Southport has been a Liberal Democrat stronghold for exactly 30 years. The town is a Liberal Democrat / Tory swing seat, and has been since the creation of the constituency in 1885. However, in this election, Labour made a historical move towards the goal of winning Southport’s seat, despite the underhand tactics of Lib Dems.
While Southport’s election was a close race, the town has unfortunately become the only conservative constituency in the whole of the county – thankfully every other seat belongs to Labour, with two new gains for MPs Mike Amesbury and Faisal Rashid in Weaver Vale and Warrington South respectively.
This seems to beg the question, what makes Southport unique? Why has it fallen into being a Tory seat after 30 years? The answer is not the failings of a Labour campaign, but the sheer desperation of the Lib Dems to cling onto their seat for their careerist MPs, at the expense of the town’s citizens.
An extremely common thing to hear around Southport at election time is the ‘importance’ of a tactical vote. Many people believe that it is impossible for Labour to get in, and they must instead vote for the Liberal Democrats to keep the Tories out. The campaign of the Lib Dems in Southport was based wholly on convincing voters to ‘lend’ their Labour vote, even sending out letters of supposedly independent political betting sites telling voters Labour were ‘strongly likely to finish a distant third’. Yet these letters, from ‘politicalbetting.com’ are unsurprisingly a farce – founder of this website, Mike Smithson, has been revealed to be a former Lib-Dem politician! It’s clear the Liberal Democrats in Southport have so little to their own campaign that they must deceive the townspeople using sly and underhand tactics for what would be Labour votes.
Labour, on the other hand, has performed fantastically. They had a clear presence in Southport throughout the election by placing their Campaign HQ in the middle of Wayfarer’s Arcade, on the busiest road in Southport, and have constantly canvassed in support of candidate Liz Savage. What is perhaps the most surprising is that Labour has for the first time ever come in second place in the share of the votes – in fact, more people voted for Liz Savage in second place this year than those who voted for John Pugh (the winning Lib Dem candidate) in 2015.
More and more people have come to realise this election that tactical voting in Southport will change nothing: there is little difference between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, be it locally or nationally. It is now time to vote for those who can really make a difference, which has clearly been shown to be the Labour Party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn.
With the hung parliament result we see a significant fall in faith behind Theresa May, even within her own party. It is vital, especially now, that Labour supporters continue to be vocal about their support for Corbyn and the party, and to emphasise their fantastic results from the 8th June, in which Labour gained 30 new seats in parliament.
There is little doubt that by the next election (which may be sooner than some think) that Southport Labour can achieve a fantastic win. With a 13% rise in the share of the votes and just 2,914 votes between Labour and Conservative, there is no chance for the Liberal Democrats to pull any sort of votes with their pathetic letters or underhand tactics. Labour can win both locally and nationally!
By Kelly Lane, Sheffield Marxists
Portsmouth
A resounding but surprise election victory for Labour in Portsmouth South, changed a planned gathering in the Guildhall Square on Saturday 10th June – organised by Portsmouth Trades Council, which most had expected to be ‘start of the fight-back’ – into a celebration of a winning campaign.
The successful candidate, Stephen Morgan, a local councillor, won the seat for Labour with a 1,554 vote majority and a 21.5% gain, the highest increase across the country in terms of percentage vote for any Labour candidate in a previously Tory seat! This was especially impressive in an area where many local people are employed in the armed forces or defence industry and in a seat which had never previously been won for Labour since the seat was established in 1918.
The Labour vote increased by over 10,000, from 8,184 to 18,290, taking a 41% share of the vote. In a constituency where the average age is 30, compared to a national average of 39, this upturn can be largely ascribed to the youth vote locally – which turned out to support Labour in unprecedented numbers. This is similar to the effects seen in Canterbury, Cambridge and a number of other places.
The UKIP vote completely collapsed (which was also a national trend). In 2015, they had 5,595 (13.5% of the vote), compared with just 1,129 (2.5%) in 2017. Many of those votes were attracted back to Labour by the clear policies put forward by Jeremy Corbyn. The Lib Dem vote collapsed spectacularly, by 17.6%, squeezed out by the Tories on the right and Labour on the left.
The newly-elected MP, Stephen Morgan said: “This is a vote for hope…The popular backing for change and an end to austerity could make a big difference to our local communities.”
Sion Reynolds, Chair of Portsmouth Labour Party, which covers both Portsmouth South and Portsmouth North constituencies, said: “The local party is very upbeat. We have lots of new activists. The Labour Party has become a truly mass organisation and people are becoming switched on to politics who weren’t interested before. Even a local Lib Dem activist congratulated me, saying: ‘Your campaign was astonishing!’”
Huge amounts of advertising from both Tories and Lib Dems failed against the people-powered campaign from Labour.
Speakers at the rally were enthusiastic about the success of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, which had attracted support by putting forward socialist policies like nationalisation.
Sylvia Courtnage, a Trades Council Delegate from the NUJ, spoke about how these policies had attracted people back to Labour and decimated the UKIP vote.
Corbyn had also defeated the media lies. She said:
“Jeremy gave hope to the youth, and also to the not so young. We want to get this Tory government out; they don’t deserve to be there.
“This is only the start. We want socialist policies. Labour must fight to defeat austerity and bring change.”
By Sylvia Courtnage, NUJ member and delegate to Portsmouth Trades Council
