Labor crisis as Keir Starmer says he made false assumptions about Red Wall voters | UK | New UK News

The Labor Party is currently reeling at his rejection in the local elections in England. While retaining a handful of tips, the overall picture saw the party lose overall control over a number of regions, some of which it had held for over 100 years. Much attention was paid to the Red Wall, where a Hartlepool by-election defeat was seen as the nail in the coffin of Sir Keir Starmer’s hopes of rebuilding his party’s once-immovable base in the north of the England.

Thinkers, politicians, commentators and more across the political spectrum have delivered their verdict on why the Labor Party lost the confidence of its traditional base of working class voters in 2019.

Paul Embery, a leading trade unionist and Labor member, told Express.co.uk defeat has long been brewing, spanning decades of liberalization, globalization and drawing a larger electorate of figures like Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Embery, among others, suggests that if the Labor Party is to keep the voters it has attracted over the years – young graduates, city dwellers, middle-class liberals – it must abandon the “vigilance” it has. adopted under M. Corbyn.

Still, if a YouGov poll is anything to go by, the response to Labor’s problems could be greater than previously thought.

Patrick English, research director at the pollster, recently conducted a full investigation into the question: “Is the stereotypical image of the inhabitants of the ‘red wall’ really accurate?”

The results revealed that the assumptions about Red Wall voters that Labor and Conservatives have been chasing are “fundamentally wrong”.

Speaking to The Times’ Red Box podcast, he said: “We asked a lot of things that people might consider progressive social-liberal policies to see if it is true that the voter or the resident of the Red Wall doesn’t care about climate change, is socially conservative, and doesn’t care about climate change. I don’t like the change in all these different kinds of metrics.

“What we have found is that this is fundamentally not true.

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“There’s a whole group of issues the Red Wall takes liberal or neutral positions on, and that includes transgender rights, teaching about Britain’s colonial past and slave trade in schools,” climate change, multiculturalism, restriction of hate speech online.

“And yes, they are even more positive when it comes to immigration than negative.

“So all of these assumptions that were going around about Red Wall voters, they just don’t stack up when you look at the data.”

Vitally, the poll found that people living in Red Wall constituencies “look a lot like the rest of the country.”

This puts Sir Keir in a difficult position as it seems his operation since becoming leader has been to adopt what he believes to be a working class mentality.

He is barely seen without a Union Jack flag in the background during speeches and television appearances.

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This was widely interpreted as a nod to make the Labor Party the “patriotic party”, which he had promised to do when he became leader.

However, the party faced another crisis earlier this year after a strategy note leaked appearing to show its plans to reclaim the Red Wall seats.

It came from an internal strategy presentation commissioned by the Labor Party which said it must make “use of the [union] flag veterans [and] dress intelligently “in order to win back voters.

Seen by The Guardian, he also revealed that the party had a new term for the Red Wall areas, now calling them “foundation seats”.

A senior Labor official told the publication the language came from the language of the Republic branding agency rather than the party’s.

With the poll in mind, however, Sir Keir’s efforts may have been in vain.

Professor Richard Wyn Jones, a political scientist, said that while Sir Keir’s recognition that Labor has a problem with patriotism – and by extension an identity problem – is a good start, he and the party do not understand the nature of the crisis, which is fundamental. to win back those lost voters.

He told Express.co.uk: “The nature of this problem is in England where they have lost the votes of people who identify as English in successive elections.

“It’s something that they really struggle with, and they even struggle to see it, let alone what to do about it.”

Since the election, Sir Keir has ‘freshened up’ his party by sacking and hiring a range of top party leaders, including Angela Rayner, Rachel Reeves and Anneliese Dodds.

Last week, he expressed his interest in the party in the future by offering a new economic offer to voters.

That, he said, would not dwell on former leaders Mr Blair and Mr Corbyn who in recent years have dominated internal Labor disputes.