Hartlepool By-Election Preview: Tradition Or Tories?

Can Labour Hold A Red Wall Marginal?

We have it, the first by-election of this British Parliament, and it's a doozy. Caused by Mike Hill's resignation, the seat of Hartlepool in the North East of England is now open, with the by-election being expected for May 6th, the day of broader local and mayoral elections across England,as well as Scotland and Welsh elections (and, also, my older brother's birthday, so Happy Birthday to him). So, we're going to preview it.

History

Hartlepool is the former seat of Peter Mandelson, a New Labour architect who would bounce around the cabinet a couple times under Blair, go take a European job, and then become Deputy Prime Minister (or, sorry, First Secretary Of State) from the House Of Lords under Gordon Brown. The seat is classic Red Wall old Labour terrain - 70% Leave, hugely working class, full of voters who do not hold socially liberal views on immigration or race. It's in some ways best compared with Sedgefield, Tony Blair's old seat, in that both Blair and Mandelson were given the seats in selection battles because of their safety in the 1980s.

Sedgefield flipped in 2019, a call that caused much derision when I predicted it repeatedly in that campaign. I bet on it, too, for what it's worth, and it won, because people looked at that seat - 60% Leave, represented by one of the main Labour proponents of a Second Referendum/Remain position in the Parliamentary Labour Party - and somehow went "nah, they're fine, they're good." The same people also thought a Hung Parliament was possible, so the intellectual caliber we're dealing with was admittedly not the greatest, but Sedgefield flipped, and if not for a vote split, so would have Hartlepool.

The Brexit Party ran their best candidate of the cycle here, a high profile Member of the European Parliament Richard Tice, who unlike many Brexit Party candidates, actively tried to win, even once Nigel Farage basically neutered the campaign by not standing candidates in any Tory held seats. Now, Farage is out of the game, Brexit is now called Reform, and all the media attention usually garnered by Farage will be non-existent, meaning that Labour probably can't rely on the same vote split again to win. So, how winnable is the seat for the Tories?

Labour didn't break 40% in 2019, only getting 37.7% and only beating the Tories by 8.8%, with nearly 26% with Brexit. If Brexit had not stood in the seat last time, the Conservatives would have won, I absolutely believe this, without a shadow of a doubt. That said, this isn't Corbyn's Labour Party anymore.

Prospects

The easiest way Labour wins this is if Tice runs again and gets 20% or whatever again. If that happens, then there probably won't be enough of a Labour-Tory swing to flip the seat, because despite the fact that Keir Starmer's poll are tanking, they're not tanking that badly. That said, there is some evidence that the Tory vote is becoming more efficient - recent polls have showed the Tory vote roughly at their national position from 2019, but with less of that vote stuck in the (safe blue) South and more of it in the (marginal, competitive) North, but that could just be randomness. I tend to buy it, because Starmer is better comparatively for the South - full as it is of posh Tories who pine for the David Cameron era to come back. The North being inherently distrustful of a literal fucking Knight who last took a private sector salary in 2002, as far as I can tell, doesn't shock me either.

Starmer is in a rough patch these days, mostly because his triangulatory bullshit goes down even worse with the electorate in large swathes of the country than Corbyn's socialism. At least Corbyn had the benefit of simple messaging. "What do we want?" "A more ethical means of capitalism, the definition of which will go before 7 different reviews and fundamentally not cohere into a basic message" doesn't exactly get the heart racing. Starmer is feckless, ineffectual, and uninspiring. Maybe we'll be so lucky as to see him unemployed before the next election, because he cannot win it, and seats like this show why.

If Labour were on track for an even mediocre result nationally, they wouldn't be scared about Hartlepool, but they're scared about Hartlepool, as their Shadow Chancellor admitted when she said it was a "difficult" by-election for them. Starmer needs a win, and a good result in the May locals generally, but nothing I've ever seen from Starmer makes me think it's coming. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

My gut says the Tories win the seat, mostly because I think even if Tice runs again, without Farage, his candidacy will fall into the background. The race will nationalize, the issues will harden, and without Farage hanging around, Tice's raison d'etre from 18 months earlier - Get Brexit Done - will be gone. If he runs, I think he gets 10%, and that his voters will flow to the Conservatives heavily. That would be enough, even if there is no further Labour slippage amongst their voters, which as we say in the US all the time, is probably not true. The idea of a floor on Democratic support in white working class areas is consistently shown to be a lie. There is a floor, but it's just much, much lower than people realize.

If Tice doesn't run, the Tories run home fairly easily, in my view. This is a seat not dissimilar from Tim Ryan's Ohio seat that everyone rightly acknowledges across the pond is gone soon, and it's a matter of when, not if. Here it's the same thing. Hartlepool is a 70% Leave seat represented by the party of Remain, and while that divide is no longer active, the things that made Leavers vote to Leave and Remainers vote to Remain still are. It doesn't make much sense that places as culturally different as Hartlepool and Tooting would vote for the same political party, and yet they do. Or, at least, they did. I think that ends in May.

Rating: Lean Conservative (Gain)