They queued in their thousands, shielding themselves from the Tyneside rain with signs: “Gan on Jezza son”, “Jezza knas”, “Jez, ya propa lush”. A crowd of more than 10,000 spectators – mostly young, many wearing Jeremy Corbyn T-shirts – turned out on a damp evening in Gateshead to give the politician a welcome more befitting a rock star.
For Alex Muller-Nicholson, 33, it was the first sign that the cult of Corbyn might sway the election for Labour in its once-impenetrable heartlands. “I think there’s been a noticeable shift in the last fortnight,” she said in her Hartlepool home the morning after the general election. “In the region, with Corbyn actually coming up here, that’s made a world of difference. It wasn’t that widely reported either, so that started to get more shares online and pick up momentum.”
Footage of the Gateshead crowds, and a picture of Corbyn buying a Big Issue outside Newcastle train station, went viral on Facebook. But it was the content of Corbyn’s speech that really struck a chord. The region, he thundered, had “suffered from the ravages of Thatcherite economics” (the mention of which elicited boos) and he accused the Tory government of standing by while thousands of jobs disappeared at Redcar steelworks in 2015.
For Muller-Nicholson, whom I first met seven weeks ago at the beginning of the Voices and votes series, the Labour leader connected with the disenfranchised in a way that Theresa May simply didn’t. “The fact he did those TV debates when she wouldn’t, and he came and visited the north-east and spoke about things that are relevant to us, like Redcar – people appreciate that,” she said.
In the days before the election, it felt as if Labour had rallied enough to cling on to its slim 3,024-vote majority in Hartlepool, a town it has held for 53 years. Over the course of the campaign, it became clear that this was not the “Brexit election” that had been billed. Immigration and sovereignty had slipped down the priority list, replaced by fundamental concerns over jobs, public sector pay and NHS cuts. Nowhere are these concerns felt more keenly than in Hartlepool, a town with double the national employment rate, a third of workers in the public sector, and a deep resentment over the removal of A&E and maternity services at its hospital.
“If you don’t agree with the Conservatives, there’s not a great deal of mainstream alternatives,” said Andrew Glover, 31, a marine engineer who had been undecided but wound up voting Labour. “I don’t agree with all their policies, but I certainly agree with an end to austerity. It was called the Brexit election when it was first called, but I think it was the cuts that really gave Labour the power to crack on and get this near majority.”
The result in Hartlepool took almost everyone by surprise. Sources in both Conservatives and Labour camps thought it was “on the flip of a coin” – one senior Tory predicted a recount with the two main parties tied on about 40% of the vote each.
In the end, Labour’s Mike Hill won comfortably: the party romped home with 21,969 votes (52.5%), its best result since Peter Mandelson’s victory in 2001. The Tories trailed behind at 14,319 votes (34.2%), up from 8,256 in 2015. Both parties benefited from the decline of Ukip, which came second in Hartlepool two years ago but saw its support slashed by 16.5 percentage points this time round. The town had concluded that Brexit was “done now, we’ve decided”, as Glover said a week before the vote.
What can we learn from the result? Old party loyalties held up enough in Hartlepool to carry Labour across the line. Faced with a choice between the Conservatives and Labour, many of the 11,052 Ukip voters from 2015 appear to have chosen the latter. Labour sources are adamant that a flood of young and first-time voters turned out on the day, having been enthused by Corbyn, who seemed to turn off so many of the older “traditional” Labour voters.
But the surge in support for the Conservatives, who secured their best result in Hartlepool in 25 years, lends support to the argument made earlier in the series that the town’s “latent social conservatism” has come to the fore. Before Brexit, that might have spelled disaster for the current Labour leadership. But when the dial swung back towards more pressing issues, like the NHS and unemployment, many voters felt compelled to vote for Corbyn.
