81. The Battle for Hartlepool: is Labour heading for disaster?
The Owen Jones Podcast
Owen Jones
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
With a critical by-election looming there, I headed to Hartlepool in England's North East to find out if Labour are about to lose another crucial brick in the crumbling so-called 'Red Wall'. I meet with the party's candidate, candidates standing for the Northern Independence Party and Reform, the current and former leader of the council, Labour canvassers and voters on the ground to ask - why is a seat in which Labour won a crushing victory less than 4 years ago at risk of falling out of its hands, potentially providing Boris Johnson with a critical triumph?
It's a complex mix: younger voters leaving towns like this as politics polarises by age, poverty sitting side by side with economically secure retired homeowners, the Tories ploughing investment into their favoured communities, and Labour lacking any coherent vision. Can Labour ever rebuild an electoral coalition to secure power - or are we doomed to indefinite Tory rule?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We are sorry that the 0906 service to Red Car Central via Middlesbrough has been |
| 0:07.2 | further delayed and is now expected to arrive at 090, which is very wonky. |
| 0:12.8 | Looming taller and taller over British politics is the discussion going on in |
| 0:16.8 | these houses in this neighbourhood which will choose its next MP next week. |
| 0:22.4 | 69.5% Brexit to leave one of the highest areas in the country yet at the 2019 |
| 0:29.3 | general election, it didn't fall from Labour to the Conservative. |
| 0:45.3 | Do you think this goes different for a donkey? Oh yes I do, I think he cares more for the |
| 0:49.8 | people probably whereas Margaret that she didn't. |
| 0:54.4 | They used to say that they wade the Labour though in seats like Harley Paul, |
| 0:59.8 | rather than counted them, but that's all changed. This port town in County Durham is a stark |
| 1:05.4 | example of the party's electoral crisis. It's got strong similarities with other |
| 1:10.0 | traditionally working class, overwhelmingly white communities in the north and the Midlands, |
| 1:15.5 | which voted to decisively leave the European Union back in the 2016 referendum, |
| 1:20.7 | where Labour's majority has plummeted over the years, culminating in the fall |
| 1:26.0 | of much of the so-called Red Wall in the 2019 election. |
| 1:30.2 | Anyone with a Labour rosec could win in seats such as this in England's north-east or |
| 1:34.6 | sorry it was traditionally thought, which is why New Labour parachuted in so many of their |
| 1:39.2 | leading lights to represent these constituencies. In the case of Harley Paul, it was Peter Mandelson. |
| 1:45.9 | But while communities like Harley Paul often suffer, its grim up north-tight stereotyping |
| 1:51.1 | is so much more complicated than that. While poverty is a major social problem, many of the voters |
| 1:56.9 | are older, often retired, homeowners. This constituency proved fertile ground for UKIP. |
| 2:03.8 | In the 2015 election, Nigel Farage's party came within 3,000 votes of Labour who won little |
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