Labour celebrations over the Blackpool South by-election win are premature
You’re being sold another lie and Labour celebrations over the Blackpool South by-election win are premature.
“It’s a massive swing away from the Tories,” they’re saying. “Seismic.” But that’s on a much lower turnout than at the general election in 2019, which is odd because this poll took place on a national election day when more people should have been aware and primed to go out and vote.
The election was held because Scott Benton resigned from Parliament after being suspended from the Tory Party for offering to take cash for questions – when three other Conservative MPs, who had made the same offer, weren’t.
As with most by-elections lately, only a minority of the electorate turned out to vote – 32.5 per cent. That’s less than the 38 per cent average for other recent by-elections like those in Wellingborough and Kingwood. I remind you, this is on a day of local government elections across the country.
The figures This Writer has suggest that this means there are 56,538 people in the electorate but only 18,375 turned out to vote, raising the usual questions about the legitimacy of an election result based on votes from fewer than half the electorate.
As usual, I have to say: the majority didn’t want to vote for any of the candidates.
Labour’s Chris Webb won with 10,825 votes – 1,732 fewer than Gordon Marsden achieved for the same party in 2019 (12,557 votes). As a proportion of the total electorate, that represents a swing against Labour of three per cent – from 22.2 per cent of the electorate to 19.1 per cent.
So we can see yet again that the reason Labour won is not because that party has become more popular but because the Conservative vote collapsed. In 2019, 16,247 people voted Tory (28.7 per cent of the electorate), compared with a pitiful 3,218 on May 2 (5.7 per cent). So that’s a percentage drop of 23 per cent.
Chris Webb, the new Labour MP, faces the same problem as other recent Labour by-election winners: he cannot claim to represent a majority of Blackpool South’s electorate because 80.9 per cent of that electorate – 45,713 people – did not want him to be their MP.
The Conservatives find themselves in a much worse position because their candidate, David Jones, won only 117 more votes than Reform UK’s (formerly the Brexit Party) Mark Butcher. He had 3,101 votes – still only 5.5 per cent of the electorate but only a 0.2 per cent difference from the Tory.
Conclusion: Labour has won Blackpool South but without a democratic mandate and with fewer votes than that party lost with in the general election. Keir Starmer is celebrating the fact he has helped make the people of the UK sick of politics.
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Another way to look at it is that where Labour did win, it was only by about 10% of the total votes.
That no Seismic victory in anybody’s books, it’s barely a rumble!
The predicted “Hung Parliament” may make pushing Starmer’s Right-Wing Policies through a lot more difficult, especially if many more “Free Thinking” Independents are sitting.