Three cheers for the Monkey Hangers!

“What is the bewhiskered Limey looney on about now? Has he finally flipped?” I hear you cry.

No dear friends. Stay with me, for I bring a little bundle of good news. It may not be of much comfort to patriotic Americans living under the rule of a demented old political hack and the Wicked Witch of the Woke, but I hope it will raise a smile and remind you that there is always hope.

I would have written this earlier, but I’ve only just stopped laughing. On Thursday we had a big bunch of elections here in the UK. Not a General election, but a big grab bag of various local and regional elections across England, Scotland, and Wales. Only Northern Ireland had no elections going on. Here is a BBC graphic summing up of what was up for grabs.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into detail, there’s way to much of it. There are seven different sorts of election going on, using at least three different actual voting systems. Some results are in, some counts haven’t even started yet. What I want to tell you about is the parliamentry by-election in Hartlepool, which we do know the result of, oh BOY do we know that result!

Hartlepool is a coastal constituency in the north east of England. It’s very much a Labour heartland place and Labour have held it since 1945 (the constituency names and borders change now and then. but all the ‘Hartlepool’ constituencies have been Labour since the war.). It was one of the “Red Wall” northern constituencies that didn’t fall to the Conserrvatives in the 2019 election. Remember, in the UK the main parties’ colours are reversed, blue is Conservative, red is Labour. The term was, of course, borrowed by lazy jounalists who heard the term Blue Wall applied to a block of solid Democrat States. It shows how the lefty/journo types think of people as blocks, not individuals. The main “wall” stretches across from Liverpool to Yorkshire, with other elements in the northeast of England and south Wales.

The nickname for the folk of Hartlepool is Monkey Hangers, from a legend that in the late 18th/early 19th centuries, during the wars with France,  a monkey, probably a ship’s mascot, was washed ashore after a shipwreck. The locals found this bedraggled, short, stinky, hairy indivudual that couldn’t speak English and made the perfectly sound deduction that it must be French, and therefore a spy, so they hanged it. Similar stories are told about various places around Britain’s coast, but it has clung strongly to Hartlepool. The people of Hartlepool, like the folk of good sense and good humour they are, embrace this story and it forms a big part of local identity. The furry chap in blue and white at the polling station in the title image of this piece is H’Angus the Monkey, mascot of Hartlepool FC.

The by-election was caused when the sitting Labour MP resigned over a sexual harrasment scandal. Ordinarily it would be a walkover for Labour. Even when the old MP has had to resign in such circumstances the opposition simply doesn’t lose by-elections mid way through a parliament, certainly not in safe seats. Especially not in safe seats that they’ve just held in general elections when other safe seats fell. Whichever party is in office, it is them who are blamed for whatever has gone wrong, the opposition have no record to defend. So, if Labour were to lose Hartlepool mid way through a Conservative government that’s had the job of bumbling through a pandemic and has imposed very unpopular lockdowns that would be huge, no sorry, it would by HUGE!

Another brick in the wall

Yup, you guessed it, on Thursday the dear, sweet, wonderful Monkey Hangers not only elected a Conservative MP, they elected Jill Mortimer not by a whisker, not by a “waifer then” margin, oh no, they elected Jill with 52% of the vote, a majority of nearly 7,000. These are the sort of numbers that Hartlepool Labour MPs used to get back in their heyday. 

“And in Hartlepool Labour have been defeate…oh look! A squirrel!”

Of course, the MSM has had no choice but to cover this crushing defeat of their Labour friends, spouses, in-laws and lovers, however, the fact that the by-election was on the same day as many other elections the length and breadth of the land has given them ample ammo to minimise the damage. One story they’re making great play with is about Jayda Fransen, (or to use her official MSM title *Far right bigot Jayda Fransen”) formerly of the compact and bijou groupette the English Defence League, more recently of the equally minimalist party Britain First. She went up to Scotland to stand against Nicola Sturgeon (leader of the Scottish Nationalists, AKA the Dwarf from the North) in the elections for the Scottish Parliament. Well, Jayda Fransen got only 46 votes. This is hardly a surprise. Given that she was once in an explicitly English party, is very much southern English Essex lass complete with weapons grade eyelashes and makeup to match who was campaigning in a part of Glasgow that has elected the leader of the SNP I’d say the real news story is that she’s still alive and not hanging from a lampost in Pollockshields.

This building up the tiniest, nastiest and least relevant elements of “the right” into monsters they can distract and scare people with is standard practice. In the US the ludicrous attention paid to the doings of the Westboro Baptist Church, the religious equivalent of the Addams Family, is a case in point. They ignore inconvenient facts about their chosen bugbears, like the fact that many of Britain First’s economic policies (in so far as they have them) could come out of a 1970s Labour manifesto, or that the founder of the WBC was a card carrying Democrat. The important thing is to inflate an unlovely and insignificant group and portray them as an expression of the actual Right.

Is the (Labour) Party over?

I think this is something rather more than a crushingly embarrasing defeat for Labour, I think it might just be a distant death knell. Put very simply, the Conservative Party is the descendant of (and is often still refered to as) the Tory party from the politics that grew out of our civil wars of the 1640s/50s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Likewise, the ugly rump of the Lib Dems is (just about, with some twists and turns) the descendant of the Whigs, who opposed the High Church Tories and became the Liberal Party. From the late 1600s to after the First World War the Tory/Whig, Conservative/Liberal dynamic defined British politics.

Although we see politics in the UK today very much as Labour vs Conservative, this has only been the case since 1945. The Labour party is really a creature of the industrial age. It grew in the late 19th century out of labour unions, nonconformist Christianity and Marxism. It had a genuine role standing up for the urban industrial working class. However, that class, and its interests have changed, the Labour Party itself has also changed, but not inline with its tradional base. Methodism has been replaced by Mohamed, the working class by Wokery. Can it survive in the contradicotory roles of the party of Islam and the Woke urban elites? Only time will tell, but to lose Hartlepool half way through a clumsey Conservative administration led by an Old Etonian Toff does not bode well.

In the meantime, just for a moment or two, let’s just sit back and sip the exquisite cocktail of leftist tears.