It's also important not to shy away this point. It's important to challenge the notion that the 'red wall' has always been that way, when in reality most of the seats we lost in 2019 had been blue at least once (often many times) since the 80s. https://twitter.com/Cravenma/status/1273879442822176768
Obviously there are some seats where the historical roots go very deep, and the decline there has indeed been a long time coming (though even then look how close some of them were in e.g '83).
But we have to get away from effectively romanticising some constituency boundaries and understand the trends through a more logical lens (e.g. through demographics, and how different places are changing over time).

The Bishop Auckland of 2019 is not the same as that of 1983.
It's rather unhelpful to talk about the 'red wall' (itself a nebulous term which seems to suggest all these places are the same - abstracting the diversity of seats that just happened to previously be labour held) in these terms.

Ultimately, the country looks very different...
...now compared with how it did decades ago. Our political geography changes with it.

This isn't the 60s anymore. Or the 70s or the 80s, for that matter.

There's no reason why Mansfield has to be a Labour seat any more than Clacton has to be one.
We should be aiming to regain seats based on how easy they look to win - a Labour MP is a Labour MP.

Why prioritise Mansfield (Tory maj 16k, or 33.1%) over Wycombe (Tory maj 4k, 7.7%)?

Just because we lost it in 2019? Mansfield isn't even in our path to a majority anymore...
I hope the conversation can become a little more mature about this.

The 'red wall' is an unhelpful framing to properly understand our electoral problems / path moving forward, particularly if not accompanied by the fact that some of those seats are simply too far gone.
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