Fantastic result in Batley and Spen

Yeah but it doesn’t hold ant weight with him being ‘a bit of a gobshite’ does it?

 

Not this again! Those younger, urban and better educated people with a more international outlook are just as working class as a pensioner from Walsall or Barnsley. They're the ones on six month contracts or doing gig work to pay rent to landlords. As I pointed out a few months ago, if you look at rates of property ownership or reliability of income then they might even have a better claim.

The only way you can get to the point where you think the people in your first paragraph are working class while the people in your second paragraph aren't is if you tie yourself in knots by defining the working class as the former (socially conservative with outdated views) and work out from there.

 

One might even say controlled be Media Barons

 

It's a broad church, Jimmy!

 

spot on. There is more poverty in some London boroughs than there is in the whole of say Yorkshire

 

I know this was covered above but it needs restating a bit.
I’ve said this before but many of the ‘working class’ Labour voters I worked with in the early 80’s were never ‘socialists’. They voted Labour because they believed it was better for ‘them’ to have a government that gave a toss about workers. But they didn’t care about ‘equality’, or protecting minorities.

As I alluded earlier, Thatcher broke that bond by offering workers ‘a bit more’ if they were prepared to sell out their comrades. In breaking the cohesion of the working class she changed the face of politics.

And where we end up: White middle aged males, who consider themselves ‘working class’ with 3 cars on the drive, an accountant and a caravan at the coast, say that Labour no longer speaks for them. But the young renting educated kids who are struggling are being derided as ‘not working class’, with gig economy jobs, little chance of home ownership, but still a sense of social justice, apparently they’re not somehow ‘worthy’.

If you’re 70 and sat in a home you own, with a triple locked pension, watching daytime telly, and complaining about the foreigners down the shops, and that Labour doesn’t speak for you any more; You’re right! But it’s not Labour that’s at fault for that. It’s probably too late to regain your social conscience but I think it’s still worth an ask.

 

Sadly, Jo Biden has already got a job.

 

Brilliant and sadly accurate post,DR.

 

Great post,Scoff.

 

I voted for Corbyn (magic grandpa) twice, I wanted a more socialist country.
Starmer isn't a socialist in the purist form, but I'll support him. Why? Because this lot ate charlatans, pure and simple.
Starmer ran the CPS very well, yep there will be cases where more could have been done, but he's a bad bloke.
He might lack charisma, but at the minute he's fighting a losing battle due to internal problems.

I wanted Corbyn, it didn't work due to infighting. But at some point Labour loyalists are going to have to agree to support whoever is in charge. Otherwise its game over.

We'd all love to have our ideal leader and government, but it doesn't work like that. We'd all like to see Mbappe, Ronaldo and Messi leading the line at Oakwell......

 

Agree with so much of that. I've said the same on here. The working class have never been socialist in the actual sense of the word, just Labour voters because they were the party that most protected their interests. Most of us would argue that's still the case but clearly many are now comfortably off and are more interested in taking the country back and keeping foreigners out.

 

If the results translated into a General Election the swing to the tories would give them a 130 seat majority

 

Would George Galloway have recruited local Labour activists to canvas against Labour in every seat?

 

This pretty much sums the situation up IMO.

An interesting debate amongst largely Labour supporting people.

Do I love the party as much as the Corbyn one, no I don't, but a reality check needs to happen. I don't want "New Labour" back, but I want us to have a strategy that can get the Tories out. They are ruining our NHS, social care system and have turned us against ourselves.

Labour won the seat, despite Galloway's meddling. That guy I would not trust as far as I could throw him.

 

IMHO it’s also time we bust the ‘red wall’ myth.

A load of Labour seats were up for grabs in Brexit voting areas.
That doesn’t mean that huge swathes of the working class have decided Labour doesn’t speak for them any more (that happened in the 90’s). Nor does it mean all those people are now true Tory believers.
It doesn’t just mean that people hated Corbyn, or that Keir Starmer isn’t ‘their kind’.

It means there was huge frustration around Brexit, and people voted to finish it off.

When they realise at the next election that it’s still ’unfinished’ that the promised land is still as far away as ever and that they’ve been had, then they’ll vote for an alternative.

The big question is that with a media that’s heavily behind the Tories (even managing to sell them as the party of change when they’ve been in power for ten years), can Labour create a narrative that’s credible and get it across. If they can; the red wall disappears and they could do something dramatic.

But… is there any chance at all of that happening

 

Possible not but the tories will actually campaign unlike they did here. Will the Greens and LibDems encourage people to vote Labour in a GE again probably not.

 

The more worrying question is… will the press spend the preceding month camped out in every Labour seat making the story all about the fragility of the Labour Party?

Because let’s be honest: for many people, if they’d lived in Middlesbrough and been told there was no point turning up to vote because the Tories were taking the seat, they’d stay at home. So it’s maybe a simple case of cause and effect rather than a prediction.

Whereas when the Tories lost a seat, it was ‘unexpected’ which might be read as ‘we didn’t spend the last month telling people this is what we wanted to happen’.

Labour hold a traditional Labour seat; the press ‘Labour hold onto seat despite internal problems’

Tories lose a traditional Tory seat; the press ‘how did the Lib Dem’s manage to win this seat , it’s surely down to a few local issues’.

And the frustrating thing is that it’s not just Labours enemies sharing these ‘lines to take’. But the actual Labour movement is allowing itself to be torn apart by the Tory press.

 

Regardless of how we view this by-election we all have to make decisions about which party we want to vote for. Speaking personally I will probably not vote Labour next election as I simply dont know what they stand for now. I may very well vote green or I may come back to Labour if I believe in what they say they will do. I await some policy statements...

 

I’m glad Labour’s kept the seat as I want Labour in Government but I do think winning this is papering over cracks a bit.

I’ve never seen as many Labour MP’s & activists travelling to another constituency & campaigning. Fair play to Dan Jarvis, he’s been there loads, Peacock’s been there plenty too & lots of other familiar faces have put the work in too.

The problem is it’s just not feasible to do that in a general election. Everyone’s campaigning in their own constituency.

I still feel he has to address Brexit & he needs to unite the party. Whether people want to admit it or not his ratings fell through the floor the minute he suspended Corbyn. If he doesn’t unite the party & restore the whip they can’t win an election. There’s not enough swing voters for the centre to win without the left just like there wasn’t for the left to win without the centre.

It’s not like the 90’s when Labour were winning in Scotland & the Lib Dem’s were winning plenty of seats that are now Tory.

 

As they would have if he hadn’t.

FFS Anyone watching that who didn’t blame JC seriously needs a word with themselves.

JC knew damned well that there’d be evidence he needed to apologise for, and any grown up would have girded their loins and done that. But the ‘always on the right side of history’ persona jumped in and had to pretend he didn’t understand what he’d done.