UK By-elections thread, 2021-

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Any predictions with less than a week?

Labour win after a recount in Uxbridge

Labour win by several thousand in Selby

The Lib Dems win by a five figure majority in Somerton

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A look at the television schedules suggests that the BBC are actually bothering with a by-election results special (quite a rare thing for them nowadays) next week. Starts at five past midnight.

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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

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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. 

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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.

Ahhhh, I remember Norwich North (or not evidently). Just had a brain falter from seeing Crewe and *name that begins with N and ends in 'wich'* together and forgot about Norwich North from the following year.

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'Voting has now closed in Tinyborough North West, a small tightly packed constituency with a small and falling electorate...a result is expected about 4.30am...'

Then, when 4:30AM comes along, the result is 'imminent', then another two hours pass, then there's another announcement that a recount is taking place, then three further such announcements, then the result is finally declared around the next afternoon.

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Sounds as if each party is going to win 1 seat tonight. Ulez saving the tories in Uxbridge

It's possible. Only time will tell, though.

Even though rational says otherwise, perception wise it’s terrible for Labour

I think you are generally perceived as being somewhat less desirable than pancreatic cancer.

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Cute and gay (I think?).

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If we are on this subject, then even these days there are certain active and prominent politicians whose non-heterosexuality is widely rumoured rather than open. 'Prominent' perhaps narrows the field down significantly as it isn't an adjective that can be applied even to most of the cabinet or to most of the shadow cabinet.

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I started following politics seriously in about 2008 - the year of the Glasgow East by-election and the year after Labour lost a national election in Scotland for the first time in around half a century. Between then and now Scottish Labour have suffered almost persistent misery, so this is somewhat bizarre for me.

The next voting intention polls for Westminster (and to a lesser extent Holyrood) will be interesting. I get the feeling that a lot of left-wing and anti-Tory Scottish voters assumed even 24 hours ago that Scottish Labour was a secondary party and its days of dominance were permanently over. This perception may have dramatically burst following this result.

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There is a by-election special programme on the BBC starting at a quarter past midnight.

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People made 'give up the telly and the chippie and the fags'  jibes decades ago. That's nothing new. But mobile phones are necessities now. Particularly if you need to engage with public bodies from DWP to your GP.

In fairness, the price of fish and chips these days is enough to land anyone in swift financial trouble.

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Rachel Wearmouth on Twitter "hearing Labour's ahead on postal votes in Tamworth".  Tories usually do better on postal votes so if that's true...

She also says that Labour are 'very positive' about Mid Bedfordshire, and the Lib Dems are saying they've been 'working hard' in the smaller villages. It's very early but I don't recall Labour sounding that confident in Uxbridge at this time of the night (and for good reason as it turned out).

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https://twitter.com/joncraig/status/1715160138229625165

This "senior source" could well be a Labour source speaking off the record, as Labour aren't officially claiming victory yet.

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As a historical point, I'm surprised the Wilson government had such a horror run of by elections-does that mean they were always going to lose 1970?

They were extremely unpopular for a time. The 1968 local election results were notoriously an extreme disaster for Labour, with the Tories winning in all sorts of places you’d never expect them to and Labour not winning a single seat in Birmingham.

But by the start of the campaign in 1970 Labour under Harold Wilson had managed to turn things around and were consistently leading the Tories in the polls. Everyone expected Labour to be re-elected with almost as large a majority as in 1966 and all the polls pointed to Labour winning the national popular vote by about 4 points. It was considered a huge upset when the Tories under Heath won a majority and won the popular vote by about 3%.

It was the first major polling error in a general election that led to lots of post-mortems on what went wrong (a bit like in 1992). There are a variety of theories of what happened. Some point to some bad economic numbers that were released just days before the election. Some say people were in a bad mood because England lost a big world cup soccer game.

I suspect that considering how ridiculously unpopular the Labour government was as recently as 1969, the comeback was a bit of a mirage. Interestingly, in this day and age the expectation would be that the loser - Harold Wilson - would have immediately resigned after losing an election that was supposed to be in the bag. But instead he stayed on as leader of the opposition for four years and regained power in 1974.

The World Cup match in question inspired the title of an alternate history writeup called What If Gordon Banks Had Played?, written by Anthony Wells (quite a well-known figure in UK psephological circles).

1970, 1992 and 2015 are the three most famous polling errors, but there have been others.

- February 1974 had the Tories at least as the largest party.

- October 1974 showed Labour winning a comfortable majority, and indeed the "on the day" poll shows a 1945esque majority.

- 1997 had Labour further ahead, but it was a landslide anyway so few much cared.

- 2001 was like 1997 but to a lesser extent.

- 2010 overestimated the Lib Dems. Cleggmania had faded out by the end of the campaign but the polls still showed the Lib Dems running about neck and neck with Labour.

- 2017 didn't really predict a hung parliament, although the YouGov MRP model did.

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They slightly overstated the Tory win in 1979 too, on the whole.

Elections where they were commendably close were 1987, 2005 and (remarkably) 2019.

There was a moment in the 1979 campaign when Callaghan was told (I forget by whom) that Labour could win the election. He replied "I'm afraid we might." This exchange may have been caused by a poll released, I think, the weekend before the election showing a small Labour lead.

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It’s been briefed overnight that the Tories are fine because ‘Starmer isn’t Blair so it won’t be 1997’(the fun counter is that 2024 could end up in political memory as being worse!) and that voters really want tax cuts and flights to Rwanda. What a strange party.

They are doing what I suspected and seeing the harder right votes in each seat (which were slightly higher than usual for a parliamentary by-election) as the main lesson to draw. Alternatively it could be an attempt by Sunak to shore up his internal position ahead of his immunity to a challenge formally expiring within a few days. Probably a mixture of the two actually.

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And it now appears very likely there will be a byelection in Blackpool South as well, if the government doesn't go to the country by next May (or earlier)

Is someone going to do a write-up of the seat for the benefit of the uninitiated? Could be, ahem, interesting.

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Anyone intending to canvass there might be interested to know that you can get a £1 burger from this place.

https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g186332-d6479548-Reviews-Higgitt_s_Las_Vegas_Amusements-Blackpool_Lancashire_England.html

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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.

I've probably set foot in or near most of those areas. Been on multiple holidays in Blackpool, have had a couple of visits to Anfield for football reasons and went on holiday to Clacton as a five-year old. These visits all took place from about the late 1990s to late 2000s, and they all seemed pretty grim then. This was before austerity, of course.

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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.

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Talking of Blackpool...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67835079

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Bone almost didn't win the seat in 2005, which would have surely been the end of his Parliamentary ambitions, particularly as he had had multiple failed attempts previously and given the leadership that took over just after the 2005 election.

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It looks like we can add Kingswood to the list of likely by-elections, following Chris Skidmore's statement just now.

It's in the Bristol suburban belt outside the city boundary in South Gloucestershire.  It's a marginal, Tory-held since 2010, with some mining history, and is being split at the next election, with the more Labour bits going into a new (and essentially safe Labour) Bristol North East, and the rest having Jacob Rees-Mogg inflicted on them, at least as Tory candidate.

It's very difficult to resist the temptation to spell his surname 'Skidmark'.

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Of course what this by-election now needs is Mrs Bone standing as an independent.

It would be hard for her to win.