UK By-elections thread, 2021-

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Don’t a Labour MP die after getting ill at some sort of banquet?

Jim Dobbin, yes. It was a Council of Europe do in Poland and the guests had a shot of vodka between each course...

Was in a wedding in Poland last month where a similar thing happened between every speech... i woke up in the hotel bathtub without my shoes, phone or glasses. Apparently it could have gone worse I guess.

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Don’t a Labour MP die after getting ill at some sort of banquet?

Jim Dobbin, yes. It was a Council of Europe do in Poland and the guests had a shot of vodka between each course...

Was in a wedding in Poland last month where a similar thing happened between every speech... i woke up in the hotel bathtub without my shoes, phone or glasses. Apparently it could have gone worse I guess.

At the inquest his wife said that, up until the point where he felt ill and went to bed, he had been having the perfect day. I suppose there are worse ways to sign off forever.

Reminds me of this anecdote about the infamous Lunch with the Financial Times interviews:

The menus were not printed until 2003, so we cannot be sure of the all-time record for the most expensive lunch. It may have been achieved when Spivey met the 79-year-old poet Gavin Ewart at the Café Royal in October 1995. The exact cost is lost somewhere in the bowels of the FT accounts department. But the bill was somewhat overshadowed by the aftermath.

The main item on the agenda was alcohol, not food. Ewart began with several negronis (gin, vermouth, Campari), which is not an amateur’s drink, and carried on from there. “We departed the Café Royal in a moderately straight line,” Spivey said in the article. He put Ewart on a bus home then lurched off himself. The following day he received a call from Mrs Ewart.

“There are two things you need to know,” she said. “The first is that Gavin came home yesterday happier than I have seen him in a long time. The second – and you are not to feel bad about this – is that he died this morning.”

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Seems to me the best explanation is that Labour was seen as an industrial party, and Chester was not so transformed by the industrial revolution even as it depended on the downstream effects of industry (similar to Blackpool, also Tory till 1997).

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Maybe you need a repeat of Carswell or Reckless?

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Maybe you need a repeat of Carswell or Reckless?

Cameron offering a referendum was arguably the trigger for the UKIP surge, ironic as that may be. The Carswell and Reckless defections were after the UKIP 'victory' in the European elections (which probably has to be considered UKIP's peak).

Yes but it's worth noting that UKIP were never able to clinch a by election win, even with farage and peak polling, without a local MP defecting first.

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Plymouth Tories also lost a very different seat to the greens on a similar swing - suggests to me they may be quite boned.

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Won't happen, but fingers are crossed Zahawi's issues force a Stratford on Avon by election so we can see incredibly laboured bits on Shakespeare from pundits eager to show off.

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Won't happen, but fingers are crossed Zahawi's issues force a Stratford on Avon by election so we can see incredibly laboured bits on Shakespeare from pundits eager to show off.

Dickhead won't resign and give us this, shame.

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The annoying thing is that USR result would see a lot of spin about how Labor are struggling in outer London even if the Tories lose the other two; they have a rather bad (for them!) habit of pretending awful election results are actually ok.

If the conversation unironically becomes "The problem with Labour is although they appeal in the northern heartlands they're clearly struggling in metro London" that would be pretty hilarious denouement to Red Wall discours.

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The other genre of safe (?) tory seats in this election may be Scotland: assuming the SNP has not recovered they may be too wounded to regain the borders seats/moray.

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Some thoughts this morning:

My biggest concern is that the Uxbridge & South Ruislip result will embolden the increasingly noticeable anti-environmental tendency in the Tories, and furthermore that it'll make Labour (and even the Lib Dems to some extent) warier of doing anything which takes the car lobby on.

The issue with ULEZ is that most local governments are running on shoestring budgets. I personally foresee many problems with this type of policy,  and know there are many better solutions for environmental urban transformation policy, most using the carrot rather than the stick. However,  for there to be expansions of public transport resources for example,  there needs to be a lot of money which there supposedly isn't. It's hopefully something Starmer recognizes and changes, especially with Nandy on board.

But until that point, local government has to realize that doing a transformational policy without providing any way to facilitateit, aka telling the voters to figure it out with the situation as is, is always going to make people very angry. Projects similar to ULEZ caused a Tory councilor to be elected in a by-election in Cambridge city of all places, and saw the Greens get entirely wiped out in Yorks 2023 elections. If you can't use the carrot,  maybe you shouldn't use so obvious of a stick.

The York Greens were wiped for an even stupider reason: they abolished disabled parking on some kind of bizarre police review for anti terrorism reasons.

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As posted elsewhere;

I had no idea this thread had been locked. It shouldn't have been. I was half asleep at the time it looks like it was locked. I was closing down a lot of screens, so if it was me, it was genuinely unintentional.

I came on this morning after waking up looking for reactions and didn't see anything after the wee small hours. Then tried to post and the system was telling me it was locked.

So apologies for discussion being inhibited.

I'll share my take on the result a bit later.

As OP of this thread I think there was a high chance I may have accidentally locked it while checking the results late last night, apologies to everybody here if that was the case.

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Fun fact: the Labour Party has only made one gain in a by-election in the 21st century (Corby in 2012).

In general, the party has had bad luck in what seats have come up; but it's been a very poor record - even in the Miliband era you had herculean efforts to win seats like Heywood and Middleton etc. The rot has been settling in, and sadly it's bigger than Corbyn and Starmer.

Maybe this matters, maybe this doesn't: after all the Lib Dems have a history of patting themselves on their back and then flopping in the real election (before Chesham we have Eastleigh and Richmond Park, both of which were washed away in the very next election). But the fact is we have a repeated event of Labour desperately trying to stop losses from opposition, even in times of unpopular governments. Peterborough. Hartlepool. Stoke Central. Copeland.

This old post is why I find the "muh turnout" cope from Tories so fascinating. Even if it is true (it isn't) that all the abstaining voters were the Tory base, what seemed like the new normal of Labour really finding by-elections tricky has quite abruptly been turned on its head.

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I wonder if the time has run out for a Romford by election - if Reform can't do well in a by-election there, they can't anywhere.

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All this is in line with a single-minded focus on (even the mere appearance of) anti-Semitism from Starmer. To the exclusion of anything else.

The comments reported recently just seem in line with what has been reported by mainstream media (that there was an intelligence failure). Labour's problem is that they couldn't have picked anyone who was supportive of Starmer's line on Israel without that defining the by-election, so presumably they picked someone who would neutralize the issue (in their hopes). But now the news will be entirely defined by their mushiness on Gaza.

This is not correct. It went beyond the stories of an intelligence failure and of Netanyahu having neglected the Gaza front at the expense of the West Bank, to saying that Netanyahu was actively aware that the attack was coming and allowed it to take place.

Ali's statements (including the new ones) have some basis in factual reports, but go beyond what they say and put them together in ways that are conspiratorial.

I can't speak for the UK, but it is a fairly common analysis I've heard in the us. I don't think it is true, but I also don't think it is particularly conspiratorial or anti-semitic. It doesn't really matter, the main thing is that they had to pick someone who supported a ceasefire, but couldn't expand on the reasons why. I think it was an impossible situation that was bound to result in leaks like this.

You might not consider it to be particularly conspiratorial because it and related are the most common conspiracy mentioned in times of war.

World War II - FDR knew Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor
Vietnam - LBJ knew the Gulf of Tonkin incident had nothing to do with North Vietnam
First Iraq War - George H W told Saddam Hussein he could take Kuwait.

I think I'm missing a couple.

The most famous one, of the 20th century, being  certain 9/11 truther theories.

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I wonder if Rochdale resident Gillian Duffy is still alive, and who she might be voting for?