LONDRES (Sputnik) – The Labor Party received a severe blow in the first hours of vote counting in the municipal and regional elections on May 6, which led militants and analysts to question Keir Starmer’s leadership and his strategy to regain positions in their English fiefdoms. .
The final results of the local elections in England and the autonomic elections of Scotland and Wales will not be known until the weekend, but the initial counts were disastrous for Labor. Starmer took the helm in April 2020 – days after the first coronavirus lockdown – and wrapped his party leadership in the slogan of under new management to distance himself from his predecessor, leftist Jeremy Corbyn.
One less deputy
The tag did not work on his first election test. Labor lost the only parliamentary seat in contention, Hartlepool, which it had held since the constituency was created in 1974. The neolabor strategist and former minister under Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, controlled this coastal square in north-eastern England for almost a decade, which on Thursday 6 passed to the Conservatives.
With Hartlepool fell, over the next day, positions in town halls and city councils in the former Labor foci of the Middle Lands and the North of England. They are part of the so-called red wall, which leaned Brexit in the 2016 referendum and supported the Conservatives three years later, given Prime Minister Boris Johnson the loose majority he enjoys in Westminster.
“It is a truly historic result (…) people were fed up and want change,” celebrated the new deputy, Jill Mortimer, ignoring that the ‘Tories’ have been running the UK Government for 11 years.
His victory at Hartlepool was colossal: a 6,940 lead and 51.9% of the vote. The Labor candidate, with 28.7% of support, did not manage to recover even a bit of the 26% of the electorate that in 2019 fled to the now-defunct Brexit Party of former MEP Nigel Farage.
Agria defeat
“I take full responsibility for the results and I will take full responsibility for fixing things,” said Starmer, when he finally sat down, in the afternoon, before the television cameras.
The lawyer and former head of the UK Attorney General blamed the “disappointingly sour results” on internal divisions and disconnection with Eurosceptic Labor.
“We have changed as a party, but we have not made a strong enough case for the country,” he told the BBC.
He thus defied critics on the left who censured his lack of vision and, in some cases, suggested that he resign from office.
“We often talk to each other, rather than to the country, and we have lost the connection and trust of working people, particularly in places like Hartlepool,” he added.
These first post-Brexit elections have ensured, in England, the realignment of the electorate between the two major parties: the Conservatives are entrenched in predominantly white, low- or middle-income post-industrial districts and retained their traditional wealthy rural areas; Labor is entrenched in university cities and towns with its youthful and multi-ethnic population centers.
Liverpool makes history
Thus, Manchester and London were on the way to renewing their respective mayors and former Labor ministers, Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan. In turn, Liverpool, with a socialist background, marked a double milestone when it elected the first black woman, Joanna Andersen, as aedile of a metropolitan unitary authority.
Vote counting will run through the weekend in an effort to comply with anti-COVID restrictions. Votes counted on May 7 indicated that Labor would consolidate its dominant position in the Home Rule Assembly for Wales, with Mark Drakeford repeating as chief minister.
Meanwhile, the team of the new Labor leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, fought head-to-head with the Conservatives to attract the unionist vote to secure the second position in the Edinburgh Parliament, after the unbeatable Scottish National Party led by Nicola Sturgeon.
Source: Sputnik
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