Last night’s byelections held no surprises for Labour. They not only maintained large majorities but, with the exception of Rotherham, they saw substantial increases. I’ve pasted up all the numbers for your convenience which I’ve just taken straight off wikipedia for mine.
First Croydon: just three parties won their deposit back and the Lib Dems were not one of them (indeed they lost all two deposits last night) who, in keeping with national trends, are seeing their vote truly bottom out.
Winston McKenzie of UKIP significantly increased his party’s vote despite managing to use the recent UKIP fostering scandal to lose himself friends by coming out against gay adoption. He is a character, of sorts, and like the US Tea Party UKIP may well find that attracting flamboyant right-wing eccentrics allows for temporary success that masks the fact that they are in fact polarising voters against them as well as attracting a smaller layer of noisy, angry people.
As predicted the Communist candidate got less than one percent but I over estimated Respect’s support who I felt had a good chance of saving their deposit. Respect do have a problem with over claiming, having stated that they had weekend “polling” indicating they were in the top two in Rotherham and Croydon.Despite my polite questioning I never discovered what polling this referred to and I did get the sense that they had simply made it up. The problem with this sort of boosterism is sympathetic activists and members soon learn not to trust the party’s pronouncements and it creates a long term distrust for a short term feel of momentum.
Tweets like the one above from Yvonne Ridley, which claimed a Labour collapse in safe seats that saw the Labour vote increase seem ludicrous in hindsight (which is why I bookmarked it at the time). These claims *may* win you a few votes on the day, but there is a law of diminishing returns as voters and activists come to understand that Respect candidates (in this instance) have no political judgement and are not reliable sources of information.
The Greens did well in another breaking the mold modest increase in their vote at a byelection. This genuinely is not normal and I’m going to have a look at why this might be taking place soon.
Then Rotherham: Labour really were their own worst enemy here but have managed to get away with it relatively unscathed. After the party excluded a popular local candidate from the selection and then the council’s social services handed UKIP a massive PR coup we can’t be surprised that some voters looked at ways of hitting out at the establishment. This meant that the second, third and fourth placed candidates were all from minor parties pushing the Tories into fifth and the Lib Dems into an impressive eighth having lost six voters out of every seven. Gulp!
Last week UKIP won their best ever byelection result. Last night that newly set record was well and truly trumped and the party look set to storm the European elections in 2014 – and possibly win a small handful of MPs in 2015. The BNP lost ground in this last remaining stronghold, if tey can’t improve their vote under these circumstances they are done and dusted. One note of interest Clint Bristow, the independent who polled 29 votes, is a member of the right-wing street fighting outfit the English Defense League who stood as a test candidate for the group setting up an electoral party – not much chance of that on those results!
Oh, and in other right-wing related gossip – the English Democrat candidate is an ex-Liberal Democrat so it musthave come a particular joy to him and pain to them that his fringe group managed to beat their (now) fringe group at the polls.
Respect’s Yvonne Ridley was always the wrong candidate to capitalise on Labour’s woes. If there had been time selecting the excluded Labour candidate could have seen a genuine upset for either Respect, or if he had fought as an independent. A middle class Muslim convert who sends her kids to private school was unlikely to unseat Labour in a seat like this – although let’s not downplay the size of the vote here, particularly when incoherent angry people had so many viable options to go for.
Incidentally the top four candidates were women. There’s a silver lining for you!
And on to Middlesburgh: The Lib Dems managed to save their deposit here, which must please them immensely as they only halved their vote, in fact the Tories lost even more votes than they did which, perhaps tells a local tale.
The Peace candidate did very, very well here. They’re a total unknown quantity to me so I’d be interested to hear any inside info people had on them.
TUSC’s vote was pretty standard, not less than 1% but again nothing to justify the time and expense of standing at all. Sometimes holding fire is exactly the right thing to do.
What this will all mean for 2015 is, of course, anyone’s guess – although I am confident of a Labour landslide and a near wipe out of the Liberal Democrats which may, or may not, spell the effective end of the party.
Two friendly notes of caution for Labour:
One, Rotherham shows that the center of the party is still capable of mucking up local parties and they can still lose winnable seats because of it. Second, all these results are for very safe Labour seats, without being cold about it an increased vote here is not nearly as important as winning new votes where the party is less entrenched. There is no * guarantee* that these results indicate that seats like Norwich North will automatically fall back into the Labour fold.