UK By-elections thread, 2021-

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If the rural polling districts are close then it isn't going to be close.

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Reports that the Conservative candidate at Tiverton & Honiton has locked herself in the press room.

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Hammered in both, hilarious!

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They’re trying to argue that Labours swing was too small

Which is hilarious as a 12.8pt swing is very large. I see they're sticking to the deranged like from Jenkyns on the night that a swing has to be 17.5pts (LOL) or it doesn't count. Amazing levels of cope.

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It's worth noticing that in the 1992-1997 by-elections Labour gained a lot more than they are now, especially in straight Con-Lab fights (Dudley West, SE Staffs and Wirral to a lesser extent had Con-Lab swings that nowadays seem like only the LDs can achieve).

Though that itself was very unusual.

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Labour run paper candidates in a fairly high proportion of constituencies every General Election. It's just that a Labour paper candidate will poll more votes than paper candidates of other parties if all non-Conservative candidates standing in a constituency are essentially paper candidates: as has been the case in quite a few constituencies in recent GEs. But I suspect rather less next time.

Though as a general point, constituency campaigning by Labour at GEs tends to be much more decentralised than for other parties: there's a degree of national targeting and allocation of resources, but the burden falls very heavily on local parties and even most sharing of resources and pooling of activists is sorted out regionally.

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Since we don’t have ward level data it’s impossible to know but Labour seem to think they did very well in the the rural (Tory) part of Wakefield- this is very similar to Batley and Spen, where iirc, Labour won because they had their best result for 30 odd years, and survived on the basis of Tory voters switching.

Labour can do well in those parts of the constituency in good elections, so this wouldn't be surprising given the margin: especially as Akbar's voters will have been concentrated in the city wards (especially East) and will mostly have voted Labour last time - therefore for such a big lead despite that...

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T & H has historic LibDem strength whilst N Shropshire never really did, however.

It did, but a bit further back: they had a strong vote from the 1961 by-election onwards and at points seemed to threaten the possibility of maybe being competitive at some point, but they never followed through and things eventually fizzled out.

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Ah now I think she means a different Honourable Member, one who cast his vote in the recent VONC in Johnson remotely.

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1) a belt through Lincolnshire into Fenland;
2) a ring of seats immediately to the north of the W Midlands;
3) a clutch on both sides of the Thames Estuary (ie Essex and Kent)

This is maybe a pretty good guide to the seats they could reasonably expect to hold in a byelection right now - the last bastions of Johnsonism.

I'm honestly not sure about all of these in a by-election situation right now, given the temptation to give Johnson a kicking which even a lot of pretty loyal Conservatives feel. You'd just likely be dealing with very tight results rather than blowouts...

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Just saw figures showing Labour spent 93K in the Birmingham by election. 

More interesting is that the Conservatives spent nearly as much which is... bizarre... as they were never in contention.

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Love-bombing the council wards?

It may have been an attempt to get a bit of extra attention to the area for the locals, not that it did them much good if that was the idea.

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They may have thought so, nonetheless. The sort of demographic that has gone their way elsewhere.

And it's certainly true that absent Dromey (who was a popular and very high profile MP: he must have been on Midlands Today more than any other MP from the region and I presume he was all over local radio as well) the Labour majority in Erdington at '19 would have been tiny. But of course...

(and Hartlepool was less than a year earlier, even though it doesn't seem like that!)

...things have changed extremely fast, haven't they? Of course they should have picked up on this by that point. There was already plenty of evidence from local by-elections to suggest that while Labour were not making much (or really any) headway in Middle England at the time despite Conservative difficulties there, they were already doing a lot better amongst certain other demographics. But there has been a consistent refusal to accept this from senior people in the Conservative Party. It hasn't even entirely gone away post-Wakefield.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Maybe a Labour gain in Tamworth, should that vacancy happen?

Interesting history, but I feel it's the exact sort of seat that Labour still struggle in (and fwiw do not need for even a healthy majority) - it's the brummie equivalent of those thames estuary seats (like aforementioned Dartford) where you have a lot of families with working class origins but now work as senior sales reps or managers - NewLab made a pitch for these sort of people, but none of the faces of Labour are particularly appealing for them. It would probably be Upminster, but closer.

Yes - there are, as it happens, still some parts of Tamworth town that are quite working class and, hooray, as of this year Labour are actually competitive in them in local elections again, but the rest... hmm.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's one of the most socially polarised constituencies in the country: the largest town is the infamous 'failed' New Town of Skelmersdale which is extremely working class in a way that few places are these days and is very Labour, and this is balanced against a large swathe of prosperous, Conservative countryside. It also includes the socially mixed and politically marginal towns of Ormskirk and Burscough and a few former mining villages near Skelmersdale that are now commuter settlements. Local politics is odd: there is an active localist party strong in and around Ormskirk and Labour can randomly win usually solidly Conservative rural wards with candidates with strong personal appeals (which does not translate into support for other Labour candidates) - both of these factors seem to reflect poor local Conservative organisation. Former MPs include Harold Wilson (1945-50: before Skelmersdale New Town but back when the constituency extended into Liverpool) and... er... Robert Kilroy-Silk (1974-83).

There is another fact that may be of relevance. Like most of Lancashire north of the great urban and industrial belt of South Lancs, this is a fracking constituency...

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Needs to be noted there, that the relationship between the new King and the new PM is already atrocious, and entirely because of actions taken by the latter. She really is a marvel of sorts.

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What ever happened with the eight MPs Boris had nominated for peerages?  Did we ever find out who they were?

His Resignation Honours List has yet to be published, so we do not know...

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This list, we have to note, is pre-vetting. If the government is truly keen to avoid by-elections, then a little 'assistance' there might be a less problematic way of going about it.

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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...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

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A pretty good result for Labour given the cause of the by-election.

And also as it was one of those constituencies with a solid result in 2019 and therefore would not have as much room to swing violently...

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I don't know much about what sort of a place Chester and who lives there. How is it that it seems to have been a pretty solidly Tory seat up until 1997 and then only went back to the Tories in 2010 and then back to Labour in 2015 and has been trending Labour compared to the rest of the country ever since.

How do we explain this?

Well, Labour nearly won in 1992 and had been relatively close a few times before. It was last a truly safe seat in the 1950s: afterwards it was reliable for a few decades, but that's not quite the same thing. There was always a solid Labour vote in places, particularly on the Blacon estate (which has a population larger than the average small market town).

But as to its recent transformations, the most relevant fact is that Chester College (which, strictly speaking, was known by a bafflingly long list of names over the years) became a full university in 2005 and then expanded significantly.

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OK thanks everyone for the background about Chester - maybe a better question is why was City of Chester ever a Tory seat in the first place. Its in the north, a medium sized urban area - sounds like the kind of place that could have been a perennial Labour seat in the 60s and 70s...

Historically just a little bit too prosperous, but then there 'was' always a random element to these things: similar things could have been said of other small city and/or large town constituencies that Labour did often win in the 50s, 60s and 70s.* The mention of Liverpool is maybe relevant: North West Cheshire and South West Lancashire were more Conservative-voting than might have been expected in the middle twentieth century, and then became progressively less Conservative-voting than might have been expected in the late twentieth century and beyond.

_{*e.g. Gloucester, Reading and Watford had a vaguely similar SES profiles in the 1960s and early 70s.}

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And it also had more of a "market town" cast--the northernmost carryover of the Shrewsburys and Ludlows and Leominsters and Herefords and Worcesters and Gloucesters further south.  So it felt oddly genteel and disconnected from the Merseyside industrial dynamic (more so than Blackpool, which even as a resort town was much more distinctly "North Country" in tenor than Brighton or Bournemouth).  And fittingly, Chester finally tipped into the Labour column when Labour itself became "Islington-genteel" under Blair...

Fundamentally it's a Marches city, yes, right down to its peculiarly polarized social geography meaning that to a visitor it looks to be a richer place than it actually is: after all, even little Ludlow has its comparatively large peripheral estate. Cheshire is a funny county in that in terms of region it belongs to several: the northern parts were always part of the North West (which has always been, in effect, Greater Lancashire), the western parts were Marches and the eastern parts essentially an extension of the North Midlands. The Marches thing might be as relevant as the Liverpool link in explaining certainly its past voting habits: a lot of the region was historically more Tory than might have been expected as the sectarian split in voting patterns was actually about the same as in Wales rather than what was typical in England. Plausible that the migration of a lot of working class people from North Wales to the city - including members of my family as it happens - in the mid Twentieth century reinforced that dynamic for a while, though quite probably bringing it to a swifter ending eventually.

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Of course Liverpool and its surroundings itself also have a lot of Welsh influence (including some of my family).

Even the accent is what happens when you combine South Lancashire accents with coastal North (East) Walian ones. People often assume that accents in e.g. Flintshire sound a bit like Scouse because of Liverpool influence, but it's actually the other way around.