UK By-elections thread, 2021-

[EastAnglianLefty]

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

I just found out today that the bloke who runs that Twitter account lives in Brighton lmao.

The founder of the party is apparently a sociology lecturer at the University of Bath, which feels painfully on the nose.

Also, what is it with Bath and attracting people with nationalist politics and dodgy Twitter accounts?

[EastAnglianLefty]

Apparently Ben Houchen is wildly popular too with a lot of crossover support and the hope is he could pull us over the line.

I've heard the same, which surprised me at first because I didn't expect him to be so well-known.

This seems to be the conventional wisdom. Given that recent polling suggested only 40% of the electorate could name him, I'm a little sceptical of this.

[EastAnglianLefty]

So apparently Batley and Spen is 20% Asian (and I assume that means South Asian), is there any way to look up how many of those are Hindus and Muslims? I assume Muslims are more reliable Labour/anti-Tory voters than Hindus and Sikhs?

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/constituency-statistics-ethnicity/#single_constituency

You can find statistics by ward (from 2011) here: https://boundaryassistant.org/census/index.html?v=1.1

Batley has a large Muslim population and Heckmondwike has a decent number. The Spen Valley wards are 95%+ white.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Delyn is probably a more likely candidate for a by-election. Not imminently, as the MP won't resign and the Tories are prepared to make the right noises but not to do anything that would allow a recall petition to be lodged in relation to his actions. However, he's clearly an idiot and the likelihood of him doing something else that enables a recall position is not small.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Lib Dems did have some success in local elections in Bexley in the 1980s, primarily in this seat, and that staggered on until about 2006 in some wards. That said, it will have been primarily a right-of-centre vote that later found its home in UKIP. Indeed, the last ward they won in was the same ward the BNP nearly won in a by-election.

[EastAnglianLefty]

By the party.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Labour was established as the party of the organised working class, and there were only a handful of areas where agricultural trade unionism was a thing (chiefly Norfolk.) These days it is increasingly a party of urban areas, the well-educated and those who do not own property. These are not the characteristics of agricultural communities.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Anyway baseless predictions time.

I'm not going to try raw vote totals but I'd guess a Conservative Majority between 4-6K.

I'm not going to guess at the outcome, but I have a hunch turnout will drop more than is usually the case for a by-election, to somewhere in the region of 40-45%.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I think the turnout in Bexley does make an upset in North Shropshire more likely - it suggests the Tory base is very grumpy indeed right now. Whilst the Tory base (and especially the base in Bexley) isn't going to vote Labour (class-based voting amongst a certain sort of Tory is very definitely not dead), it's a lot more willing to flirt with the Lib Dems to send a message.

I would think the Conservatives are still favoured, but there's more reason to be concerned than there was 24 hours ago.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Do you think places like Medway or Clacton are well off?

As somebody who grew up ten miles from Clacton, the town as a whole isn't well-off (though bits of it, especially Holland-on-Sea, are very far from poor) but the rest of the constituency is decidedly comfortable. And those areas were no less in favour of Brexit than the extremely poor areas in the centre and west of the town. The class cleavage on Brexit was not strong, whereas the age/cultural cleavage was very strong (and Clacton is both poor and extremely elderly.)

[EastAnglianLefty]

Only because they thought it was from somewhere distant and confusing, like Billingham.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The fact that the Conservatives held this story back until today, rather than briefing it to the press when it might plausibly have affected the result, tells you something about the expected outcome here.

[EastAnglianLefty]

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!}

The easy way to solve that issue is to preemptively ban all Vote2012 users from public office, if not polite society.

I would definitely be ensuring we had the capacity to run a snap by-election campaign in Heywood & Middleton, just in case.

[EastAnglianLefty]

No by-election in Lagan Valley: Donaldson is staying in Westminster, and the DUP will be co-opting his seat at Stormont. Makes one wonder if the whole thing was just to make Edwin Poots sweat.

Little-Pengelly was formely the MLA for South Belfast, so not impossible that he might still have to switch if she decides she wants to switch back.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Lib Dems have selected Richard Foord as their candidate for Tiverton & Honiton.  He lives in Uffculme, in the constituency, has an army background and stood for the party in North Somerset in 2017.

The Tories haven't announced their candidate yet.

Ofc because he’s a Lib Dem he was also a Major and part of the UN peacekeeping forces- he looks rather like the type of candidates the Tories use to cast.

He was pictured in front of a cow (subtle!) in the Telegraph but unsure if he’s a farmer too. Then again I don’t know if farming is simply a part of the constituency or the type of seat where every hustings has questions about milk quotas, grain prices and EU directive 1010192

The town of Uffculme that he lives in certainly looks like the latter on Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/bWddxWAfSUqh2Zuy5.

On the other hand, it's also less than 2 miles from the M5 and a railway station with a high-speed connection to London. There are plenty of farms in the seat, but it's not a particularly labour-intensive industry these days so agricultural workers will be comfortably outnumbered by people commuting to Exeter.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Galloway? I think he'd lose his deposit in either of them.

[EastAnglianLefty]

FWIW, here's the bands of those 2 polls:

Lab - 48-56%
Con - 28-33%
Green - 2-8%
LD - 2-7%
Ref - 3-3%
Ind - 0-3%
YP - 0-1%
BF - 0-1%

The Labour range is within the 1987-2001% share they obtained with Hinchcliffe (and at the higher end is closer to the 1997 share). The Tory range falls that which is achieved between 1997 and 2005.

So Labour actually getting that sort of vote share in a by-election is more than just 'winning back' red wall marginal seats but getting an emphatic 'endorsement.'

Though worth noting that the 1997-2010 boundaries were a tiny bit more favourable to the Tories, as rather than Horbury and Ossett they had marginal-but-Tory-inclined Denby Dale and securely Tory Kirkburton.

[EastAnglianLefty]

To be fair, it seems unclear if she's a liability because she's a bad candidate, or because the Tory by-election strategy is to hide the candidate and rely on national messages and any candidate will perform poorly when the national brand is mud.

[EastAnglianLefty]

For a while it was also the case that opposition leaders often stayed away from by-elections, for similar reasons. Cameron campaigning in the Ealing Southall by-election in 2008 was news for that reason.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Conservatives won every ward covering the seat in last month's local elections. Labour were close to sneaking the last seat in East Wickham, but only part of that is in the constituency.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Unless "it" is a substantial bequest from your will, in which case you didn't have very much choice in the matter.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The efficiency of the LD votes in by-elections this Parliament is remarkable. In every by-election that they've stood in, they've either won or lost their deposit. More than 95% of votes cast for LDs in by-elections have gone to winning candidates. This is utterly unprecedented.

[EastAnglianLefty]

If we look at English by-elections (and excluding Southend West) we have the following average vote share changes

Conservative: -10.7%
Labour -4.4%
Lib Dem +11.4%

These elections also include Hartlepool (the first by-election; a Conservative gain) and Batley and Spen (intervention).

Without Hartlepool (a reverse intervention), the Tory vote drops on average by 15.5

If we look at the same picture in the 1992-1997 Parliament, but only during the years Blair was leader of the Labour Party, the Tory share dropped by 17.7 points on average (Labour up 13.9, Lib Dems down 2.0). These were contests on more favourable seats for Labour than the current crops of seats up for election.

So the Tory share is as down by almost as much as it was during the period in which they were heading for the exit.

The Lib Dem gains now are even more impressive given that in most seats they are recovering from relative historic lows for a third party.

Though is that Lib Dem average that meaningful? In three out of elections they got more than 45% of the vote, in the remaining five they couldn't break 4%. It's a pattern of really striking advances where they're the most plausible anti-Tory option and absolutely nothing where they aren't.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I think Dartford might just about stay Conservative in a by-election without a major scandal, but to judge by local election results that wouldn't be because of the White Van Man bits of the seat - and certainly not those which people think of as White Van Man territory, even if a lot of the owners of said vehicles are much better off than that.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Already the talk of parachutes being unfurled are spreading.

Yet to see the usual ‘will David Miliband’ return- tbf the new version of this is ‘will Andy Burnham’ run.

It could easily be his best chance but would break his pledge iirc.

Wouldn't he have to stand down as Mayor, as you can't be an MP and have the Police and Crime Commissioner powers at the same time, and the Greater Manchester Mayor has those?  (Same reason as Tracy Brabin had to stand down from Batley & Spen when she became West Yorks Mayor.)

Yeah he would- my hunch is that he’s hoping a Manchester based seat becomes available through retirement at the last minute and he can run in the GE. But ofc events have been changed from this time last year when he needed a seat to theoretically depose Starmer whereas now who knows- become Secretary of State for the North in a KS cabinet?

He seems to enjoy being Mayor anyway and is young enough to wait.

My money is on Graham Stringer personally, he’s a weird guy but I heard on the party grapevine that Burnham was sniffing around him in the event of a snap. Outside chance of Andrew Gwynne imo, he looks pretty miserable nowadays. Or, ironically enough, Tony Lloyd.

Lloyd was really seriously ill with covid during the first lockdown and is not young, so it would be a surprise if he chooses to run again. Then again, it was a surprise he made a return in 2017.