UK By-elections thread, 2021-

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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?

Well, sure: there are few people in the country more right-wing than arable farmers or beef farmers! Rich buggers as a rule. But generally speaking dairy farmers are more likely to be Conservatives than sheep farmers as the latter are more likely to be smallholders and smallholders are more likely to be genepool Liberals or tenant farmers. What needs to be noted is that from the mid century until deregulation and the end of the Milk Marketing Board in the 1990s dairy farmers were a prosperous and protected group and this encouraged Conservative voting and identification. Life has always been more precarious for hill farmers and so there's more political diversity - most are still Conservative, but the numbers aren't so one-sided.

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).

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.

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 ?

The type that vote (or who are open to occasionally voting for) Labour are quite different from the type who vote Green and are at the bottom of the farming income and social scale: nearly all are tenant farmers. A late uncle of mine owned his own land and was an extremely partisan Labour Man, but he was very much a statistical anomaly.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Farmers Weekly actually run semi-regular surveys on this topic, and they're useful in terms of giving a broad overview:



For context (and it is important context!) the proportion of tenant farmers is somewhere between a third and a quarter of the overall total.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Is this true though? Could Rishi Sunak or Thatcherite Liz Truss really be expected to hold on to all these "red wall" seats Johnson gained last time around more so than Johnson himself? Seems quite the gamble to me...

The issue is simply that at his present levels of unpopularity (we have now reached the point where not-at-all-political people spontaneously mock him without prompting: that's really only one level on the ladder above Late Period Corbyn) he would not be helping to hold seats anywhere. To carry on with the Shropshire theme, it isn't as if he remains popular or is any less hated in Telford than the rest of the county: quite the contrary. But you are correct that a new leader would require a significant recalibration of strategy and that it may now be too late to do this in a way that does not entail a serious risk of the electoral equivalent of a structural adjustment. There are no longer any safe options, a reality that is really going to add something to the coming drama.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's just a very insular place and can be a bit odd about things. If you look at voting habits (rather than simply who won) then it has one of the stranger post-1918 electoral histories of any large town in England. Of course it has always been odd. They hanged a monkey you know.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Over one thousand spoilt ballots, which is very high.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

We've had the usual expectations kabuki from Labour for a few hours (not backed up by the other parties), which has now been replaced by more confident sounds. Hard to focus on this much, mind...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Had it happened a year ago I suspect there would have been much more interest, it could have been another Hartlepool.

But the Conservatives have fallen a lot since those days

As Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in... *bang*

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Rather relevant here: turnout of 27.0%.

This is one of those constituencies where there's usually a notable partisan impact to variable turnout patterns - Labour tend to poll better the higher the turnout which isn't the case everywhere. This is partially because some people locally vote Labour in GEs and Conservative locally (not relevant in a by-election), but it mostly largely reflects the composition of the constituency: it's quite the patchwork of different elements, of different types of inner suburb. Possible that some of Labour's expectation management reflected jitters relating to this given the obviously incoming comedy turnout.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In this particular case their initial choice of candidate had to be dropped in a hurry after some of his internet history* became public knowledge, but all the same...

_{*And not even the worst bits!}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Almost but not quite: 'Armchair Critic' is a friend of his and is presently a district councillor. He, however, once posted as 'Wakey Tory Boy' and was even more horrifically unpleasant than 'Armchair Critic'.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I was briefly a moderator there, many years ago. By 'briefly' I mean 'two days' - I modified an antisemitic post by an overt Neo-Nazi (replacing the grotesque comment with a mocking emoji), resulting in a massive outraged backlash from certain users and me getting sacked. I have no regrets.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I suppose the question is whether they would like to get a likely loss* out of the way or to drag things out in the hope that multiple electoral blows don't land in quick succession.

_{*By-elections are inherently unpredictable things but the combination of a) the circumstances b) the national climate and nature of the seat and c) the state of the local Conservative Association is certainly not... ideal from a government perspective, one would assume.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The seat has quite an interesting history; it’s not one of the seats Thatcher won in 1983 (see Darlington, Batley etc) nor is it one of the ones that had huge Labour majorities in say 2010 or 2015.

It has been changed quite radically at every boundary review since (and inclusive of) 1983. As well as the changes alluded to by YL above, the constituency that existed in the postwar decades stretched a surprising distance south to include Royston (a large mining town just north of Barnsley) which greatly bolstered the Labour vote; its removal then made it a constituency quite vulnerable in a poor year and Labour were lucky that Walter Harrison decided to run one last time in 1983 - in the event he hung on by the skin of his teeth.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think the 1983 boundary changes were mostly just the removal of Royston; is that right?  (NB Wikipedia does not mention Royston as ever having been in the seat, but the historical maps on Vision of Britain show that it was indeed included.)  Obviously the removal of Royston helped the Tories, as you say.  It seems a little surprising that Labour held on in 1983.

Some parishes in between Royston and Wakefield were transferred into Hemsworth - generally very small but also Walton which had a population of about two thousand at the time and would have been pretty Labour (these days, now that it is a Wakefield commuter town and its industrial past long gone, it is larger and rather less Labour: though presumably still a little more Labour than this constituency, at least under normal circumstances). I think for 1983 it really was just that Harrison was a well-respected incumbent with local roots - the swing to Labour in 1987 was quite small for the general region.

The 1997 boundary changes moved Wakefield South to Hemsworth and Horbury to Normanton and brought in Denby Dale and Kirkburton across the border in Kirklees.  This seems a weird Boundary Commission decision, but I don't know what the alternatives considered were.  I guess the partisan effects on this seat were neutral to slightly pro-Labour?  (Wakefield South's Toryness replaced by Kirkburton's, and Horbury and Denby Dale both being marginal)

Notional calculations at the time (and as we know: pinch of salt) were of a slight nudge in the Conservative direction, I think on the basis that Horbury was a better bet for Labour in local elections at the time than Denby Dale.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If you want a laugh in these troubled times, then the weekend "Tories see (Lord) David Frost as their electoral superman to win Wakefield" concoction might just provide it. Quite apart from the trifling matter of it actually being illegal, it shows just how clueless many in that party currently are.

I wonder whether he has even so much as set foot in Wakefield before?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

My view on this would be that if Balls wants to stand and if local members want him to be their candidate, then that's fine and unobjectionable, but that a rigged selection would not be a good idea.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Look, no one normal knows who Lord Frost is. And if you say 'David Frost', they'll think you mean the late political journalist and interviewer.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The trick was always that enough people in those bits did. Keep those Con percentages down as low as you can and then whack them in the towns - that was the usual tactic.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Tories certainly won't want this byelection given their recent form.

Mind you, few things have been less welcome for them than 'looming by-election in a rural seat in the West Country' since the 50s. Always risky...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If this is a resigning issue, then I expect many more by-elections this year, given that there are rumours of far greater misdeeds.

Ah, but many of those in question feel no shame about what they have done, whereas the former Upstanding Member for Tiverton and Honiton is obviously extremely embarrassed. Or at least his friends and family are.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Actually this raises an interesting question - will they want Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton on the same day or a little apart? Get it all out of the way or stagger any blows?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Same day- I was going to say that Wakefield is the easier defence but that just shows how much my brain has been rotted by red wall discourse and how little faith I have in Labours by-election machine…

As far as Red Wall Discourse goes... while I'm not taking anything for granted, looking at the recent pattern of local by-elections, well, we're not in Kansas anymore...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The voteuk Wakefield thread is a real trip

It's quite funny when you realise quite how close to each other two of the main participants live. It's like neighbours ringing each other up to scream abuse down the phone...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The map shown there is of Wakefield district which is much larger than the constituency - and more Labour as well. The constituency is at its western end. Anyway, a comparison map between the 2021 and 2022 results would be more dramatic!