In case you missed it right wing populist politics just took a bit of a duffing up this week.
The British Government lost 2 by-elections in one day – Tamworth and Mid-Beds. Both were safe Tory seats. If these results were replicated at a General Election* the Conservatives would be the 4th largest party
LAB: 480 (+284)
LDM: 104 (+96)
CON: 20 (-356)
SNP: 23 (-25)
PLC: 3 (+1)
GRN: 1 (=)
A few months ago the Tories narrowly held on to Boris Johnson’s old seat in Uxbridge. They attributed that victory to the unpopularity of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone extension by the Mayor of London.
Personally I wasn’t convinced by this explanation. I thought it was more likely that a combination of middle class Green voters, and an overloaded Labour election machine. There were 3 by-elections fought on that same day, and Labour’s forces were divided between 2 target constituencies.
Since then the Conservatives have pursued a culture war strategy, particularly trying to drag environmental policy into their culture wars, with a bogus “war on the motorist” slogan.
The results last night show what a disaster this has been – their entire campaign was based around marginal issues that are important only to a small group of right wingers who spend too much time on line. Real voters don’t care. Policies which not long ago won general elections are tossed overboard to acommodate an increasingly belligerent party membership. While Starmer scoops them up with quiet gratitude.
But this doesn’t mean Labour are heading for a landslide. Conservative voters stayed away from the polls on Thursday night – they didn’t shift to Labour en masse.
But this shouldn’t be too much comfort for the Tories. If they aren’t going to fight the next election on culture wars what are they going to fight it on? From the economy to immigration the Government have failed and failed again
There is a good chance that the economy will improve next year, although this isn’t certain, and there is a chance we might slip back into another recession instead.
But even if the economy does improve voters most likely wont give the Government credit it for. The economy had been improving for several years before 1997 and Labour won big. It grew faster under Labour 2008-10 than it did afterwards with Cameron and Osborne. The same was true before and after 1979 -in fact Government finances were worse under Thatcher than when Labour asked for an IMF bailout, she just kept her nerve better.
And this isn’t the end of the Tory’s problems. Their candidate in Tamworth was awful – a sneery little snob who had posted a flowchart on social media advising benefit claimants to fuck off. Who on earth allowed this total clownshoe to stand to be an MP?
One of the reasons Labour got such a pezzling in 2019 was the ghastly quality of their candidates. The Conservatives are making the same mistake: selecting voter repellent candidates because they fit a peculiar ideological profile. If the Tories continue to pick such dreadful candidates, particularly with so many long serving MPs standing down, they will end up putting lots of seats in play that wouldn’t normally have been competitive. This is exacerbated by the dwindling membership of Constituency Conservative Parties, who are less and less able to find people to canvas and door knock, and a sharp reduction in donations from businesses, some of whom are openly switching to Labour.
This isn’t a political party in a fit shape to win a GE. It is in an even worse shape than Labour was in 2019. At least Labour had people to go out and knock on doors even if the people they spoke to on the doorstep responded by voting Tory.
It looks to me that Labour learned the right lesson from Uxbridge – to improve it’s ground game and go hard on the Get Out The Vote. They were still running their GOTV campaign in MidBeds late into the evening, getting every last vote out for victory. Labour members were been rung at 6pm and organised into last minute phone banks to get voters to defy the weather and vote.
This is unlikely to be the end of Rishi’s by-election misery. Normally the main cause of a by-election is ill health, and the longer a party has been in power the greater the number of by-elections.
This is the first ever Parliament where the main cause of by-elections is resignations due to scandal.
This trend isn’t going to stop. Peter Bone faces a recall petition if he is suspended for 6 weeks for hitting a member of staff and exposing his genitals to them. It is uncertain how many Tory MPs are currently on Police bail awaiting charges of rape and sexual assault as the Met won’t name all of them. There are another half a dozen Tory MPs who have lost the whip due to various misdemeanours.
The last time we had an extended period of sleaze like this was the 90s, where even Conservative supporting newspapers carried devastating front pages.
This ended with the Sun switching sides and backing Labour. The question is – will they do it again rather than be seen to back a loser?
*That’s not going to happen so stop fantasising about it, it’s not healthy