Wow! This is a high stakes move! They must be very sure they are in the clear.
This will put a lot of pressure on Boris to do the same.
He will be hounded until he proves he has the same level of integrity.
Integrity in public office is an important feature of UK politics. It is an honor system and this means a lot to voters. It is not Johnson’s strong suite. He is a ‘maverick’ politician who has been able to get away with the lot of rule bending, but people are getting very tired of that.
He can’t, of course. That ship sailed years ago.
But it may well not come to this. Durham police could well accept Starmer’s explanation of the circumstances and not issue a fine. Not impossible that Starmer’s announcement actually puts more pressure on them not to do do, while appearing not to be doing anything so crude as leaning on them. Clever.
Can you translate these into American?
Neil Parish is the Member of Parliament (MP) who represents the constituency (or “seat”)
of Tiverton and Honiton in the county of Devon. At the last general election
he won with a majority of 24000 votes.
We used to be like that. Then Trump came along, and the word got erased from the dictionary.
The UK Parliament has two chambers for making laws. The House of Common and the House of Lords. The Commons makes new laws and the Lords is for ‘revising’ the laws. I guess this is something like Congress and the Senate in the US. The House of Commons consists of 650 Members of Parliament (MPs) and each represents a ‘constituency’ that have more or less the same population (about 72,000). MPs are usually addressed as the ‘Right Honorable Member for Tiverton and Honiton’ and part of the job is to represent local interests. If you have a problem, you can always get an appointment with your local MP and have a chat with them.
That local aspect is quite important. A person becomes an MP by being selected to by the local party. Some, good upstanding citizen with the appropriate political voice. When an issue comes up in Parliament that could have a local impact, he will get lots of letters from local party members and others. He is expected to represent their views.
Now if your local MP gets caught with his trousers down in some scandal, this causes a lot of disquiet in the local party. If he has to resign for some reason, or dies, then another MP must be elected. This is a local By-Election, outside the cycle of national General Elections when the whole country gets to vote.
By-Elections can be a quite significant test for the ruling party, which, of course, hopes that the local constituency voters will vote for their new candidate. However, there may be some disagreement between the national party and the local party over who should be the best candidate. They like local personalities who they like and trust. The national party may want the candidate to be one of their chums.
When it comes to the voters, they will be influenced by local and national issues. They will look at the candidates each party has put up for the by-election and make their choice. Recently there have been by-elections where the Conservative vote has collapsed when in the previous election there was a comfortable majority. With a 24,000 majority (out of 72,000) in the previous election, there would be a big upset in the party if enough voters were lost for another party to win. In Wakefield, with a majority of 3,353, it would not take much for the Labour to overturn that. Especially when the Conservative MP resigned because of the sexual offense.
The voters of Tiverton and Honiton with such a big majority in the last election may be so disgusted with the party that they simply do not turn up to vote Conservative or vote for another party altogether. The MP watching porn in Parliament scandal has been very big news in the UK and women MPs from across the political spectrum have been voicing protests at the sexist culture of entitlement that prevails at Westminster, especially in the Conservative party and the administration run by Boris Johnson.
By elections tend to be partly a measure of the popularity of the national government, same as the local government elections we had last week. These are clues regarding how well a party might do at the next General Election and whether Boris Johnson is the man to lead the Conservatives to victory.
Johnson won a big majority in the 2019 General Election because he managed to convince constituencies in the North of England that Brexit was the answer to all the issues faced by people in this region that had lost so many jobs with the contraction of the industrial economy. '‘Rust Belt’ issues and Boris doing Brexit was supposed to cure all that. These traditionally Labour areas were know at the ‘Red Wall’. The Conservative party know that they are going to have to deliver something for these voters and an MP who has turned out to be a pervert will disgust them. These by-elections will be political discussion points over the next weeks.
Boris is about to bring out a lot of new laws inspired by Brexit that is supposed to liberate the economy. These had better work, because the economic forecast for the UK is not looking at all good. There is a huge ‘cost of living’ crisis developing that will hit the poorest in those Red Wall seats.
I don’t personally consider the local elections results a good thing in many ways. The Tory govt, as in parliament, appears to loathe local govt, and has repeatedly given local councils more powers over the years, while also decreasing their funding.
And in some areas, like schools, academies have taken over the running of many or most schools, but a lot of local voters don’t seem to realise the LEA (Local Education Authority) has very little to do with them any more, and blames them if they’re bad, which they often are.
Local govts end up getting the blame for a lot of things that aren’t really their fault - sure, some of them are corrupt, some of them are inept, but most of them are running out of money, so even the good ones are suffering.
Losing councils doesn’t really affect MPs, let alone ministers, in the short term. In the medium term, by the time the next general election rolls around people will be blaming their local Labour, LibDem, etc councils for failing, and will look on the Tories in parliament more favourably.
Thanks, @pjd, @filmstar-en. I’m still unclear if the 24,000 is the total vote won by the MP or the vote differential of the MP above the opposition. (Or similarly, if the 72,000 constituents is the number of voters or the number of residents.)
Americans tend to use percentages in similar situations.
American here, but it’s the differential (won by ~24000 votes over the next highest vote getting candidate from a total of ~60000 votes cast). We do use the same occasionally but you’re right that we use percentages more often, even when the total vote counts are tiny.
Mainly, I suspect, because there are usually only 2 real candidates in most US elections, while there may be candidates from 4 or 5 parties or more in parts of the world with parliamentary systems. Even in the last several replies, you see mention of several parties (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats)
ETA: Actually, the wiki page on the by-election pretty much answers all this pretty handily if you look at the table
Each local government maintains a list of voters called and electoral roll.
They do this by sending out forms every few years, asking who is living at each address. It standardised and quite simple, there is nothing like the ‘voter registration’ issues that bedevils US politics.
These voter lists are mapped onto geographic constituencies that elect MPs to Parliament. They are also used for local government elections.
The geographic area constituencies cover is decided by a national ‘Boundary Commission’. This adjusts the boundaries at intervals to ensure it takes account of population changes. There is a review coming due to complete in 2023. The Boundary Commission is independent of the government and holds public consultations so people can have their say. The political parties will be keen to assess the affect on their election prospects, but it won’t be dramatic. One effect is that there will be few less constituencies in the North of England and more in the South East. Win some lose some.
Again, it is nothing like the US system, where boundary issues are prone to political interference.
When people speak about the voting in an election for an MP in a constituency. They talk about ‘safe seats’ and ‘marginals’. A safe seat is where the pattern is for one party to regularly dominate in and area. The industrial heartlands and big cities like London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham and so on tend to vote Labour. Outside of these dense urban centres, in the suburbs and countryside, they tend to vote either Conservative or for the centrist party the Liberal/Democrats.
So there are Tory (Conservative) safe seats and Labour safe seats and elections or won on persuading the voters in the marginals. A safe seat is where one party regularly wins a large majority of the votes. The maximum is 72,000 or whatever is the exact figure for that constituency, but that presumes everyone will actually vote. In the last General Election, the number of people turning out to vote as 67.3%. That is a kind of measure of political engagement. On the other hand, the recent local elections in my area of London had a turnout of 36%, which is appalling mainly because the area is solid Labour territory. If you vote in marginal area where there is a good chance of the elected party changing, you vote counts for more.
People talk about a constituency like Tiverton and Honiton being a safe Conservative seat because they got the majority of votes and that was 24,000 votes more than next party. This is the ‘first past the post’ system where the competition between parties existing within each constituency. For another party to beat that in the coming by-election there would have to be a huge percentage swing in voting from the Conservative Party to another. If that happens it will send shock wave through the Conservative party and they will begin to seriously worry that they are losing the confidence of the voters. This does happen from time to time.
By-elections tend to attract the big names trying to shore up their parties support by shaking hands and being photographed with local dignitaries. There is often a bit of tactical voting. Conservative voters might be persuaded to vote for the Liberal Democrats, but would never vote for Labour. Sometimes a party will not campaign in an area where they stand little chance, but want to avoid dividing the anti-Conservative vote.
The Conservatives are fearful of losing their foothold in the traditionally Labour voting Red Wall seats in the North and in the prosperous South West they will be nervous of losing votes to the Liberal Democrats. I expect the Conservatives will win Tiverton and Honiton, but the party will look very closely at how much there majority has eroded because that will be a measure of how much support this scandal has cost the party if it were extrapolated nationally.
Local elections and Parliamentary by-elections are studied quite carefully for clues to the mood of the electorate.
There are also elections that take place in the devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The recent elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly have been interesting. Regular UK political parties do not participate in Northern Ireland assembly elections. Northern Ireland has its own parties and there has been a significant swing to the Irish Republican Sinn Fein party. This is very significant.
UK politicians keep a wary eye on Northern Ireland because of its troubled constitutional history. Boris Johnson got elected on the basis that he ‘got Brexit done’. Well in Northern Ireland, the business of drawing a border between EU and UK rules was fudged and it is a difficult constitutional problem whose solution has been put off. The Northern Irish Assembly has not been in operation for some years now and there is a growing frustration that political decisions have been delayed for too long. This suits Johnson very at the moment. But the voters want this logjam fixed and the only way to get this Assembly working again is to fix the concerns the DUP have about the ‘Northern Irish Protocol’.
Biden takes a lot of interest in Irish politics. He has made it quite clear that the US will take a dim view of any of the terms of the Good Friday Agreement being compromised, which says no border in Ireland. The DUP say there should no border between the Northern Ireland and the UK. So back to you, Boris…
If Northern Ireland starts becoming restive, Boris can’t blame that on the Covid pandemic or Putin or any other external influence. It is entirely down to him and his Brexit fudge.
Mmm. Brexit Fudge.
That’s the one with the unchewable chunky bits.
Good point, The Tories and Labour get all the chatter, because they’re the only really viable parties capable of carrying a general election, but there are a number of other parties, some of whom hold seats in the House of Commons and can swing votes on key issues - notably the Scottish National Party (45 seats), Liberal Democrats (13 seats, which is currently low for then), rival Northern Irish Parties (8 and 7 seats), and a few other parties who have one seat, such as the Greens.
I actually wish we had proportional representation, which would increase the number of minor parties, better present the actual voting intentions of the electorate, and force compromise in government. This idea of gifting all the power to a party which doesn’t actually have a majority of votes in the country is hardly democracy at all.
Well, the UK had a referendum about that and voted against changing the system
How many of the voters actually understood what it meant is debatable.
The UK is not very good at referendums.
The problem with proportional representation - and I’m speaking from experience here - is that it creates a huge mess of feuding parties, which can make forming a coalition a real bitch.
I know, I voted in it. The public didn’t have any good idea what it was about, not helped by the tory press machine being completely against it.
Ah yes, I’m not blind to that, no system is perfect, but it is at least representative of the wishes of the people, and prevents any one party being able to bully through policies which the country wouldn’t agree with.
Indeed - the anti-PR people in Parliament were loudly and rabidly against it, the pro-PR people in Parliament were rather tepid in its support (not helped by largely being LibDems who are rather tepid anyway), the actual referendum was a deliberately-muddy mess, and the press took every opportunity to smear it. It never stood a chance of being an actual measure of the value of PR.
It wasn’t about any form of proportional representation, just the Alternative Vote (a second preference), which might adjust the result between the two leading candidates in any one constituency but not lead to much more proportionality overall.
But the comment above about us not doing referendums well is spot on. This one and Brexit were set up as a fudge to get Cameron off a political hook, with no real preparation of the ground, in terms of explaining the issues or clarifying the options.
And back to the antics of Just Boris. It’s just been announced that his latest wizard wheeze to keep down the cost of living is to order thee cabinet to cut 90,000 civil service jobs. Yes, that’s really going to reduce the energy bills and the numbers of people at the food banks.