UK By-elections thread, 2021-

[EastAnglianLefty]

https://www.parliament.uk/business/news/2022/october-2022/independent-expert-panel-recommends-suspending-christian-matheson-mp-for-serious-sexual-misconduct/

[EastAnglianLefty]

I think Cameron's attempts to "modernise" the Tory Party were a significant factor in UKIP's appeal to previously Tory voters, and that does include same sex marriage as well as environmental issues.  But I'd agree that they were a fairly small part of UKIP's appeal overall.

The unavailability of the Lib Dems for protest purposes in the Coalition years is, I think, underrated as a factor, because people underestimate the extent to which UKIP's and the pre-Coalition Lib Dems' appeal overlapped; they genuinely didn't have much in common ideologically, but that's not the same thing.

(Is the return of the Lib Dem by-election surge making it harder for Reform UK to make an impact?  I'm not convinced; only three by-elections in this Parliament have had strong Lib Dem performances, which leaves plenty of opportunities for Reform UK.)

Also, Lib Dem campaigning efforts have tended to be either actively liberal, pro-European, or NIMBYism above all else. Only the latter has much appeal to the cranks who were the LD/UKIP base and even for them it wasn't the big issue.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Meanwhile, a certain "senior political commentator" at the Independent has given their assessment of this byelection result. Three guesses as to what it is.....

"This is wonderful news for Keir Starmer, and shows that he's set to find himself as Prime Minister with a convincing mandate"?

What would it take for him to actually say something like that?

Probably for Starmer to pull off a mask like a villain at the end of a Scooby Doo episode and reveal he was Anthony Lynton Blair all along.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Crick rather than Crichton - sometimes fiction does turn up on his Twitter feed, but only because his fact-checking is poor enough that he has fallen for obviously made-up names of potential candidates, such as the rumoured Labour candidate for Worcester 'Amon Gus'.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Keir (Starmer) visited Selby with Angela Rayner yesterday- seemed to have a lot of activists. The majority is so large though that it’s one of those seats that even on a low turnout by election would need a big jump but if you look at the recent polling…

It’s also only a hunch but I wonder how similar Selby is to the other areas where the Tory vote has really collapsed- there are seats with much smaller majorities where I feel they would defend much more easily.

There seems a decent chance that - whatever the actual winning party is - the pro-Labour swing will be quite a bit bigger in Selby than Uxbridge.

Certainly; these sort of outer London seats weirdly tend to have a certain type of partisan toryship.

Added in with the fact it’s a well ran Tory council and they’re essentially running on an anti ULEZ ticket it could be a strange result.

I also just realised how soon it is; only 20 days till polling day.

Labour are strong favourites in Uxbridge with the bookies* and personally I doubt ULEZ is as much of a magic bullet for Tory electoral prospects as some of them may hope (not least because polling has it nowhere near as unpopular as some media claims in particular might pretend)

(*yes I know they have been wrong before, famously in Chesham and Amersham recently)

Yeah it's one of those issues that certainly will deflate the Labour vote in parts but equally one that tends to convince rival political parties they're onto a winner because of the strength of opposition which gets confused for quantity; added ofc to the fact that most errr political types in london forget how low car ownership actually is. 

Though the north of Hillingdon is one of the areas of London where car ownership rates are highest.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I really wonder why they aren’t panicking more about Selby- this is not a seat that they should be losing to Labour and it would suggest the bottom of their vote has fallen out.

There's a distinctive lack of seriousness to the Tories, which this piece sets out quite well: https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/tories-braced-three-by-election-defeats-blame-game-2480670

Lots of talking about things that are comparatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things but important to the individuals who benefit from them, but a tendency to ignore the actual serious problems they face.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Polling stations opened at 7AM (just over two hours ago). Rumours should start doing the rounds pretty quickly after 10PM or even before.

I may be made to look silly by this later, but if the Tories thought Uxbridge and South Ruislip were neck-and-neck or close, would they have allowed Leadsom and Grayling anywhere near?

https://twitter.com/andrealeadsom/status/1681939253884796928?s=20

As a general rule, in the last week all you're really doing is contacting supporters you've already identified to make sure they turn out. Neither Leadsom nor Grayling is so well-known that they'd be unsuitable for that.

A sign of the times is that I thought Somerton was only a 7-8K majority because it’s so widely expected to flip- but no, it’s almost 20K!

It says something that there’s two seats with such huge majorities and there’s barely a shrug that they will not only be lost but lost easily. A bit like Crewe and Norwich in the fag end of the New Labour days.

Crewe and Nantwich. Crewe and Norwich would look quite something on the map. 

No, there was the Crewe & Nantwich by-election but there was also the Norwich North by-election in 2009, at the height of the expenses scandal. The result in the latter was actually slightly better for Labour than expected - feedback on the doorstep was so awful that there was a genuine fear amongst activists that we might come fourth.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Southend is one of the southern towns and cities where Labour is surging

I was not aware that this was a thing -- what's the deal?

There are quite a few places in urban southern England with fairly average demographics where Labour have really underperformed since the 80s onwards. Just as the Conservatives have benefitted from depolarisation in the #RedWall, Labour can do so in these places as well. There’s also some that would be trending Labour in absence of other political change, as they become more popular with younger commuters and similar things.

I don't think that really applies to Southend, where Labour has underperformed since there has been a Labour Party. Labour historically did badly in seaside towns until they broke through in 1997, but this didn't happen in Southend, mostly because the boundaries split Labour strength in the city centre between the two constituencies. The closest we've ever come to winning a seat in the city was in a 1980 by-election at the height of Thatcher's unpopularity.

Labour success in recent years seems mostly to be a consequence of it now behaving less as a seaside town and more as a peripheral urban centre to London.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Equally as much as I see it called a rural seat it’s not exactly one where there would be high levels of  NFU activity…

It is a substantially less rural constituency than Selby & Ainsty.

But also a less (traditionally) industrial one, so it sort of balances out perhaps.

The historic industry was brickworks, which I would call a fairly traditional one, if not one that had the same electoral impact as mining or heavy industry.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Possible Tamworth by election if the honourable member Pincher resigns rather than facing a recall.

It is geographically a West Midlands seat but very Staffordshire in my mind! 19k majority but held by labour 97-05. The local election results were terrible for the Tories- one of their worst areas iirc in terms of just how much the bottom fell out.

The Tory problems in Tamworth almost all flow from Pincher, but he's been able to hang around so long that said problems won't easily go away. He's the difference between Tamworth's sweeping Labour local result and the positive but not crushing Labour results in say Cannock Chase and Reddich. And all of these areas are no longer among Labour’s immediate targets, even though they were won in 1997. Glancing over at the various models will find they all in normal circumstances would still stay Tory presently, partially cause of voter behavior since 97, partially cause the seats are geographically larger and now include rural turf.

I don't think this is true. Labour did well in Tamworth in May, but they did just as well in Redditch - Labour were 5% ahead, despite the two strongest wards in the borough not being up this year. And in Cannock the Tories got a hammering, which only looks better than it is because the Greens did well too. Pincher doesn't help, but the Conservatives are extremely unpopular in outlying bits of the West Midlands for a lot of other reasons.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The division wasn't just between Warwickshire and Staffordshire. Repton ended up in Derbyshire for similar reasons, and to a certain extent Worcestershire was involved in the carve-up, though the areas it took in (now part of the West Midlands county) were more peripheral to the core Mercian heartland.

[EastAnglianLefty]

LibDems online are still pretty relentless in their spin that they are the front runners in Mid Beds and Labour are nowhere ("they are only campaigning in Flitwick" is one suspiciously frequent claim)

And a fairly obviously untrue claim if you follow any Labour activists on Twitter.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Also worth remembering that the Lib Dems have never leaked an internal poll this early (and with good reason - opinion in by-elections moves fast).

Pull the other one, it has bells on. The Lib Dems do not leak "internal polls" because they have a deep interest in putting out accurate information about public information. They are not a polling company. They do it to send two messages to the electorate - firstly that they can win, and secondly that it really is too close to call, honest, and they really need you to get down the polling station on Thursday. These are messages you can put out at any time and you can do it as often as the electorate finds it credible.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Isn't that exactly the point? The campaign has been going on long enough that the Lib Dems will have some evidence about how well they're doing. If it's not being shared, that is a choice.

[EastAnglianLefty]

If at this stage in the campaign, you don't have canvass returns (which is what most of the "leaks" have been), then you don't have a campaign.

Moreover, the fact that the figures are frequently out of date is besides the point. The point is to drive the narrative, not to check them for accuracy after the election - if that was the point, then the methodology is clearly rubbish, because it always finds the Lib Dems just narrowly behind in contests they go on to win by more than 5000 votes...

[EastAnglianLefty]

Am I correct that Rutherlegen (which I can't spell) has quite a lot of what I believe a poster on here called tongue in cheek 'Labours core vote now-old Lanarkshire grannies'?

There was a write up of the seat in the Guardian (which ironically didn't interview anyone under the age of 50)

The Guardian has previous for this. In the 2017 election they profiled a bunch of seats, one of which was Glasgow NE, which they painted as an SNP-Tory marginal based on their vox pops, none of which seemed to be with anybody below the retirement age. Sadly, I believe they've scrubbed that from the website.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Labour has one attacking Lib Dem drug policy

I realize this isn’t necessarily the best example, but still, genuine question: is there any “social issue” on which a Starmer government would be different from the current one?

Labour quite often attack the Lib Dems on drug policy.  Blair mentioned Oldham East & Saddleworth, referring to what happened there in 2010, but in its predecessor constituency Littleborough & Saddleworth there was a 1995 by-election where Labour (with the same candidate as in 2010) attacked the Lib Dem candidate as "high on taxes and soft on drugs"; as a Lab/LD swing voter, it's not unheard of for Labour leaflets to be more effective at making me want to vote Lib Dem than Lib Dem ones.

(Littleborough & Saddleworth was actually a Tory-held seat, but it was 1995, so they were out of contention and it was between the Lib Dems and Labour.  The Lib Dem won, but the 1997 boundary changes which replaced Littleborough with eastern Oldham made it more Labour and Labour took the seat then.)

Lab/LD squeeze material was often aimed at Pennine communities with decidedly reactionary attitudes. In 2010 I was campaigning in Cambridge and we were sent some national Lab/LD squeeze leaflets that went straight into a shredder, because we'd have haemhorraged votes if we put them out.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The 'big' by election successes we've already seen in England don't manifest solely based on the swing in average national polling. They are exceptional. That's the point.

I'm not sure this is quite right. It's true for the Lib Dems, but for Labour the big significant positive results have been pretty much entirely in line with the national polling.

[EastAnglianLefty]

How big an effect do people feel the cause of the by-election had?

Personally I tend to think that the effects of such things on results can get exaggerated: voters can be quite forgiving of parties when their previous incumbent had found their way into the MPs Behaving Badly file (as Andrew Teale calls it) and on the other hand voters can still punish an incumbent party after a death (see Chesham & Amersham). But that does not mean that causes don’t have some effect.

It was a long campaign in Rutherglen, with it effectively begun when Terrier faced her suspension.

Labour were everywhere. It was a genuinely effective campaign.

You will have a better idea of this than I do, but it also seems like the SNP campaign was ineffective. Scottish Labour won't be able to focus the same resources in a single seat in a general election, nor to call upon support from south of the border, but the SNP have got a lot of defensive targets to resource and the rather flat nature of the campaign (in terms of MSPs being scolded for failing to turn up etc.) suggests that there's some work to do to get ready for the general election.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Particularly since the Lib Dem candidate doesn't live in the constituency.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Reading between the lines, the memo also suggests that their data for both seats is mostly either poor quality or non-existent.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The state pension is,* but the state pension is a classic Rowntree Liberal (i.e. poverty trap avoidance) measure exists to top up any existing arrangements and is presently slight more than £200 a week and that's at 'full rate'. The very, very large pensions some people have are old Defined Benefit ('final salary') schemes that have now largely been closed to new pensioners and which were only available in certain occupations to start with. Some of them are genuinely quite extravagant. The phenomenon of a mid level public sector employee retiring and then immediately swinging forty foot to the right is well known and is not exactly unrelated.

_{*Via the so-called 'triple lock' mechanism that means it rises by whichever of the following is highest: CPI inflation, wages growth, a figure of 2.5%.}

DB schemes still exist in bits of the public sector, but they're based on career average earnings rather than final salary; often have a lower accrual rate; and are sometimes limited to a maximum salary, with pensions contributions above that going to a defined contribution scheme.

They're still much better than provision at an equivalent salary in the private sector (and a big bit of the reason I choose to work in the public sector) but much reduced from what they were.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I doubt Labour have been caught totally unaware by the Wellingborough by-election - there is usually some tacit knowledge of what is being investigated. My suspicion is that this is part of the reason it hasn't selected yet - the demands of being a by-election candidate are more intense than those a GE candidate faces, and party HQ may want to have more control over the selection than they'd ordinarily feel the need for in a stretch target.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Here are the top twelve Lower Super Output Areas for deprivation in the 2019 Index of Multiple Deprivation for England.  As this is England only, Rhyl does not feature.

1. Tendring 018A (i.e. part of Jaywick, Essex)
2. Blackpool 010A (in Bloomfield ward)
3. Blackpool 006A (in Claremont ward)
4. Blackpool 013B (Bloomfield again)
5. Blackpool 013A (and again)
6. Blackpool 013D (in Waterloo ward)
7. Blackpool 010E (in Talbot ward)
8. Blackpool 011A (back in Bloomfield)
9. Blackpool 008D (Claremont again)
10. Liverpool 019C (in Anfield ward)
11. Blackpool 006B (Claremont again)
12. Blackpool 013C (Bloomfield yet again)

Claremont is in Blackpool North & Cleveleys but will move to South in the next General Election; the other Blackpool wards listed are already in South.

What connects Jaywick (the closest thing the UK has to a shanty town) and those parts of Blackpool isn't just that they're seaside towns, it's also that these are places you end up when everything has gone very wrong with your life and there's nowhere else you can go.

[EastAnglianLefty]

This could be a useful indication of whether Reform's ~10% support in many national polls is genuine. Wellingborough is the kind of place where the ought to be doing at least somewhat better than whatever their genuine overall support is. Which probably means they'll get about 6% or something like that.

That applies just as much to Tamworth if not more, so that may be a generous estimate.