If British Labo(u)r is Summarily Trashed/Trounced/Routed in Today's Parliamentary By-Election, It Has Only Itself to Blame/It Cannot Blame Anyone But Itself/It Fully Deserves What(ever) It Has Coming/Everything Coming to It...-It Has Totally Deserted and Alienated Its Traditional Voting Base (Though Newbie Leader Keir Starmer Can Hardly Be Blamed; He's Probably Done the 'Bestist' Anyone In the Party Could've Done In the Circumstances)...

In what can only be deemed the bitterest irony, by eschewing Jeremy Corbyn's radical economic plans and by simultaneously dining out at the altar of political correctness/identity politics/cancel culture/virtue-signalling/post-nationalism - and all the rest of the horrid socially 'progressive' agenda - it has jettisoned any remaining commonality it once so proudly shared with its traditional, heartland, working-class base...

...evidently having learnt next-to-nothing from its absolute thumping in the December 2019 General Election. 

As Rod/Rob Little, (Aotearoa-New Zealand's) Newstalk ZB U K correspondent (on the Mike Hosking Show) so aptly expressed things this very morning, the Labo(u)r Party's working-class heartland base in the industrial north didn't really mind/object all that much - the very converse in fact! - to socialist-style economics (my terms, not Mr Little's), but what they do find all too difficult to stomach - and will doubtless give full vent to in today's parliamentary by-election there - is the party's extreme social liberalism (again, my own phraseology/summation of the gist of Little's comments).

Not altogether that different from yours truly, who, though never a voter for, much less a supporter, let alone a paid-up party member of any left-wing party here in New Zealand - though the local Social Credit party official here did (at his own expense; and ever so briefly) make me a member of the party not long after my own unsuccessful attempt at political office as an independent in our 2008 General Election - came to see as much in relation to New Zealand's own Labour Party awhile ago now...

...especially whilst hearing noted political scholar/author/pundit/friend and party colleague of my long- (16 years)deceased Dad, one-time New Labour/Alliance Party political activist/co-founder and regular blogger/editorial writer Chris Trotter at a public meeting in our hometown DCC Public Library:

Trotter chronicled in fascinating and meticulous detail how literally hundreds of thousands of active, generally evangelical members of Aotearoa-New Zealand's own Labour Party left/abandoned /deserted/forsook the party in mega-droves in the early-to-mid-nineteen eighties as social reforms such as the landmark Homosexual Law Reform Bill promulgated and pushed relentlessly by 'social progressives' passed into law here - against the petitioned opposition of 700,000-some signatories...

Much in the same vein as yours truly, who, while never an actual Labour voter as such, ever had strong political sympathies in that particular direction (and even more to the left, embracing both the then Values Party and the Social Credit Political League)...

...being - actually very much like Social Credit - pretty well ever decisively left-of-centre on economic matters whilst strongly right-of-centre upon 'social issues', whereas Labour - especially following the forced retirement of thrice-losing Bill (Wallace) Rowling and his replacement by the charismatic, Norman Kirk-like (and similarly to Kirk, socially conservative and globe-bestriding) David Lange - adopted pretty well hook, line *and especially sinker a right-wing Thatcherite/Reaganomics economic deregulation regime whilst actively embracing social causes promoted by the professional 'chic' set... 

*I jive in those italicized words, I simply couldn't resist the unavoidable emphasis...

P.S. Hopefully Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) lot itself gets spanked by Alex Salmond's renegade/breakaway rump/faction, deservedly so in light of the way she has apparently and to my mind and that of many others (especially 'Scotlanders') trashed the well-and-justly earned reputation of the party's former (?and founding?) leader...and moreover, to merely satisfy/gratify political ambitions - while quite possibly fully knowing the allegations against him were so much mere flim-flam, flotsam and jetsam; but well realizing the penchant of today's mainstream media to swallow wholesale any and every allegation and accusation, however tenuous, against **middle-aged white males, to placate Feminazis Incorporated...

**'Pale, stale males' as some wags have termed us...