Labour’s defeat in Copeland shows the party is losing its heartlands

So what went wrong for the Labour Party in Copeland last night? There’s no understating the scale of the defeat – the worst by-election performance by an opposition since 1878 by some measures. It lost a seat it has held since 1935 to the Conservatives because the local MP, Jamie Reed, quit politics for a job in the nuclear industry. It’s threatening to become a trend: last night another by-election replaced Tristram Hunt, who also quit as MP for Stoke Central to run the Victoria & Albert Museum. His party held the seat last night, seeing off a noisy but shambolic Ukip campaign but let’s not pretend there’s much for Labour to cheer.

Neither of the two resigning MPs directly attacked Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in their resignation letters, but both have been outspoken critics of the direction he was taking. Both wrote agonised essays about the future of Labour. In a pamphlet, which Hunt had organised, on Labour and Englishness, Reed described a ‘quiet crisis’ in towns and smaller cities across England in which the local institutions, from the high street to the newspaper to the town hall, were all disappearing, and with them regional identity.