• UK Scotland decides its future in the most crucial elections of the last decade

The Labor debacle in the north of England has put party leader

Keir Starmer

on the ropes

, who faces an internal uprising on the hard wing and calls for his resignation within a year of succeeding

Jeremy Corbyn

.


For the first time since 1964, the Labor Party lost the seat of

Hartlepool

, the pro-Brexit stronghold of the industrial north,

to the Conservatives

.

And he did it in a humiliating way too: Tory candidate

Jill Mortimer led

Labor candidate

Paul Williams

by 23 points (51% to 28%)

.


Mortimer's victory in the traditional "red wall" of Labor gives wings to "premier"

Boris Johnson

and is a tremendous blow to Keir Starmer in his first electoral litmus test.

The Labor leader said Thursday that he

would take "full responsibility" for the results.

"If Starmer doesn't change direction, not only will he lose his post, but the Labor Party will never come to power," warned Andrew Scattergood, co-director of the current hard wing Momentum, who recalled how Jeremy Corbyn came to capture the 50 % of Hartlepool's vote in 2017.

"

This result is a disaster

," Scattergood added.

"A transformative and socialist message would have served to win again. But Starmer's isolationist and empty-talk strategy has failed miserably."

"Starmer should resign"


"There is no excuse for what happened, Starmer should resign," said former Corbyn communications chief Stebe Howell. "Never again can we send a candidate to an election naked, without a clear program and

without a vision of society,

" said former Corbyn number two for economic affairs, John McDonnell.

In the absence of the final results of the local elections in England and the parliaments of Scotland and Wales, the Labor Party ambitions at best to retain the mayor of London with Sadiq Khan. But that Pyrrhic victory will be no consolation to Starmer, 58, who overtook Johnson in polls last fall (at the height of the pandemic) and who has been worryingly deflated since the start of the year. His incisive prosecutorial style was effective against Johnson in the first parliamentary confrontations. But his internal revenge against the corbynista sector and the

lack of a message

have taken their toll at the moment of truth.

For Boris Johnson, driven by the success of vaccines, these local elections have been his personal revenge and the confirmation of his popular pull in the north of England, in the face of the rise of the pro-independence parties that can achieve an absolute majority in Scotland .

The Conservative Party further confirmed its advance in what is now becoming known as the

"blue wall" in northeast England

with the victory in Northumberland, a county that had been in Labor hands since 1970.



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