Hanging The Monkey

Hartlepool is a small port town in the North East of England ... 

The Hartlepool Monkey Hangers ....

... Its greatest claim to fame to-date, was when its residents allegedly hung a monkey as a French spy during the Napoleonic Wars.

This story, may of course simply be a corruption of a fact that they may have hung a shipwrecked French boy sailor (boys were known as 'powder monkeys) as a spy, and the tale has just got mixed up in the intervening centuries .... but whatever the truth of it, the inhabitants of the town and borough have been nicknamed 'The monkey hangers'.  

Politically, ever since the 1945 election, The Hartlepools (Hartlepool after the 1974 boundary reorganisation), the town has been a safe Labour Party seat (one brief blip in 1959) .... so much so that it was one of the safe northern seats used by Tony Blair to parachute his London cronies in to parliament ... in this case, Peter Mandelson was handed the seat in 1992, despite not having any connection with the town, or even the north of England ... he resigned the seat in 2004 to become a European Commissioner (much more his style one suspects) ... however the seat remained in Labour Party hands until Mike Hill recently resigned.

This obviously triggered the need for a by-election, and as this is mid-term, post Brexit, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson having a few personal difficulties over his domestic decorating, and while we are still in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, one has to assume that the Labour Party expected to hold the parliamentary seat with some ease .... 

Well hold the front page. The Conservatives won ... and another brick from Labours once seemingly impregnable 'Red Wall' of Northern parliamentary seats, has fallen to serial election winner Boris Johnson. Whilst no doubt a string of excuses will be given for this, the fact is that blaming Brexit (Labour strangely fielded a candidate who was strong EU remainer, in a seat that voted heavily to leave the EU), or Jeremy Corbyn, after they have changed the leadership, or even saying that the party should have kept Corbyn's radical agenda, which they have diluted after the worst election defeat since 1935 ... really don't hack it.      

It appears that the Labour Party is just not seen as the natural home of white working class voters .... its apparent preoccupation with the metropolitan multi-ethnic London voters concerns, is an issue that it just can't seem to address. Being seen to be WOKE, LGBT concerns, or the BLM movement, don't play so well in the country, outside of London and a few large cities in the north.  

How this minor electoral disaster will play out, inside an already divided Labour Party, we will no doubt see in the coming months, as the world resumes more normality. But even as the result, and unexpected losses in the local council elections (being held on the same day) were announced:

• Shadow Labour minister, Steve Reed described the result as "absolutely shattering."
• Ex- Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said they show "a loss of hope" and urged Labour to "offer a bolder vision." i.e. more of what he had offered, and lost an election with.
  
• While Union leader and effectively Labour Party paymaster Len McCluskey said, that "people don't know what Labour stand for now" and he hoped Sir Keith Starmer learns lessons.

The man himself, Starmer, said that while he was "bitterly disappointed in the results" he also took "full responsibility" for them. He also said he would focus on "setting out a bold vision" for "fixing things". He admitted that his party has "lost trust" and he "intends to rebuild that".

 

Meet the new boss .... same as the old boss ...