UK By-elections thread, 2021-

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Does anybody have a video of the decleration ?

No, I think only a local radio station covered the election. Most of the media was noticeably absent.

nah, I found a video from elsewhere.

The guy doing the declaration sounds North American

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FWIW there seems to be a big surge in people betting on a Labour win all of a sudden.

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Normally holding this seat very narrowly would be seen as a bad result for Labour but it’s all about expectations and since everyone seemed to expect an easy Tory win, a Labour hold even by the narrowest of margins will be seen as a big win for Keir Starmer

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Has anyone noticed the irony that Old Bexley and Sidcup is apparently this odd enclave of pro-Brexit sentiment in London - and yet the MP for the riding for half a century was none other than Ted Heath - the most pro-EU politician of all time!

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Why is there so much pro-Brexit sentiment in Old Bexley and Sidcup? I get the Brexit sentiment in "left behind" rust belt areas of the north etc... but what explains anyone in Greater London wanting Brexit when its so abundantly clear that if there is one place that will be (and has already been) devastated by Brexit, its London? Though I suppose some might ask that question to a certain former mayor of London...

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Easy Labour hold

Birmingham Erdington, by-election result:

LAB: 55.5% (+5.2)
CON: 36.3% (-3.
TUSC: 2.1% (+2.1)
REFUK: 1.7% (-2.4)
GRN: 1.4% (-0.4)
LDEM: 1.0% (-2.7)
IND: 0.6% (+0.6)
CPA: 0.5% (+0.5)
IND: 0.4% (+0.4)
MRLP: 0.3% (+0.3)
IND: 0.1% (+0.1)
MBPE: 0.0% (+0.0)

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Didn’t I read that the local councils that fall in the Wakefield constituency voted Albour by a very wide margin on Thursday? That should be a good predictor of an easy Labour win here

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I would think that in the current environment, there is not a single solitary Tory seat in all of the UK that could be considered safe in a byelection context. Seriously, can anyone name ANY seat at all that the Tories would be favoured to hold if a byelection took place tomorrow? I can't

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BJ's resignation list has been published, with four sitting MP's:

Nadine Dorries - Mid Bedfordshire
Alok Sharma - Reading West
Alister Jack - Dumfries and Galloway
nigel Adams - Selby and Ainsty

Reading West would be certain Labour, Dumfries and Galloway would be certain SNP (given Labour used to have some strength here, I wonder if they could embarrassingly push Tories to third) and the other two would be in play on current polling.

Rumour seems to be that Sunak is trying to broker the same deal that Truss did - trying to get Charles to break precedent and delay appointments until the end of this Parliament, so by-elections don't happen.

I can understand why Sunak and co would want to avoid any byelections, but its not as if losing a few seats is going to rob the Tories of their majority and if the next election is as much as two years away its inevitable that there will be more byelections - not to mention local elections in May 2023 that will be a massive Tory shellacking - so why go to any extraordinary lengths to avoid a few more byelectuons?

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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?

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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...

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I suppose they could then schedule the by-election for July 21 out of pure spite. Might help the Tories hold on since tactical voters might get confused by strong Labour performances in the former two.

Is there a law that byelections and general elections must be on a Thursday or is that just a convention that could be easily ignored?

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If there’s a decently smaller swing in Uxbridge I can already see a potential Tory tabloids’ spin that it’s proof of Boris’s enduring popularity. Seems an appropriate level of tripe that qualifies for by-election “analysis”.

That makes no sense at all. If Boris were still so personally popular then you would expect Tory support in Uxbridge to collapse even more with him no longer on the ballot and replaced by a generic Tory candidate. It’s not as if Boris is out campaigning in the by election and asking people to vote Tory to show their support for him. If anything a Tory vote now in Uxbridge is a vote for Sunak..

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How do the SNP and Labour compare in terms of vote efficiency in Scotland? In other words if they were tied in the PV, would one of them likely win a lot more seats than the other?

My suspicion is that at parity Labour could be more efficient since the SNP is competitive in every single part of Scotland, urban and rural so when they win big they win almost every seat but when their vote drops they are vulnerable. Labour's vote in Scotland is more concentrated in urban areas and there are some rural seats where labour is typically in fourth place.

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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.

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

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The other news of the day is that Sinn Fein MP Michelle Gildernew has announced that she’s running for the European Parliament in Ireland, and is expected to resign as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

Ultra-slim majority of 57 over the UUP at the last election. But that was an odd race (there were a bunch of alliances set up between the parties in 2019, on a seat-by-seat basis), where Sinn Fein, Alliance and the SDLP all ran, but the DUP stood aside for the UUP, so things could be rather different depending on who stands, and if polling continues to shift.

I'm curious whether demographically over the last 4 years there would have been any change in the Catholic vs Protestant population in that seat. Seems like the general trend in NI is for the Protestant share of the population to be steadily shrinking

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Even if the Tories dumped Sunak after the local elections who come next? Another Boris Johnson comeback ? A Liz Truss comeback? Suella Braverman?

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Does the Rochdale seat change much in redistribution? Presumably no matter who wins the byelection its almost certain Labour wins the seat in the general election and this byelection will tell us absolutely nothing about national trends.

From Labour's POV what is the least bad outcome? Ali still winning under the Labour label but having to sit as an independent? Danczuk winning and giving Reform UK a seat? Galloway winning? A Tory coming up the middle? Could the Lib Dems fill the vacuum, they held this seat many years ago

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Didn't I read that the Green candidate in Rochdale has also had to sand down after revelations....?

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FYI, in the last Canadian federal election there were a couple of cases of Liberal candidates being dropped AFTER the deadline to replace them on the ballot. One was an incumbent and the other was a new candidate in a seat where the Liberals were heavily favoured.

The Liberal incumbent in Kitchener Centre was disavowed 10 days before the election due to some sexual harassment allegations. He was still on the ballot but came in fourth and the Green party candidate won - seems that behind the scenes the Liberals let it be known that Green was the next best thing.

In the downtown Toronto riding of Spadina-Fort York, it came out four days before the election that the Liberal candidate had concealed being discharged from the military for some sexual harassment case (notice a pattern here). He was disavowed, but thousands of votes had already been cast in the advance polls and it was so close to election day that many voters may not have been aware that he had been disavowed and he narrowly won over the NDP candidate. Seems the NDP won the e-day vote but the ex-Liberal banked a lot of advance poll votes. He now sits as an independent and is a pariah in the House of Commons.