This Labor meltdown has been building for decades – The Guardian, Theguardian.com
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On the really painful days in politics, most commentary isn’t worth the name. It’s not analysis, it’s score-settling; party political broadcasts for the I-told-you-so brigade, rushed out by people who won’t admit to ever getting a single thing wrong themselves.
So it will go this weekend. You’ll read that Labor’s wipeout was only down to Brexit, by those who won’t admit a flaw in Jeremy Corbyn and hisnoodling messof a campaign. Or that it was all the Labor leader’s fault, said by remainers who have seen the position they urged on him blown to bits. It was both, of course. Ask voters in those seats that have just gone blue for the first time since the 1930 s, or the Labor would-bes who tried canvassing them. If you want to play election Cluedo, then Corbyn and Brexit go together like Colonel Mustard with the candlestick. But when a party descends into civil war, the factions at each others ’throats rarely bother looking up at the rest of the country.
To clear the decks, here’s my confession. I never foresaw the scale of this wipeout – and what it spells for our already failing economy, fractured society and battered democracy frankly scares me. Yet thereporting I’ve done– both in this election and before – made me almost sure Labor was going to lose, and in precisely those areas that are all over the front pages. What were called its heartlands, at least until Thursday night. The Bolsovers, the Bishop Aucklands. The un-metropolitan, unfashionable, never-kissed-a-Tory land that would, as the old saw goes, elect a donkey if it wore a red rosette.
And I can say with certainty that this week’s meltdown is the culmination of trends that stretch back decades. They were Corbyn’s poisoned inheritance, not his creation – but any leader who wants to win back those seats will have to deal with them better than he managed.
For decades, their party took much of the north, the Midlands and Wales as its birthright. It was the “red wall” that would repel invading Tory forces. As one Labor county councilor in Derbyshire, the region that lost Dennis Skinner as an MP on Thursday night, told me: “They barely bothered to campaign. ”While the party bigwigs threw their weight about, the mines and the manufacturers, the steel and the shipbuilding were snuffed out. With them went the culture of Labourism: the bolshy union stewards, the self-organized societies, most of the local newspapers. Practically any institution that might incubate a working-class provincial political identity was bulldozed.
In North East Derbyshire last month, I saw up close what was left: warehouses and care work. Bullying bosses, zero-hours contracts, poverty pay and social security top-ups. Smartphones to tell you whether you have a shift that morning, and Facebook to give you the news, or some dishonest fragment of it. Across the UK, mines were turned into museums, factories swapped for call centers, meaningful local government replaced by development quangos.
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