Lessons from Labour’s 2021 Election Defeat

“It is a crushing defeat that signals that Labour’s loss of several of its Northern constituencies under former Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in the 2019 general election was not a one-off occurrence that could be fixed with a new leader.”

On Friday morning, we awoke to find that Labour had been defeated in the Hartlepool by-election by an astounding 51.9% to 28.7%, with the Tories taking a seat Labour had held since its creation in 1974. As we enter the weekend, it is becoming clear that this was just the first of many poor results for Labour following voting on “Super Thursday,” which saw local and mayoral elections take place across the United Kingdom. It is a crushing defeat that signals that Labour’s loss of several of its Northern constituencies under former Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in the 2019 general election was not a one-off occurrence that could be fixed with a new leader. It seems that the working classes are—just as in the late 1970s through to the 1990s—intent on voting for the Tories, when all indications show that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government (just like Prime Ministers David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s) holds them in contempt.

The real shame here is not only that the working class has been significantly brainwashed into voting against its interests. It is not just a Tory party that brazenly flaunts its greed because journalists no longer hold them to account. The real shame is that Labour has stopped supporting the working class because it is too scared to point to the clear bogeyman in the era of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) (just as before): capitalism.

The Corbyn era was exceptional in this respect, which is why the mainstream media led non-stop personal attacks against a man who has fought for justice and equality as a member of Parliament since 1983 (the year former Prime Minister Tony Blair entered parliament). The press was terrified of a man who pointed to the mechanisms of capitalism as the cause of poverty and suffering across Britain at a time when Prime Minister Cameron’s Tories seized upon the economic fallout of the 2007 financial crisis to implement swinging cuts to welfare. When Mr. Corbyn’s Labour Party called out this cynical move, fighting the 2017 general election with a pledge to end seven years of austerity and promising investment in the National Health Service, schools, and social security, Labour slashed the Tories’ lead. This led Prime Minister May to depart and then-Member of Parliament Johnson to take over a party that ended up with no working parliamentary majority.