'I hope here in Cheshire we will get more control over our affairs'

MP for Ellesmere Port

There is no doubt that the Labour Party’s defeat in the Hartlepool by election was of seismic proportions but there were plenty of warnings that Hartlepool would be a struggle if you cared to look for them. The party had scraped home with just over one third of the vote in two of the last three general elections, had been losing council seats there for some time and there were 10,000 plus Brexit party voters who were looking for a new home.

There are mitigating factors in this election; we have not had politics as normal for 12 months and the traditional opportunities for the Leader of the Opposition to make their mark have been severely curtailed. What would most people think if Keir Starmer had spent the first year of his Leadership setting out detailed policy positions in the middle of a pandemic? Given an election is 2 or 3 years away at the earliest they would have thought we were completely out of touch and wouldn’t listen anyway, but as we move towards what is hopefully an end to the damaging cycle of lockdowns and reopenings (and there will be a day of reckoning for this Government on their mistakes during the pandemic when we finally get that independent inquiry) then now is the time to set out that clear agenda on job creation, job protection, investment in public services, strong devolution in the regions, the green industrial revolution and those core issues that people have always and still care about.

As our excellent results in Wales show, incumbency in a crisis is an advantage and there are patches of other good results around the country with the Metro Mayor successes showing a clear and localised message is still a winning formula as we recommended in the Labour for the North report which I co-authored. Call it an emotional connection, call it engagement; most people’s priorities in the places we have lost are still the ones we should have the most compelling answers on and when the shine wears off on this Government and people realise things haven’t got any better they will look for alternatives. Labour has won nearly all of the Mayoral contests with Andy Burnham’s in particular standing out as a major success. This tells me that there is a future for the Labour Party with strong local leadership campaigning on the issues that matter to people. His signature policy in the campaign was to take back control of the bus network, something I know would be extremely popular around here too. The results also tell me that the more people see of devolution the more they want of it and I hope here in Cheshire we will get more control over our affairs. But I am also in no doubt that if we are to form a national Government again there are lots of places around the country where we will have to spend a lot of time over the next few years listening, building trust and never ever taking voters for granted.