The result was declared less than four hours ago, around 4.30am GMT. This is hardly a 24-hour news channel, and some of us need our sleep.
Yes, a campaign not without more than usual nastiness and a very bad result for both Labour and Tories. But a lowish turnout for such a high profile by-election - longstanding Labour and Tories staying at home… for now?
The result was not what mattered, but the entire leadup to the election, there was reams of chatter generated on my twitter/other social media I follow about the various tactics of each side, the implications, how this matters to British politics. This was far from an inconsequential election, despite the relatively small number of people voting.
It was just odd seeing sometimes 25% of my feed dominated by this news on my other social platforms and crickets from the SDMB. I would have liked the SDMB take on the situation developing in real time as a way to calibrate but I’m unable to get it. During the Johnson/Truss/Sunak period, there were reams of trenchant British political insight here covering every minute development but not for large parts of the Starmer government.
I must say I feel somewhat heartened by 67% of the vote going to the left. With the news constantly banging on about Reform, it shows we’re getting quite a skewed idea about the electorate. I wouldn’t mind that as a coalition to keep out Reform. Tories totally collapsed, where next for them?
That’s fair. I suppose my personal reasons for posting less in the STarmer years than in previous PM’s tenures are:
That said, I shall stir myself:
The worst outcome for this election was a Reform victory, not least because their candidate is even more openly racist than the party he represents. That would ahve been bad in and of itself, obviously, but would also have had the effect of convincing Labour they needed to be even more right wing/punch left even harder.
Instead we had a big Green win - and the size matters, everyone I read was expecting whoever won to do so only by a narrow margin - and Labour beaten into third place. Hopefully that will wake people up to the understanding that the whole strategy of “well who else are lefties going to vote for - the Greens? Chuckle chuckle guffaw” has been ill-conceived and they will start governing for the voters they have not the voters they can never get.
Meanwhile some light relief on the left of the left:
This is the bit that’s being less talked about, but they are the official Opposition and nominally the second biggest party in the country - the fact that they have been a complete afterthought behind Reform is or should be shocking and a) should see Badenoch lose her job and b) is genuinely worrying in terms of drift to the right.
From the vox pop interviews I read about, it seemed as though the prevailing mood was, if not “none of the above” (though the low turnout would indicate its strength) so much as “someone - anyone - else should have a go”. The Reform vote suggests to me that “anti-woke” has its limits, particularly in areas with strong minority ethnic communities if Reform continue to put up that sort of candidate; while the Green vote shows that appealing on the bread and butter economic issues works, though it may well be that feelings about Gaza may also have had their effect.
I don’t know where this low turnout impression came from. This was a by-election that saw a greater turnout than the 2024 GE. That’s an unusually high level of turnout.
Someone mentioned on Twitter that this is the first time since the 80’s that the Conservatives have lost their deposit on an election.
From the perspective of an outside observer, it feels like the Lib Dems have spent a generation waiting in the wings, smugly rubbing their hands together with the prospects for capitalizing on the falling fortunes of one or both of the other parties. “We don’t have anything to offer, but any day now, our time as the default option in the center will come!”
One imagines they’re as shell-shocked here as anyone. “The… the Greens? Really? But… but…”
For a long time they saw themselves as The Alternative for voters that were temporarily or permanently disgusted with the other two. But now the voters have others.
Didn’t see much merit in speculating about what might happen, save it for when it comes.
A statement from Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, on the election result in Gorton and Denton:
“P.S. I’m not mad. Please don’t put in the newspaper I got mad.”
The fact that the Tories are accusing everyone else of “grievance politics” with a straight face is a definite sign that they’ve gone hopelessly over the edge.
Every accusation is a confession.
I think Ofsted needs to do an emergency inspection of that particular charm school
What exactly is the platform of the Greens [I had thought they were basically more or less single issue–the environment–although that of course involves many different programs].
They’ve oriented themselves as the left–populist alternative to Labour, e.g.
There have been complaints that their campaign in this by-election played too sectarian an appeal to Muslims (leaflets in Urdu and Bangla, and drawing attention to contacts between Reform and Netanyahu, and between Labour and Modi). But as has been pointed out, the Greens are led by a gay Jew and their local candidate is a female plumber.
And a statement by Starmer to all Labour MPs. It’s… probably not as bad as the Conservative statement but wow is it pretty bad:
An incredibly ironic video to be surfacing given Starmer’s letter:
From 2020
Charlotte Cadden, the Conservative who lost her deposit, is a TERF - and in fact Badenoch’s statement points out she has campaigned on single-sex spaces. She’s a trustee of Sex Matters, an anti-transgender campaign group.
A quote from farage :
When I told Gorton and Denton to ‘channel their patriotic Blitz spirit’ I didn’t mean ‘defeat the far-right fascists’