By Monica Showalter
Talk about cruelty to animals.
The U.K. Labour Party took the mother of all thrashings in yesterday’s local or special elections, losing its longtime stronghold of Hartlepool in the industrial north for the first time in 62 years, and by a monster margin. That wasn’t the only one.
According to the Daily Mail:
Ministers have predicted that Boris Johnson could rule longer than Margaret Thatcher as results showed the Tories could take 36 more Westminster seats from Labour at the next General Election.
Labour was thrashed in the Hartlepool by-election on Thursday, with Jill Mortimer securing a majority of almost 7,000 in a seat the Tories had not held since 1964.
In a second stunning Tory victory in the North East, Ben Houchen secured a second term as Tees Valley mayor. He grabbed 73 per cent of the vote – up from 39.5 per cent four years ago.
And the Conservatives gained control of a series of councils, including Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Dudley, Harlow and Nuneaton and Bedworth – reversing the mid-term slump often suffered by governing parties.
Cabinet ministers believe there has been a permanent shift in the nation’s political identity and claimed Mr Johnson – who has been the premier since July 2019 – could outlast Margaret Thatcher’s 11 years in Downing Street, The Times reports.
The picture is grim. Get-woke-go-broke applies to more than just business.
According to U.K. columnist Melanie Phillips:
The significance of the Hartlepool result is hard to exaggerate. This was a rock-solid, northern, blue-collar working-class Labour constituency which had elected a Labour MP for the past 62 years. Now the Tories have won it with a majority of nearly 7,000 votes on a swing of 16 per cent — only the second time in nearly 40 years that a governing party has taken a seat from the opposition.
That huge swing is a massive repudiation of the Labour party. Naturally its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has come under under immediate pressure to change the party’s approach. This is pointless unless the party understands the full significance of why it lost. At present, there is nobody in the party’s leadership or activist base who seems to do so.
The rout for these rabid leftists has spread as far as London, where even odious, Trump-hating Mayor Sadiq Khan, is “unexpectedly” running into trouble as the counting continues. The vote is so close that rival conservative Tories are now saying they might just pull an upset.
A Conservative source told The Times that the party now believes Bailey is in with a shot of winning.
A senior London Tory party source told City A.M. that this was still unlikely, but that Bailey had “acquitted himself really well”.
“He’s tapped in to what people are talking about – he’s had his ear to the ground and he’s tapped into something in London,” they said.
“He’s been talking about knife crime, about violent crime where Sadiq Khan just keeps blaming the government for it.
If it happens, the victory can arguably be called total.
But if it doesn’t, it remains extremely bad news for the leftists, as it demonstrates a trend, a re-alignment, a continued failure of the left to connect to voters, despite a lot of warnings earlier. The Labour Party has bled voters from these areas, bigtime, in the last two elections. Now the Hartlepool stronghold has toppled, and others are going fast, too.
Two reasons are cited for it, by the perceptive Phillips, and in at least two othermainstream media analyses:
One: Labour continues to ignore and discount Brexit, a referendum vote that drew 69.6% of Labour’s voters in Hartlepool alone. People wanted out of that European Union with all its petty tyrannies. Only 30.4% chose to remain, as good little European Union vassals, according to Phillips’s figures. She noted that the Labour Party ran an inchoate position whether to stay or go, and then, thinking Brexit is over, went ahead and put up a ‘remainer’ from the tony London suburbs as their Hartlepool candidate. It went over badly. Labour hadn’t a clue that British voters in the industrial north would like to retain ownership of their country. Nations are still important — I now suspect the fact that Prime Minister Boris Johnson sent out his gunboats to defend the island of Jersey in a fishing dispute against the European Union bigshot France meant something valuable to these voters.
Two: The wokester culture of the left is serving as Labour’s spraycan voter repellent. Really gross things have gone on with the left, such as the leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, taking a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, as if England, historically home to the global anti-slavery movement of the 19th century, and country that now attracts millions of immigrants of color from all over, is this nasty racist place nobody should want to live in. You’d think the bad reaction from the British public to Meghan Markle’s mendacious racist slur against the British royal family would have been a warning to the left, but somehow, it wasn’t to the wokesters of Labour.
Phillips noted that this wasn’t the only appalling application of U.S.-style wokesterism (though Britain’s Labour wokester loonies certainly do their part to innovate):
Both that and their subsequent general election vote for Boris Johnson, who had delivered their country back to them, were also a repudiation of what the Labour party had become. No longer was it the party that represented them, their interests and their overwhelmingly socially conservative values.
It had become instead the party of the educated metropolitan upper middle-class, which was committed to liberal universalism and trans-national “human rights” law and up-ending basic values such as the traditional family or even what is to be a man or a woman — and which denounced people like themselves as racist and privileged, simply on the basis that they had a white skin. It was no longer the Labour party; it had become the North London Dinner Party.
Cancel culture in particular seems to be abhorred by these voters, Phillips notes:
Indeed, all you need to know about Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party and why it can never win back the decent, fair-minded, patriotic working-class was in the picture the Labour leader proudly tweeted of himself and his deputy, Angela Rayner, taking the knee to the Black Lives Matter agenda.
This is why the party doesn’t get it and shows no sign of ever getting it. There may well be members who disapprove of the extremism of tearing down historic statues; or who think Extinction Rebellion goes too far in causing a public nuisance; or who are appalled at the witch-hunts against those who insist that biological sex is unalterable or who are made to confess to their own “white privilege” — or who find themselves up before a disciplinary panel accused of using racist language for observing that you couldn’t turn on the TV “without some person of a colourful disposition having a moan about something” (yes, really; it’s a moot point which is worse, the intolerance or the illiteracy).
And it’s been in the culture awhile. Look at these remarks by rock star Roger Daltry, who had been the ragged, raging-voice lead singer of rock band The Who. According to the Daily Wire:
“The Who” lead singer Roger Daltrey has joined the wave of rock musicians speaking out against woke culture and its effect on society.
Speaking with DJ Zane Lowe on Apple Music, the “Baba O’Riley” singer said that the “woke generation” is creating a “miserable world” for themselves and everyone else.
“It’s just getting harder to disseminate the truth,” Daltrey said. “It’s almost like, now we should turn the whole thing off. Go back to newsprint, go back to word of mouth, and start to read books again. It’s becoming so absurd now with AI, all the tricks it can do, and the woke generation,” he said. “It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere. Especially when you’ve lived through the periods of a life that we’ve had the privilege to. We’ve had the golden era. There’s no doubt about that.”
Daltrey compared the woke generation with previous generations.
“We came out of a war, we came out of a leveled society, completely flattened bomb sites and everything,” Daltrey said. “And we’ve been through socialist governments. We’ve seen the communist system fail in the Soviet Union. I’ve been in those communist countries while they were communist. I’ve seen how ‘wonderful’ — really? — it was.”
This is deadly, and it’s completely directed at the left — a combination of nationalism, anti-wokesterism, and a full blown blast at socialism and its entire evil record. You know that if Daltrey is saying stuff like that, then a lot of voters are thinking it. In the Wire’s piece, other rock stars also threw out anti-leftist blasts.
The third reason is extremely interesting, because it’s the opposite of the either-us-or-you’re-racist stance of the wokester leftists. Conservatives don’t seem to be racist at all in the U.K., as they elected many conservatives “of colour”:
That in fact has close links to the issues of the inner cities – the crime, the filth, the disorder, the corruption — all evident in leftist one-party rule.
Here’s a candidate “of colour” who put his finger on this live issue with voters in leftist-run cities (we can’t say ‘blue’ or ‘red’ over there, because the colors are reversed, with leftists more accurately called ‘red’).
Look at this effective video from this successful conservative candidate:
He’s doing pretty much the same thing spunky Baltimore political candidate Kim Klacik did, a lovely black woman just walking through her city run by leftists to demonstrate what a hellhole it had become. The Tory candidate, a taxi driver named with the cool name of Tiger Patel, did the same, very effectively, showing broken or missing playground equipment, barf on the ground, and filthy obscene graffiti to demonstrate leftist indifference to voters. In his case, it was done in the city of Blackburn, Lancashire (that place the Beatles sang about), and it worked.
What’s interesting here as a footnote is that this comes against a backdrop of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s far-from-perfect record. He allowed too much lockdown. He shuttered too much of the economy. Those are the reasons some are blaming for President Trump’s election loss to Joe Biden in 2020. But among these U.K. voters, Johnson’s mistakes had little impact and were alleviated by Johnson’s successful vaccine rollout, which comes close to President Trump’s decisions and record. Johnson’s errors were also alleviated by the fact that the left was so much worse. That, of course, supports the argument here that Joe Biden won his U.S. election by fraud, as our two peoples almost always vote in tandem.
Bottom line, Britain has swung Tory so long as they continue to care about the working class, and this country is going to make it. Let this be a lesson for Republicans.