The by-elections are not just about the heavy hitters though, plenty of voters are looking elsewhere for their electoral sustenance. UKIP got their best ever by-election result, as already mentioned, but concentrated their fire on just the one contest so there’s no pattern to discern across the three constituencies. Is there a lesson in that?
Let’s take a quick look at how “the others” did in the three Parliamentary by-election.
The Greens:
The Greens had a good set of elections gaining 13.7% in the one and only PCC election they stood in, won a council seat in Bury St Edmunds, a good result in the Bristol Mayoralty and their Parliamentary by-election performances were far better than I was expecting them to be.
In Cardiff Anthony Slaughter increased the Green vote to 4.1% (up 2.9%) and Tom Dylan in Manchester increased the vote by 1.6% to 3.9%, this in a city where the party selected very late only bringing Tom on board after Respect’s Kate Hudson stepped down from running in the city. This is extremely unusual for the Greens to increase their vote in by-elections, particularly by such a large proportion. Well done them.
In Corby the Greens stood Jonathan Hornett as their first ever Parliamentary candidate and gained a predictable 1.1%, in an election dominated by Tory collapse and a large Labour campaign spend.
This is nothing to brag about (or be ashamed of particularly) but the contrast is that where there is a serviceable local branch (as in Cardiff and Manchester) they don’t have to be that special in order to win new voters in this political climate. In areas like Corby where the local party is, ahem, more modest, I still think standing at all is a poor use of the £500 deposit. Elections are not the only useful campaigning that money could have been used for and you don’t get to pick and choose where the by-elections crop up.
I think these Green results indicate that the depressed vote in the 2010 General Election may have been more temporary than I had feared and it’s clear that Labour are not the only ones who can make advances under the Coalition. This is good news for the Greens and well done in particular to the Manchester and Cardiff branches, working in traditionally Labour, working class cities.
The Fascists:
In Corby the far-right crashed from a strongish result down 3% to 1.7% for the BNP and the English Democrats got in there to split the far right vote at 1.2% – we’ll see more of this in the next few years, God bless their ineffectual little socks. In Manchester the BNP were down by 1.1% to 3% and, combined with the flourishing of UKIP, the space for the far-right has closed if they are moving backwards in areas that should be fertile ground.
It’s quite possible that in a few years time a new force could come out of the far-right ashes, but it isn’t going to be any of the current toxic crop of fascist splits and factions that’s for sure. Shame. The extra bit of good news is that people will be able to put all their focus on campaigning *for* their ideas rather than voting *against* a far right threat. It’s time for hope not fear, positive campaigning not emotional blackmail.
The Left:
In Cardiff Socialist Labour won 1.2% by breezing in and standing a paper candidate while the Communist Party head honcho Roger Griffiths who has campaigned in the area for years won 1.1%, which must be gutting for him. The lesson being the less people you meet…
In Manchester we had a veritable cornucopia of leftist candidates. The Pirate Party’s big cheese Loz Kaye won 1.9%, TUSC won 1.3%, Respect 1.1%, and the Communist League 0.4%. Again, as with the Corby Greens, people should ask themselves whether the £500 minimum they spent on embarressing themselves nationally was a better use of money than targeting that effort into one ward where they could have helped save the local nursery, library, whatever and prime the area for the next local elections, with the added bonus that they hadn’t just told the world they can’t even manage 2% of the vote.
Pretty paltry stuff but at the very least stand just one candidate in each place!