UK By-elections thread, 2021-

[Cassius]

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.

It would be a Comedy of Errors.

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of bore.

[Cassius]

Yes I don’t think anyone is disagreeing that it’s harder to win!

But ofc Labour won in Chester when their own honourable member had resigned for errr personal reasons relating to an investigation- I think most U.K. pol people here would agree that the reasons for resigning make a difference.

Iirc I don’t think an MP dying from natural causes has been replaced by a different party since maybeee 2008?

By elections are weird beasts mostly because turnout is weird and equally people do seem willing to vote tactically.

Not quite, the Tories lost Cheryl Gillan’s (who’d died of cancer if I recall correctly) seat to the Lib Dems back in the Summer of 2021.

[Cassius]

I know it's a Lib Dem leaflet - but still, by even their own recent standards, this is a stretch:

Especially given the graph seems to be invented wholecloth.

A true classic.

[Cassius]

When presented with two warning by-elections earlier this year, Sunak put all his eggs in the Uxbridge basket. He ripped up his party’s climate strategy, pandered to motorists, and went full anti-woke.

And now - if tonight’s told us anything, it’s that these new by-elections look a lot more like Selby than Uxbridge.

Feel like Sunak might have a credibility problem emerging here. He can’t u-turn on all those policies - he’s used his first, and possibly only conference speech to stake his reputation on them.

So what now?  

I doubt that the environmental and ‘anti-woke’ policies had much if anything to do with the losses (and, of course, ‘pandering’ to motorists is never a bad idea in a country where most journeys are still made by car, especially those journeys made in Tory constituencies).

The issue is that the party put the country through a year of really embarrassing bullsh**t (from the Paterson debacle to the Truss denouement), a year of really embarrassing bullsh**t that also coincided with the worst inflation that this country has seen in decades and a time of real financial pain for many, financial pain compounded for mortgage holders (traditionally a core constituency) by a financial scare prompted by the Truss’ mini-budget. We all know this but it’s worth repeating, there’s absolutely no coming back from that. Sunak may not be a political mastermind, but the gallows was already built for him by Johnson and Truss (and of course, these by-elections were caused by two Johnsonite MPs, one of whom specifically resigned in order to damage the present government). All persuadable voters have stopped listening to the party (and why would they, given all of its tergiversations over the last 13 years, I certainly don’t).

The concern now is that the right starts going off on one trying to manoeuvre one of their own into the leadership before the next election and I suspect the fact that if you added the Reform party tally to that of the Tories in both seats they would have held both will provide some grist to that mill (even if we know that’s a silly argument).

[Cassius]

As a historical note, this parliament has now seen ten seats change hands as a result of by-elections, thus overtaking 1992-1997. You now have to go back to 1970-1974 to find a parliament in which as many seats changed hands (ten as well, although only five were government losses). The government has lost eight seats as a result of by-elections during this parliament, equalling the figure for 1992-1997. Given that we may well have a couple more by-elections coming down the pipeline before the next general election (Messrs Benton and Bone perhaps), this record could well fall and we’ll have to go back as far as 1966-1970 so see a worse rate of loss at by-elections for an incumbent government, when Labour lost fifteen (!) by-elections over the course of the parliament.

[Cassius]

How come there is a Sussex, an Essex, a Wessex and a Middlesex - but no "Nossex"?

Given that Hertfordshire (directly to the north of what was Middlesex) contains such thrilling locales as Watford, Stevenage and Tring, Nossex would indeed be a very apposite thing to call it.

[Cassius]

Apart from the rigged one, every recall petition has easily passed. Is this a good thing? I'm of two minds.

The interesting thing is that the current system is a weird hybrid; it was originally intended that a recall would happen if you were suspended for longer than 10 days from the House. This often only happened in rather obvious breaches of rules of traditional parliamentary rules e.g not declaring free flights or hotel trips, doing lobbying etc and this had to be investigated by the standards committee and was relatively rare.

But then the ICG scheme was introduced which specifically created a body that could investigate bullying and sexual harassment by MPs; this has in several cases reported and caused MPs to quit rather than face the indignity of a recall.

By my count this is the 10th by election related to members personal conduct

It has never been said but I assumed the hope is that one way to stop this behaviour is that for MPs to realise that breaches of the behaviour code will lead them to lose their jobs; I can't recall all the reports but the committee & body basically now have a button (recommendation of suspension for more than 10 days) which can lead to a by election.

Yes, it’s definitely a record for members resigning or being recalled due to scandal. It’s interesting to look at how the makeup of by-elections has changed over the years; before the expenses scandal (which led directly to the resignations of Michael Martin and Ian Gibson and helped midwife the recall system) it was basically unheard of for MPs to resign because of a scandal. Instead, the principle cause of by-elections tended to be deaths, which have declined dramatically in recent parliaments, presumably due to most MPs being younger/healthier. It would be interesting to have seen how many by-elections the Major government would have had to endure had the modern rules and mores around the personal conduct of MPs been in place then.

[Cassius]

One is starting to suspect that the stars (or the asteroids) are aligning for another Galloway upset.

I thought the issue for him in Rochdale was, as in Batley & Spen, that the kind of demographic that propelled him to victory in Bradford a decade ago (with the obvious caveat that not every Galloway voter is a Muslim and not every Muslim is a Galloway voter) simply isn’t big enough for him to pull off a win?

[Cassius]

The Tories have now officially broken the 1992-1997 parliament’s post-1970 record for government losses in by-elections (ten) and there have now been twelve changes of hands overall, again the most since 1966-1970 (will of course be thirteen when Rochdale comes in in a couple of weeks time). Almost no chance of the 1966-1970 parliament’s post-war record (fifteen government seats lost and sixteen seats changing hands in total) being broken in the remaining lifetime of this parliament, but nonetheless a creditable effort.

[Cassius]

All in all the Ali selection was actually rather fortuitous for Labour, given that by effectively not running a candidate they’ve managed to avoid the spectacle of a straight loss (or perhaps more likely a Heywood & Middletonesque embarrassingly close shave) to Galloway and can now claim (as they’re doing) that they would have easily won had they been able to run a ‘normal’ candidate.

[Cassius]

Hazel Grove?

How bad is... it... exactly?

By-election bad:

https://www.politico.eu/article/westminster-honey-trap-scandal-uk-tory-mp-admits-sharing-numbers/

A quick summary from what I can understand:
He was forced out of fear to share info about his colleagues to a guy that had compromising things on him.

The Conservative Party reply (what can they say? ) :

https://twitter.com/Conservatives/status/1775882749921911191

Balkan tier propaganda.

[Cassius]

The Reform candidate is a local businessman who has also been involved in charity work in the constituency (food banks et al), so he may get a little bit of an extra boost from that.