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Laura Piddock is now member of the Labour Party’s central apparatus. Having been elected to the NEC. This is very interesting. Piddock lost the seat of North West Durham in 2019, by 2.4%. This was not a total smashing but is still instructive.
Piddock was elected to the seat in 2017 because the previous Labour MP (Pat Glass) was sick of the death threats from Leave voters and stood down.
Prior to this the seat had seen safely Labour since its creation in 1950.
Piddock was from the very first moment strongly associated with Corbyn and his leadership and was shadow Secretary of State for Employment Rights in the Corbyn shadow cabinet from in the last 4 month of Corbyn’s leadership.
So when Corbyn and Swinson whipped their MPs to vote for the election that Johnson’s wanted to deal with the problem MPs in his own party and the few who had left to join Change UK Piddock was an absolute measure of the appeal of Corbyn and Corbynism in a safe Labour seat.
What followed the total destruction of Labour at the polls and the loss of North West Durham to the Tories. Piddock was out as an MP.
If we go back in time very slightly to the English local elections of 2017 we again find Laura Piddock loosing a seat to the Tories. This time as a ward councillor on Northumberland County Council.
Northumberland County Council is a classic English local government entity where a lot of people living in towns are merged with gigantic rural hinterlands. This often me abs that rural Tories rule over urban Labour voters.
Since 2008 Northumberland County Council has been under No Overall Control but the trend towards the Tories has been clear. The Tories have slowly eaten the local LibDem vote and are now pushing Labour into ever smaller electoral enclaves.
The LibDem’s went fully suicidal in 2010 so the evaporation of their vote is entirely self explanatory. Labour is another matter.
Labour lost seats on the council in 2008 and the LibDems emerged as the largest group. Another classic sign of the collapse of the Labour electoral bloc as a result of the Iraq War.
In 2013 the LibDems lost a lot of seats because the Orange Bookers had made their deal with Satan and so the party as a whole was on its way to oblivion. Labour got close to it’s pre-2008 seat count but did not recover all the the ground.
Which brings us back to 2017. Piddock was then defending a council seat where she had a clear majority over the LibDems in second place. When the Tories seized the ward in 2017 they came from 3rd place to win. The LibDems lost 90% of their vote.
Clearly something was going on but it was not just Leave/Brexit. UKIP were no where electorally and Labour’s reach had been shrinking for years. The geographically spread of Labour voters in the county was shrinking and is now concentrated in the costal towns north of Newcastle.
There has been a structural change in the seat distribution on the council. Labour are never going to push their way to control of Northumberland ever again.
Piddock was there to witness these changes but doesn’t seem to have noticed them. Presumably the blinding lights of Westminster and Corbynism dazzled her. That is not a good sign.
Perhaps being on the NEC and needing to think more strategically will help Piddock to reflect on these issues. Failure is, after all, the greatest teaching tool their is. I suspect not however.
No one in Labour seems at all interested in the social structural changes in their electoral bloc. This is a shame because recognising the problems caused by these structural changes is the only way Labour can start to push back against Tory power.
Perhaps when it is only degree level educated people in major urban areas voting for them then Labour might notice but by then it will be far, far too late.
Leave/Brexit is a symptom of a deeper structural problem. The collapse of the working class and its culture into an atomised and terrified mass.
Until Labour works out that the UK is now very firmly back in the, historically normal, situation of asymmetrical class relations nothing will change.
The class conflict of Bourgeoisie and Proletariat was historically atypical. Normally in human history the ruling class has not been opposed by another class but by a disorganised and atomised mass. This is why it was always so easy to rule.
The opposition of Bourgeoisie and Proletariat is now over (because the working class no longer exists and the bourgeoisie have transcended) and we are back to the situation of a ruling class confronting an atomised and terrified mass.
That atomised and terrified mass cannot be appealed to on the basis of class politics. Talking about the working class, ‘us’, and the typical political language of the left will not do anything.
So in Piddock we have the perfect misstep by the Labour Party and the wider Labour movement. Shame really.
