UK By-elections thread, 2021-

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

There is an old tradition (though not consistently followed), despite certain facts being obvious, to not speculate on by-elections in the case of death until they are properly eulogised and buried.

I'd like this to remain that way.

In any case, Labour, Liberal Democrats and The Green Party have all announced they will not contest the seat. The tradition of not contesting by-elections created by political assignations is fairly new however, does anyone know why it was established only in 2016 with previous by-elections in the 90's caused by the IRA contested with Eastbourne even flipping ?.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

For the Major Parties, are deposits put up by the individual candidate or by the party?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

North Shropshire would be an interesting one to watch to see whether the recall petition passes.  So far we've had three: North Antrim (narrow miss), Brecon & Radnor (comfortable success), Peterborough (overwhelming success).

As a mostly rural constituency where there would be no non-incumbent party who would be likely to be particularly optimistic about a by-election, and as the petition would be caused by suspension rather than conviction, this is perhaps most like North Antrim.  OTOH, it is in England (even if place names like Llynclys, Rhydycroesau and Porth-y-waen might suggest otherwise) not Northern Ireland, so it is not that like North Antrim.

My guess would be a narrow success, but with considerable uncertainty.

In the absence of any normally competitive party aren't the liberal democrats favoured to be competitive party if anything to make the race competive happens ?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

A complicating factor is that there may be more sympathy than usual for Paterson - both at Westminster (relevant because he hasn't been suspended yet: this is just a recommendation) and locally - because of the suicide of his wife last year. He has already been playing this card for all that it is worth, so we shall see.

As for the constituency (which was named for Oswestry, after its largest town, until 1983), it was formed in 1918 and has had only six MPs since, all of them Conservatives. The Conservative nomination has traditionally been controlled by the local NFU, which tells you a few things. The last time any of its predecessors elected a non-Conservative MP was the West Shropshire (sometimes also called Oswestry, but with very different boundaries) constituency at a by-election in 1904 - the seat was then re-gained by the Conservatives in 1906, despite the landslide elsewhere. Long ago and far away, but that's sort of the point. There is a Labour vote here (many of the towns have substantial working class elements due to - especially - food manufacturing employment and there are also some former mining villages north of Oswestry), but the local party collapsed some time ago and there's not much organisation. The Liberals used to have a serious presence, but could never make it stick and that all faded away during the 1990s. These days the Green Party has developed a local government vote in Oswestry town, due to a mix of local factors (read: local corruption and planning scandals) and the organisational weakness of all other non-Conservative forces.

Green generarly tend to do quite badly in by-elections, is there any particular reason they can't seem to translte local goverment succses into by-elections suprises like the liberal democrats can ?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Claudia Webbe MP (ex-Labour, Leicester East) has received a suspended sentence.  That is enough to trigger a recall petition, but not until any appeal is dealt with.

Is the recall petition likely to succeed ?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

The irony is that one that might well have failed was North Shropshire as it is a rural constituency without a dominant centre, the opposition parties are poorly to barely organised and that, until the farcical scenes of the past week, Paterson would have been able to count on a degree of sympathy due to his personal circumstances.

I think it would still have passed even if not as easily as some previous ones, there are surely enough anti-Paterson voters in the towns to get at least close.

Is a there a farmer vs non-farmer divide in this counstieuncy ?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Is a there a farmer vs non-farmer divide in this counstieuncy ?

Farming community (many more people than those directly employed in agriculture) and not, yes. This is extremely productive lowland dairying country, and therefore the farming community is monstrously Tory and has been since they were given the right to vote. There's also a substantial military element, if not to the extent that was the case during the Cold War. The towns are politically and socially mixed: sizeable but not massive market towns with a degree of prosperity in places but also some big estates and more industry (esp. food processing) than outsiders tend to notice.

Why has labour not been able to make inroads with agricultural communities ? The liberal democrats seem to be stronger among them then the labour party.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

The Tories have chosen Neil Shastri-Hurst as their candidate for North Shropshire.  He's a barrister from Birmingham, so I presume he has some other qualities which make him suitable for a by-election in Shropshire in the present climate.

Will there be any effect of picking a BAME urban lawyer for a rural constituency that's 98% white and only 0.2% Asian ?


https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/constituency-statistics-ethnicity/#single_constituency

The Tories have chosen Neil Shastri-Hurst as their candidate for North Shropshire.  He's a barrister from Birmingham, so I presume he has some other qualities which make him suitable for a by-election in Shropshire in the present climate.

He is an barrister AND a medical doctor.

The vital South Asian Parents vote will love him. Has a painfully generic Twitter account but vague sense he's somewhat culturally liberal.

https://twitter.com/DrNShastriHurst

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Ha classic Lib Dems- 'do you hate issue x... we also hate it...' is basically their entire by-election shtick.

If it works, you should try it.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Has/Will there be any polling in any of the by-elections because the results would be interesting.

By-election polls are fairly rare and don't have the best reputation (constituency level sampling being hard) but I suppose someone might commission one.  The Lib Dems actually commissioned some constituency polls themselves before the last General Election, presumably to get some numbers for bar charts, so I suppose they might.  (But they didn't in Chesham & Amersham.)

There was a lib dem internal poll that showed them in striking distance in Chesham & Amersham. Might have helped them consolidate the non-tory vote.
https://www.cityam.com/exclusive-polling-puts-lib-dems-four-points-behind-tories-in-chesham-and-amersham-by-election/

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Someone keeps posting rubbish about betting odds for North Shropshire by election on Twitter and it turns out they’re a former Lib Dem MP. Just embarrassing

What else are they supposed to be doing ?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Someone keeps posting rubbish about betting odds for North Shropshire by election on Twitter and it turns out they’re a former Lib Dem MP. Just embarrassing

They should join the hellhole known as voteuk.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Anyway baseless predictions time.

I'm not going to try raw vote totals but I'd guess a Conservative Majority between 4-6K.

I agree with your prediction, the conservatives have done a great job in expectation managment while the oppostion has gotten ahead of themselves.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1468586170347098115?
If this is real rather twitter nonsence, this seems a bit too transparently trying to drump up outrage to work.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

The Conservatives also struggle to whip up the same hatred against the Lib Dems compared to Labour; in fact the only proven method they have of attacking the Lib Dems is to generally warn that voting for them will lead to a 'Socialist Government'.*

I've always wondered if that's been a factor behind the bigger swings we've seen to the Lib Dems compared to Labour.

*To an extent Labour had this issue in the mid 2000s- it wasn't until the coalition that they had a reliable way of moving voters from the Lib-Dems to Labour. There were some laughable actions pre 2010, some of which ended up in court action.

Couldn't using Brexit and the Lib Dems incredibly toxic REVOKE policy work in a heavily leave constituency such as this ?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

I doubt the Liberal Democrats will die anytime soon, even if every LibDem MP is defeated hypothetically, they would still have a presence in local councils.

I guess it depends on your definition of "dead". For example, surely by any reasonable definition the continuation Liberal Party is "dead", but it does still exist and still elects a handful of councillors. The continuation SDP was even more "dead", having lost its last councillor, before it recently got a tiny breath of life when it was taken over by Brexit activists and even had an MEP in 2018-2019 (a defector from UKIP); is the party still alive?

Regardless, the Lib Dems are very clearly far more viable than either of those parties and continue to be quite alive in some parts of the country, if moribund in others. They were in much more dire straits in the early 1950s, kept alive only by the sentimentalism of random local Tory groups.

Can someone explain this ? Did the tories stand down candidates in certain consciences or something to keep the liberals alive?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Would this be the first by-election for a while where the party in third at the GE has won?

If we discount the two UKIP by-election wins (where the party didn’t stand at the preceding election) and George Galloway’s win in Bradford in 2012 (where Respect had come in fifth place in 2010), this would be the first time since Leicester South in 2004 (which the Lib Dems also won).

Ah the lesser known of the 2004 by-elections- I know of the Birmingham one for it's well, rather yikes, New Labour approach to immigration that only West Midlands Labour could do.

'I know that people here are worried about fraudulent asylum claims and illegal immigration. Yet the Lib Dems ignore what people say. They ignore what local people really want. The Lib Dems want to keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum seekers. They voted for this in Parliament on 1 March 2004. They want your money -and mine - to go to failed asylum seekers.'

Labour didn't mention that the disputed measure was a plan to take the children of asylum seekers from their parents and put them into care, which Michael Howard had denounced as 'despicable'.

The leaflet implied that Byrne was a comrade of the working class rather than a former City slicker who made his pile as an accountant at Andersons Consulting and a banker at NM Rothschild. 'I know what you want,' he cried. 'Someone who is tough and on your side. Someone who wants the same as you. And I do. I want to push my new baby's buggy along the road without having to face a gang of youths spitting and swearing.'

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/aug/22/politicalcolumnists.guardiancolumnists

Wait so the labour candidate took a position to the right of Michael Howard on immigration and lost the by election?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

A lot of people in another  forum are attacking Starmer for the poor by election performance and for "Destroying Corbyns grassroot strength".

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

I’d be fascinated to see how members of the farming community voted; Labour made a big outreach (Keir was the first leader to speak at the NFU conference for a decade) and there’s been a number of rows over their treatment by the Government- not helped by Boris saying ‘let the pigs die’,

I've heard credible second-hand reports and rumours of grumbling and muttering from the farming community in North Shropshire about various issues - material pressures (many of which are Brexit-related), concerns about the government's enthusiasm for 'free trade' deals, irritation that Paterson (who was supposed to be their man) wasn't pulling his weight (which added to anger at what he was actually doing instead...), that kind of thing. The farming community in North Shropshire is dominated by dairying and is overwhelmingly comprised of landowning farmers so is ordinarily extremely Tory (we're probably taking over 90% here), but there are good reasons to believe that there was a very large slump. Probably more still voted Conservative than for the LibDem, but when what is normally an absolute pillar gets wobbly that's really, really bad...

Dairying (and pomological and viticultural) communities in the US tend to vote to the left of big cereal grain/legume agriculture communities and WAY to the left of ranching communities. Is that not the case in England?

I think thw general rule is that dairy and sheep farmers are far more depressed and miserable than wheat farmers, but they are basically small businessmen/managers/owners so not particularly inclined to vote Labour. The non-Tory vote comes from smallholders and artisanal types who are happy enough voting Lib Dem or even Green (bear in mind the Green Party proper has policies that would not be remotely popular with even the most organic hippy farmer, but they can cope).

Isn't most of the green/labour farmer votes from hobby-farmers who are rich enough to farm for fun and not hugley impacted financially by any green policies ?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

There's an overlap between the type that vote Green and the type that vote LibDem, but it isn't total: there are still a lot of traditional farmers (again, predominantly smallholders or relatively small medium-sized farms) who are genepool Liberals, particularly in upland regions. Of course most ceased to vote LibDem during the Coalition years, but there are indications that this might be reversing. In the Welsh-speaking parts of Wales the same sort of people tend to vote Plaid, of course.

Where did these voters go post-Coalition ?, it seems unlikely they would go conservative if they disliked the Coalition government but none of the other parties beneifted much from the lib dem collapse in these regions.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Where did these voters go post-Coalition ?, it seems unlikely they would go conservative if they disliked the Coalition government but none of the other parties beneifted much from the lib dem collapse in these regions.

There was a general shattering in 2015 (UKIP picked up quite a few, some certainly went Conservative as well even if that seems paradoxical, some didn't vote) but the polarised atmosphere of 2017 and 2019 threw almost all firmly into the Conservative camp.

Were these people typically the leave supporting lib dem voters? A result like the one shown in north shropshire seems to indicate that the toxicity of Swinson and her Revoke stance seems to have faded remarkabley fast.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10324785/Tory-MP-arrested-car-crashes-lamp-post-causes-internet-blackout-locals.html

A Conservative 2019 Gain, where the lib Dems got absolutely nuked following 2015. Starmers Critics may be right if they can't gain this seat.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

It would be interesting to see how he would go down in Hartlepool today.

Heh, was wondering that myself after seeing the scale of the NS swing.

Not impossible it is one of the few places that still remains *relatively* loyal to him - its different from even most of the "red wall" areas it gets bracketed with.

It’s totally politically unique, different from just about everywhere else in the country, yeah. So I suppose it is a possibility that his popularity hasn’t declined as much there, but considering just how much of a hit it has taken across the board…

What's so unique about it ?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Dave Nellist is standing as the TUSC candidate in Erdington.

He has an unusually successful electoral history for a far left candidate.  He was a Labour MP for the then Coventry South East constituency from 1983, but was expelled from the party in 1991 over links to Militant.  He stood as an independent in the 1992 General Election; he came third, but got 28% of the vote and actually wasn't that far off holding his seat, one of the best performances by "left of Labour" candidates not called George Galloway in a parliamentary election.  (He did considerably better than the other MP expelled from Labour at the same time, Terry Fields.)  Later he was a Coventry city councillor for the Socialist Alternative (one part of TUSC) for 14 years, and even had two ward colleagues representing the same party for a time, but lost his seat in 2012.

He was my mums MP and councillor. Ardent Blairite that she is, she said he was always a great representative and that was why people kept voting for him - ignoring his more outlandish views.

He’s of course famous for having acrimoniously shared an office with Blair when they were first elected.

That sounds like a sitcom plot.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Can't wait for the first person to use to argue that actually Boris Johnson is still popular