13 Dec 2019

Conservatives capture key Labour heartlands in north

Many of the 60 MPs who lost their jobs last night turned angrily on Jeremy Corbyn, saying he was simply unelectable.

Welcome to the Red Shed, the Labour club in Wakefield, the constituency once the cornerstone of the party’s so called ‘red wall’.  That’s a swathe of the country which marks out huge areas of solid Labour seats.

But now that red wall has crumbled – with the Conservatives picking up a host of those seats instead.

Many of the 60 MPs who lost their jobs last night turned angrily on Jeremy Corbyn, saying he was simply unelectable.

But for plenty of voters across the north it was the party’s ambiguity over Brexit that was to blame. Like here in Wakefield where Labour’s Mary Creagh was a prominent Remain voice – and suffered the consequences – as the Conservatives won for the first time since 1931.