THE Conservative Party have won the Parliamentary seat of Hartlepool for the first time since 1964.
At around 5:20am, the Labour Party finally accepted defeat, after being trounced by the Tories by thousands of votes, in a clear demonstration of the port town’s long overdue rejection of socialism.
The new MP of the Pro-Brexit seat will now be politician and farmer Jill Mortimer, with the final results as follows:
Green: 358.
Lib Dem: 349.
Reform UK: 368.
Labour: 8,589.
Conservative: 15,529.
Labour accepted defeat in the Hartlepool by-election with hours before the final results, with the town gaining a Tory MP for the first time since the 1960s.
As the counting began to draw to a conclusion, Labour were forced to accept defeat, with Jim McMahon, the shadow transport secretary, saying that Labour “haven’t secured enough to get over the line”.
“Our starting point was the 2019 election, and at that time we secured just over a third of the vote,” he said. “So it was always going to come down to the 10,000 votes that the Brexit Party attracted in that election and where they would go to.
“In the end, we weren’t able to convince that Brexit vote to come back to Labour. It was an aftershock from the earthquake that we felt in 2019, being felt in this by-election.”
The win for the Tories poses a further worry for Keir Starmer and his party, this time over the election race of Tracy Brabin.
If Brabin is announced as the winner and becomes the new mayor of West Yorkshire this weekend, she will naturally have to stand down from her role as the MP of Batley and Spen, triggering yet another by-election – an election that, taking into account the result in Hartlepool and the wave of Tory wins across the country so far, could result in yet another important loss for Labour.
