My analysis of British local by-elections from 4/10/18 and 11/10/18

Readers, the results of British local by-elections from the last two weeks were as follows:

(4/10/18):
 Cambridgeshire CC, Soham North & Isleham: Conservative 858 (48.8%, -17.4%), Liberal Democrats 527 (30.0%, +12.5%), Labour 191 (10.9%, -5.5%), Independent 182 (10.4%).

Chesterfield BC, Moor: Liberal Democrats 532 (47.1%, +14.0%), Labour 445 (39.4%, -11.3%), Conservative 84 (7.4%, -8.9%),UKIP 69 (6.1%). Liberal Democrat gain from Labour.

Hambleton DC, Thirsk: Conservative 679 (65.4%, -0.1%), Labour 251 (24.2%), Yorkshire Party 108 (10.4%). [No independent candidates this time]

(11/10/18):

Adur DC, Shortlands: Labour 448 (45.9%, +16.9%), Conservative 395 (40.5%, +10.6%), Green 132 (13.5%). Labour gain from UKIP who did not defend the seat; all changes are since 2016. [Liberal Democrats did not stand]

Halton UA, Ditton: Labour 644 (73.5%, +11.6%), Conservative 135 (15.4%), Liberal Democrats 97 (11.1%). [No independent candidates this time]

Hartlepool UA, Hart: Independent (Brewer) 637 (44.1%), Labour 582 (40.2%, +1.5%), Conservative 200 (13.8%, -1.4%), Green 27 (1.9%). Independent gain from Labour; all changes are since this May.

Warrington UA, Penketh & Cuerdley: Independent 784 (36.1%), Labour 691 (31.8%, -20.6%), Conservative 479 (22.1%, -16.9%), Liberal Democrats 100 (4.6%,-4.0%), UKIP 69 (3.2%), Green 47 (2.2%). Independent gain from Labour.

West Lancashire BC, Tanhouse: Labour 464 (72.3%, -12.8%), Independent 129 (20.1%), Conservative 49 (7.6%, -7.3%).

Of the by-elections that occurred the day I set off for the Green Party Autumn 2018 conference in Bristol which started the next day, the by-election in Chesterfield has an interesting backstory. The successful Liberal Democrat, Tony Rogers, first contested an election in 1974 but never became an MP; however, his efforts against Tony Benn in the Chesterfield constituency enabled Paul Holmes to win it in 2001 (partly helped by Labour selecting hard-left former Wood Green MP Reg Race as candidate to replace the retiring Tony Benn) and for nine years become the only Liberal Democrat MP in the East Midlands. This has occurred despite the fact in 2017 the Liberal Democrats only narrowly saved their deposit in the Chesterfield constituency, with 5.4% of the vote. Cambridgeshire's commuter hinterland is becoming increasingly vulnerable to strong swings from Conservative to Liberal Democrat, and even very safe rural wards and divisions can experience this; Soham North & Isleham experienced a 15% swing from Conservative to Liberal Democrat.

The Labour win in Adur was not unexpected by any means; as I have mentioned before an increasing young professional population is strengthening the support of Labour, and also the Green Party, on the once true-blue South Coast of England. However, in the north of England, Labour lost two seats to strong local independents, one in Warrington and one in Hartlepool, and as was shown in the 2017 election in particular a build up of support for localist independents at council level usually translates to increasing Conservative support at general election level unless the localist group fields a candidate themselves. Mansfield and Ashfield, both former Labour strongholds  in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, provide excellent evidence to this effect.


  




Comments

  1. Unknown12 October 2018 at 23:29

    Thanks for your data crunching prior to conference, Alan.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better
Read more

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more