UK By-elections thread, 2021-

[Coldstream]

It's MRP, which models individual seats by applying the national voting intention of demographics.  Perhaps useful for a broad indication of the "state of play" but isn't going to be very predictive of a by-election.

It's also very odd.  It was conducted in 83 Northern seats, not particularly focussed on marginals (both safe Labour and safe Tory seats were included, but many Northern marginals were not; also the one Lib Dem seat in the North was not included), but it did include Hartlepool.  It produced predictions for all of those seats, but not for seats outside the 83.  Overall it shows Labour making modest progress, with a reasonable number of gains, including one in a seat Labour didn't win even in 1997 (Altrincham & Sale West, but note that the details in this sort of thing can be badly off), but also some 2019 losses not regained (Sedgefield the most striking, note same caveat).  Because of the weird selection of seats, it's hard to translate into a national picture, but I'd guess hung parliament with the Tories the largest party but a little short of a majority.

I don't think it says as much about the by-election as some people seem to think, even if it's accurate.  People don't vote in the same way in by-elections as in general elections.

Altrincham and Sale West is pretty similar to seats like Canterbury that went for Labour post-2016 due to Brexit, albeit more rural hence why it didn’t switch in 2017/19, so I could see Labour winning it next time even on a middling night.

[Coldstream]

It's MRP, which models individual seats by applying the national voting intention of demographics.  Perhaps useful for a broad indication of the "state of play" but isn't going to be very predictive of a by-election.

It's also very odd.  It was conducted in 83 Northern seats, not particularly focussed on marginals (both safe Labour and safe Tory seats were included, but many Northern marginals were not; also the one Lib Dem seat in the North was not included), but it did include Hartlepool.  It produced predictions for all of those seats, but not for seats outside the 83.  Overall it shows Labour making modest progress, with a reasonable number of gains, including one in a seat Labour didn't win even in 1997 (Altrincham & Sale West, but note that the details in this sort of thing can be badly off), but also some 2019 losses not regained (Sedgefield the most striking, note same caveat).  Because of the weird selection of seats, it's hard to translate into a national picture, but I'd guess hung parliament with the Tories the largest party but a little short of a majority.

I don't think it says as much about the by-election as some people seem to think, even if it's accurate.  People don't vote in the same way in by-elections as in general elections.

Altrincham and Sale West is pretty similar to seats like Canterbury that went for Labour post-2016 due to Brexit, albeit more rural hence why it didn’t switch in 2017/19, so I could see Labour winning it next time even on a middling night.

I'm not sure how Altrincham and Sale West is more rural, even if the seat does contain Partington, but the broader point stands. There are quite a few of those potential 'Major/Labour' seats: Chipping Barnet, Kensington, Chingford and WG, Truro and Falmouth, and Wycombe, and if Labour were to win a majority there would likely be loads of them: Bournemouth East and West, Basingstoke, York Outer, Worthing East and Shoreham, etc.

Well more rural in that it’s got countryside, whereas Kensington, Chipping Barnet, Canterbury etc are almost wholly urban. Though it’s less rural than Truro and Falmouth. And yeah I agree with you that Worthing, Bournemouth, Basingstoke are where the next Labour majority will go through.

[Coldstream]

If Labour is to win a majority at any time in the non-distant future it would need to win a lot of seats everywhere.* Not in a position to pick and choose, the numbers do not work and can't. But that's for the future.

*Of course it happens that most of this country is actually quite similar and is increasingly so and that this actually explains much of our tediously volatile politics these days.

Sure, but Labour aren’t going to win every seat or see the same swing in every seat, so it’s okay so speculate as to which kinds of seats Labour will be most likely to win in a hypothetical victory...

[Coldstream]

It's a very boring point but I do wonder how the Northern Independence Party is going to actually run a by-election campaign.

Lmao apparently NIP may run Thelma Walker, MP for Colne Valley for two years.

They have been busy having a go at Labour "parachuting" in their candidate (from distant Stockton) previously, so this would fit well with the level of political nous they have displayed thus far

It's mainly just sh**t posting twitter accounts flirting with it, but the fact that a former MP seems to think this is somehow a viable strategy shows that people really haven't learnt the lessons from Change UK (who irrc were replaced in every case by members of the Socialist Campaign Group)

I did see that some Scot Nats were getting annoyed at being compared to the NIP; as a lot of people were claiming were that the SNP just somehow appeared when New Labour all went a bit south.

Not quite, Joan Ryan was replaced by Feryal Clark someone very much on the right of the party (she’s in the LFI) and Angela Smith was replaced by a Tory.

[Coldstream]

The NIP will be lucky to get 0.2%.

[Coldstream]

16 candidates for Hartlepool

David Bettney (SDP)
The Incredible Flying Brick (OMRLP)
Hilton Dawson (North East Party) [1]
Gemma Evans (Women's Equality Party)
Rachel Featherstone (Green)
Adam Gaines (Independent) [2]
Andrew Hagon (Lib Dem)
Steve Jack (Freedom Alliance) [3]
Chris Killick (no description)
Sam Lee (Independent) [4]
Claire Martin (Heritage Party) [5]
Jill Mortimer (Con)
John Prescott (Reform UK) [6]
Thelma Walker (Independent) [7]
Ralph Ward-Jackson (Independent) [8]
Paul Williams (Lab)

[1] Labour MP for Lancaster & Wyre 1997 to 2005
[2] Pub owner in the town
[3] anti lockdown party with quite a few council election candidates
[4] has a Facebook page, and has some connections with the local football club; I don't know if she's ever dressed up as a monkey
[5] UKIP splinter
[6] no, not that one; Reform UK are the re-branded Brexit Party
[7] the Northern Independence Party weren't registered in time, so she's an Independent on the ballot
[8] appears to be a relative of the man who founded West Hartlepool, of the same name; hard to Google because of that!

8 tried to stand as the Brexit and then Tory candidate in 2019 but was denied both times.

[Coldstream]

How credible is this?



https://www.survation.com/new-phone-poll-places-conservatives-on-course-for-hartlepool-win/

I don’t buy 12% combined for two independents.

[Coldstream]

https://twitter.com/JoshHalliday/status/1389628163320393729

Could just be expectation management, considering Boris Johnson apparently doesn't expect to win (again, also expectation management)? Though if true, I would place more stock in that than the Survation poll.

Anyone who has ever canvassed in seats outside of major campaign areas (London, Bristol, Exeter etc) knows how worthless the promise rate is. They don’t get canvassed enough and a lot of it will be people saying they’d vote Labour in 2015 or before, they could have voted Tory twice since then. Sure the Tories could still win, but this is hardly damning for Labour (as the article admits).

[Coldstream]

Sunday Times has an article claiming that Galloway is basically going to take the entire ‘muslim’ (their words) vote and doom Labour

He said Humza Yousaf couldn’t represent Scotland because he wasn’t a Celt “like me”. I don’t think his support with Muslim voters is as important to him as it once was.

[Coldstream]

The Greens have withdrawn their candidate due to homophobic and sexist tweets he posted ten years ago, they probably don't have time to find a replacement before the deadline tomorrow. If so, good for Labour, might be worth an extra percentage point or two.
www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2021/06/06/green-party-to-replace-batley-and-spen-candidate/

I’d still expect they will find someone. In the seat I was working in in 2019 the Green candidate withdrew and endorsed us two days before any they still managed to find a replacement. The Green Party nationally is almost as hardline as the Lib Dem’s about standing everywhere irrespective of chance of keeping their deposit.

[Coldstream]

Famously/infamously this was her candidate application form, note no. 5:

To be fair to her, candidates were encouraged to put “Any” down at that point because there were so many vacancies unfilled due to the election being on short notice. It was why you ended up with so many random candidates on the last minute short lists with no connection to the seats.

[Coldstream]

The 2019 election? People had to have known that an election was coming, at least for several months and likely earlier. It's easier to say it was a huge surprise if 2017 is the election discussed.

Up until September 2019 most people thought the election would be in the spring. Also the seats she applied for were all ones where the incumbent MP’s had just announced they weren’t standing for re-election in the previous few weeks leading up to the election - they were the ones people were encouraged to put “any” down for. If you look at labour list there were a few other people who ended up on multiple disparate shortlists (Laura Parker, Ibrahim Dogus being two off the top of my head).

[Coldstream]

Famously/infamously this was her candidate application form, note no. 5:

To be fair to her, candidates were encouraged to put “Any” down at that point because there were so many vacancies unfilled due to the election being on short notice. It was why you ended up with so many random candidates on the last minute short lists with no connection to the seats.

Why is that ? why do so few people want to run for office ?

I think it was a mixture of lots of people who might have run being burnt out/disenchanted with Corbyn’s leadership, those who did support Corbyn and wanted to run being in many cases unfit for office (whether it was anti-semitism or something else a la Webbe) and the fact that although the membership was/is huge compared to recent years it’s disproportionately concentrated in some seats. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the active membership in places like Coventry and Leicester had barely risen since 2015.

I remember in 2018 asking someone from the shadow cabinet why we’d lost Walsall North in 2017, and they said we only had 170 members there despite the surge.

[Coldstream]

Which tbf likely means it had under 100 members pre-"surge" - not at all implausible IMO.

Membership increased everywhere post-2015, a few Scottish seats maybe excluded. And it would be surprising if either Leicester or Coventry didn't see a significant bump.

A bump probably, but not a significant one. The membership vaulted up in places like Bristol, Brighton, inner London etc but the increase was negligible in most of the country. It would be very odd for it to have increased evenly everywhere…

In case I’m not clear, I mean negligible in absolute terms. Yes some seats probably went from 50 to 100 members, which is an achievement in itself undeniably: but the 400k plus members were concentrated in certain seats (ie Bristol West having 10k members at its peak) - and few of those, if any, were in the midlands.

[Coldstream]

Um, we are taking about party membership basically doubling in less than a year.

In that case membership increasing pretty much everywhere would be EXACTLY what you would fully expect to see. Why this complete mythology that people only joined in Bristol and Brighton?

My own (iconic, even if for the wrong reasons to a Labour POV) "red wall" seat saw a big jump in membership in 2015 and after - and a smaller, but still real, rise in meeting attendance and activism. That has (especially the latter) reversed somewhat post-Corbyn, but membership is still some way above what it was in the Ed Miliband years, still more previously. And the same is true nationally.

I mean this is all checkable and on the record, so why persist in denying it??

I’m struggling to see what you’re not understanding, but I’ll try and make it clearer. I did not, anywhere, say people “only” joined in Bristol etc, I said more people joined in places like Bristol than in places like Coventry. I’m not denying Corbyn brought an increase in membership just that it wasn’t evenly spread. And the places where it had least of an impact were the traditional red wall seats which is why so many had parachute candidates in the short list.

If, as you seem to believe, there was an even increase in membership even across the Red Wall - why did so many seats need Corbynite parachutes from outside at the last minute in 2019? Why not simply choose local corbynites if there were so many available as you seem to claim?

This isn’t even a specific Corbyn issue. Since the 90s the membership has been concentrated in those sorts of places, it’s why Bath has 1k+ members despite not being in contention for a Labour win for 50+ years. Whilst target seats around it like FaBS, Kingswood, NES have more like 300-500 even at their Corbynite apogee.

[Coldstream]

I would suspect and hope that the Lib Dems, Greens, and Labour would not run a candidate, similar to how the Tories, Greens, UKIP, and Lib Dems didn’t run a candidate after Jo Cox’s murder.

That would be my hope. The party has suspended campaigning in general, so I’d assume a statement about the vacancy will be forthcoming over the weekend.

[Coldstream]

As with Rod Roberts, he won’t resign if he has any choice - the Tories certainly won’t make him - because they know they’d lose it.

[Coldstream]

Nine candidates for Southend West:

Christopher Anderson (Freedom Alliance)
Catherine Blaiklock (English Democrats)
Olga Childs (no description) [1]
Ben Downton (Heritage Party)
Anna Firth (Conservative)
Jayda Fransen (Independent) [2]
Steve Laws (UKIP)
Graham Moore (English Constitution Party)
Jason Pilley (Psychedelic Movement) [3]

[1] Address in the Corby constituency; a quick search didn't find anythingsee Tintrlvr's post below
[2] The British Freedom Party isn't registered
[3] Stood in the last General Election in Rochford & Southend East with the similar description "Psychedelic Future Party" and got 37 votes in Westborough ward in last year's Southend council election with this description.

Blaiklock was a founder of the Brexit Party who had to resign (to be replaced by Farage) over some old tweets.

[Coldstream]

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.

[Coldstream]

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.

Indeed, Blair got so annoyed he was moved in with another 1983 newbie Gordon Brown (and the rest, as they say, is history!).

[Coldstream]

I'm curious to know how people think the Southend West election to day would go if the other parties hadn't left it uncontested.

Worth noting that the Tory vote yesterday was actually lower than the Labour vote in 2019. Obviously it’s on 1/3 of the turnout, and probably attributable more to people not voting since the election was a foregone conclusion, but still.

Though it’s likely the other Southend seat that Labour will be targeting in the next election, whilst it’s a big majority (13k) there’s quite a few councillors there and it swung quite heavily to Labour in 2017.

[Coldstream]

I spent the day canvassing in Wakefield for Labour. Feels pretty amazing, those who switched in 2019 are coming back almost unanimously (and with some fervour) previous Tories are either not voting or protest voting (some for us) to get Boris Johnson out. The idea that if the Tories take a beating in Wakefield it could be the end of Johnson has cut through way more than I thought it would. We can’t be complacent, but I’ve canvassed in places that we’ve won that have felt worse than Wakefield does atm.

[Coldstream]

Anyone whose been out in Wakefield would have seen that the independent candidate Akef Akbar (an ex-Tory councillor) is campaigning heavily, his posters are everywhere - probably more than for Labour and certainly more than for the Tories (of which I saw none). 9/10 times. independents do poorly, and the fact he has a lot of posters on lampposts isn’t indicative of actual support, but he may end up taking a good chunk of Tory votes which increases the overall margin of victory for Labour.

[Coldstream]

Anyone whose been out in Wakefield would have seen that the independent candidate Akef Akbar (an ex-Tory councillor) is campaigning heavily, his posters are everywhere - probably more than for Labour and certainly more than for the Tories (of which I saw none). 9/10 times. independents do poorly, and the fact he has a lot of posters on lampposts isn’t indicative of actual support, but he may end up taking a good chunk of Tory votes which increases the overall margin of victory for Labour.

I saw on Twitter a Labour activist who has been to the seat claim that he might take more from Labour than the Conservatives. Given that he’s a Muslim from the usually safest Labour ward in the constituency, that may well be the case.

I guess it’s possible but I seriously doubt it. For one his leaflets are Tory Blue, his campaign is so Tory that we assumed he was the Tory candidate until we actually read the fine print.

[Coldstream]

Very early muttering about a Reading (East?) by election if Alok Sharma quits to take up a UN climate position.

Doing so would be an FU to the Government as it would be a hard by-election to defend- I didn’t realise how marginal it was even in 2019.

Reading West* and yes it would be another hard hold. I get the suspicion this seat is on borrowed time for the Tories and will be part of a future Labour opposition - like Cardiff North and Canterbury now.

Given the nature of the Tory demographics in the seat, if the bottom is falling out, Reading West is the sort of seat where the Tories could potentially fall from first to third, even though the Lib Dems were nowhere in the seat in 2019. Labour would win of course, but there are a lot of Tory voters who wouldn't switch to Labour but would be quite willing to vote Lib Dem.

Reading West also benefits from a well organised CLP - certainly more so than Wakefield. And because it’s next to London activists will pour in constantly, I’d be pretty optimistic about our chances of taking it even without the Tories current difficulties.