9: The Red Wall Crumbles

Corbynism: The Post-Mortem

Society & Culture, National, Government, News, Politics, Documentary

4.4 • 285 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The loss of Labour's traditional northern heartlands was one of the most devastating elements of the 2019 general election defeat. In Episode 9, we explore just how Labour's 'Red Wall' turned blue as we are joined by the former MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, Ruth Smeeth.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is obviously a very disappointing night for the Labour Party.
0:05.0	I want to also make it clear that I will not lead the party in any future general election campaign.
0:13.0	I will discuss with our party to ensure there is a process now of reflection on this result and on the policies that the party will take going forward.
0:27.5	It's not Corbinism. There is no such thing as Corpulism.
0:33.5	Labour's defeat in the 2019 election was its worst in 84 years, losing 60 seats and 7.9% of the voters they managed to secure in 2017.
0:44.5	The shock for Labour was not just the scale of the defeat, but that the areas it was losing to the Tories had been voting Labour for generations.
0:52.4	The Labour heartlands in the north of England, otherwise known as
0:55.8	the Red Wall, had abandoned their traditional support for the party. Old, working class,
1:01.4	industrial and mining towns that had returned nothing but a Labour MP for decades were now
1:06.8	flipping Conservative, a prospect that would have seemed unthinkable only a few short years earlier.
1:12.3	If losing Scottish safe seats in 2015 was a low water mark for the party, the loss of seats like
1:18.4	Bolsover in 2019 was like a deep sea dive. Boris Johnson, who had successfully taken control of
1:25.4	the Conservative Party and crushed his own backbench Brexit rebels,
1:29.6	gambled on red walled towns preferring his Brexit Britain to the manifesto pledges made by Corbyn's labour.
1:36.7	Johnson's gamble paid off as Brexit, Corbyn's plummeting popularity with the electorate,
1:42.8	and years of neglect, combined to deliver a devastating
1:46.4	and fatal blow for the Corbyn project. But how exactly did the Labour Party lose seats that had only
1:52.2	ever voted Labour? How did a constituency like Bolsover, which had been returning socialist
1:57.8	stalwart Dennis Skinner to Parliament for nearly 50 years, end up backing
2:02.4	Boris Johnson. Hello and welcome to Corbinism the post-mortem with me, your host, Oz Catterjee.
2:08.7	Here on this week's episode to answer these questions and more about Labour's northern struggles,
2:13.5	we have one of the Labour MPs who lost their seat as the red wall crumbled.
	...

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