London: Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives scored a stunning election victory in an opposition stronghold Friday, after Britain held its first major ballot box test since Brexit and the coronavirus crisis.
The “Super Thursday” regional and local elections could reshape the UK as pro-independence forces in Scotland, where voting for the devolved parliament was also held, bid to break away. Results in Scotland are due on Saturday.
But early results from England on Friday showed that the Conservatives had won a landslide in the parliamentary seat of Hartlepool in the northeast, a bitter blow to the opposition Labour Party and its leader Keir Starmer.
Hartlepool, a rust-belt constituency deep in traditional Labour heartlands which has never voted Conservative since its creation in 1974, saw a 16 percent swing to the Tories.
“It is a truly historic result and a momentous day,” said Hartlepool’s newly-elected Conservative lawmaker Jill Mortimer. “Labour have taken people in Hartlepool for granted for too long.”
Her win continues the trend from the last election in December 2019, when Brexit was the dominant issue and Conservatives grabbed a string of seats across Labour’s so-called “Red Wall” heartlands in northern England.
The vote in strongly pro-Brexit Hartlepool was held alongside local elections across much of the country after the town’s Labour incumbent quit over allegations of sexual harassment.
In 2019 — Labour’s worst election result since 1935, under the hard-left leadership of Jeremy Corbyn — a quarter of Hartlepool’s electorate opted for the upstart Brexit Party.
Now, with Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union complete and that party rebranded, those voters appeared to flock to the Conservatives rather than back to Labour.
The result will ratchet up the pressure on Starmer, elected leader a year ago promising to rebuild the party and reconnect with its traditional voters.
“There’s no hiding from the fact this is a shattering result for Labour,” senior Labour MP Steve Reed told the BBC.
“It tells us that the pace of change in the Labour Party has not been fast enough. We need to quicken it up.”
Ahead of the official results in Hartlepool, a giant inflatable Johnson appeared outside the building where the vote count was taking place.
The balloon prime minister, complete with trademark scruffy blond hair, gave two thumbs up.
The outcome suggests Johnson continues to enjoy popularity in former Labour strongholds and has benefited from a “vaccine bounce” — even while Britain has suffered one of the world’s worst death tolls from Covid-19.
“The work to repay that faith starts right now, as we continue with our agenda to level up and build back better from the pandemic,” said Conservative Party co-chair Amanda Milling. AFP
