The latest ructions in Israel & Gaza should bring the usual cockroaches out of the woodwork. It’s certainly starting that over on the US side of the Atlantic. Be interesting to see how the usual suspects start their bleating about their usual complaints.
And how Rishi tries to navigate a suddenly choppier sea.
One wonders what the upcoming Parliamentary election will be like.
Russian-dominated. Just like ours will be. And most other Western democracies.
Bastards.
Now now, the Chinese will have their turn too.
Ha
Ha
Ha
Great results, but the voter apathy is quite depressing. Something in the mid-thirties percentage wise for the turnouts at each. Could usually Tory-voting people have stayed away as a protest? Or are people genuinely not bothered that the Conservatives are running the country into the dirt?
Yes, it may well be that “natural” Tories stayed at home rather than that Starmer has closed the deal for the next general election. But wins in constituencies like these are still wins, and notable ones
Turnout at by-elections in the UK is typically low; a signficant number of voters don’t greatly care who represents their district in Parliament and only vote if they feel that they can make a choice of government. Average turnout over all bye-elections since 1979 has been just below 50%.
But, yeah, both these turnouts are unusually low, even by bye-election standards. This is likely, as you suggest, to be Tory voters staying at home rather than voting Labour or Liberal. They do this knowing that there is no government at stake; in a general election at least some of them would vote, and the Tories would be the beneficiaries of this.
Still, for it to happen on this scale, handing rock-solid Tory seats to the Labour party, does indicate fairly deep dissatisfaction among Tory voters, and is likely also to mean that swing voters are not going to vote Tory in a general election. The Tories won’t take much comfort from the fact that the swing against them was achieved on the back of an unusually low turnout.
The Mid-Beds result is the record for largest government majority overturned in a by-election.
The previous record was set in…July this year, when Labour won Selby and Ainsty.
The headline of the Tories narrow win in Uxbridge (which hinged on the hyper-local issue of ULEZ charging) overshadowed the real story, which is that Labour is winning votes in what should be rock-solid Tory seats.
And this is without any detectable levels of enthusiasm for Starmer or Labour as a political force. The current Labour strategy seems to be to minimise their exposure to attack - but we saw at the conference the beginning of a willingness to talk more about what makes them different (e.g. “I will ignore NIMBYs and build houses”). “We’re not the Tories” is probably a winning position all by itself at this point - if they can go into an election with a campaign that offers positive reasons to vote for them, we might be looking at something pretty seismic.
(That said, overturning an 80 seat majority in one go is traditionally pretty hard so that we’re even talking about it as likely tells you how badly the Tories have fucked up.)
These results, while hilarious and basically good, might be bad news in one way.
The next general election is due any time between now and Jan 2025. When exactly is entirely up to the Tory Party generally, and Rishi Sunak in particular. And I greatly fear that the greater the evidence that he is going to lose, and the greater the evidence that he is going to lose badly, the more reluctant he will quite naturally be to call the election. So while there has been a lot of talk about a May election (a very traditional month for elections - good weather but not too many people on holiday), which allows one to hope for a relatively quick end to this ludicrous shambles of a government, I don’t really see Rishi waking up to these results and putting his team on a 6-month warning.
“Armageddon.” Heh.
The 80 seat majority thing is a bit overblown. They got that majority based on 1. Being the only party to back Brexit, which was a popular stance and 2. The most unelectable maniac to ever a major party leader as leader of the opposition.
With both those major issues gone away, there was never going to be anything like the same majority.
From the BBC article:
- Labour emerged victorious in Mid Beds - Nadine Dorries’ former seat - which the Tories have held for more than 90 years and had a majority of more than 24,000
That’s definitely a “wowsers!”
YEah, not the same majority, but the normal expectation would be that the 80 would turn into 40, or maybe 20 or 10 in a really bad result. It’s enough a buffer to withstand a reasonable oppostion gain.
But it’s not normal times. As you say, it was a unique set of circumstances that led to that majority. More to the point, per this site, the majority is now only 59. (Don’t know if that’s been updated this morning either!).
Labour have 200 (maybe 202) seats. c.320 is a majority, depending on how many seats Sinn Fein win and don’t take up. Winning over 100 seats will be a pretty historic result and should therefore be relatively unlikely, but does seem pretty nailed on at this point.
There are “it’s never happened before!” precedents that lean the other way, too. If the Tories were to win the next election, they would be returned to government for the fifth time in a row. That has never happened before for any party. Does the present rabble, running on its record of delusion, division and incompetence, look to you like the kind of outfit that could possibly pull off this historic feat? No, me neither.
Well quite.
The graph here shows a pretty settled view of the two parties over the past year and more and it’s just not going to get any better.
The Tories are telling themselves that the polls always tighten up at an election. And sometimes they do. But they are not tightening up that much and they could conceivably go the other way, like they did in 2017.
FWIW, the implied odds from this morning’s betting markets are
Labout majority: 75% (1.33)
No overall majority: 25% (4)
Tory majority: 10% (10)
(I’m aware that doesn’t add up!)
Just like Tory budget math!
A couple of thoughts from across the pond:
I don’t know how much, if any, early or mail-in balloting is done in the UK for any election, or for by-elections in particular. I also know the last few days have seen some beastly weather there in many areas from storm “Babet”. Does anyone think this contributed unusually to holding down turnout?
Don’t forget that parties get the electorate they deserve and vice versa. The “present rabble” (great phrasing!) in Parliament only need to be attractive to the present rabble in the voting public. cf. the current disaster unfolding in the US House.
Individual pols and entire parties can be objectively awful and also plenty popular enough to win given an equally objectively awful voter pool.
Overall I agree this looks seismically bad for the Tories. But the two factors I mention may soften the blow a bit. Also agree that Sunak will be sorely tempted to wait to the last possible day to call for an election. The only exception I can see would be if suddenly by some great miracle they began having a run of good news and wanted to capitalise on the momentum while they could.
An interesting point was raised on the Pod Save the U.K. podcast, which I haven’t heard anywhere else, that Uxbridge is a big college/university town so because it was a summer byelection, there were thousands fewer students in town and voting than there would have been at any other time of year. If school had been in session, it’s likely the Tories would have lost that seat as well, no matter the locals’ feelings about ULEZ.
That is interesting and goes to show the basic point that: it was very close! A seat which was considered safe enough for the Prime Minister came down to a few hundred votes. It should have been a massive wake up call. But they seem to have decided that they were basically fine, just needed to bang on about the rights of the motorist a bit and maybe cut some green targets.