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.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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