The ballot box: do either of Labour’s two new MPs actually have a mandate, when the vast majority of voters in both constituencies did not support them?
Once again, This Writer feels compelled to say: don’t buy what Keir Starmer is pedalling – the by-election results in Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire are not great victories for Labour.
Yes, Starmer’s party gained the Parliamentary seats in both constituencies after yesterday’s (October 19) votes – but only because 46,000 Conservative voters stayed away from polling stations or didn’t post in their choices.
And yet, once again, we’re seeing reports of huge swings toward Labour only because they are recorded as percentages of the turnout, rather than of the electorate.
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But turnout was down from 46,066 in the 2019 general election to 25,586 – a drop of 20,480. The Conservative vote fell from 30,542 to to 10,403 – a drop of 20,139. So we can see very clearly that Labour’s gain was due to Tory disaffection.
The electorate is currently taken to be 72,544 (although these figures are from 2010 and are therefore around 13 years old).
Labour had 10,908 votes in 2019 – around 15 per cent of that electorate. Yesterday the party’s vote did indeed increase in real terms – but only by 811 votes to 11,719 – around 16 per cent of the electorate.
That is hardly a thumping majority.
Some might say it is not acceptable. With turnout at just 35.3 per cent, we can see that 64.7 per cent – nearly two-thirds of the electorate – did not want any of the candidates offered to them.
How can Sarah Edwards – the apparent winner – claim to represent them or their political desires?
She can’t.
Let’s move on to Mid-Bedfordshire, where the situation is even worse, although you wouldn’t know it from what’s being said:
At 40,720, turnout was 48.3 per cent of the 84,212-strong electorate but, again, the number actually voting for the winning candidate was pitiful.
Tory voters again avoided the ballot boxes in huge numbers, with only 12,680 supporting the Conservative candidate – down a massive 26,012 from the 38,692 who voted Nadine Dorries back into Parliament in 2019.
As turnout then was 64,717 we can see that the 23,993 fall in voter numbers is entirely Conservative, with 2,019 others choosing to vote who did not take part in 2019.
So, again, Labour’s gain is due only to Tory voters turning away.
Labour’s candidate, Alistair Strathern, actually gained fewer votes than the party’s candidate in 2019, Rhiannon Meades. She collected 14,028 – around 16.7 per cent of the electorate, while he could only manage 13,872 – around 16.5 per cent.
Again, it may be suggested that, with 51.7 per cent of the electorate not turning out, and with 83.5 per cent not voting for him, the winning candidate does not have a valid mandate to represent the constituency.
But you wouldn’t think that, listening to Starmer!
“There is a confidence now in this changed Labour party that we can go anywhere across the country, put up a fight and win seats that we’ve never won before.”
Fine words about two constituencies where Labour will almost certainly lose both its new MPs at the next general election, when the disaffected Tory voters will most likely return to do their bit to foil Starmer’s chances of forming a government!
In fairness, he did admit, “I don’t want to get carried away” and added that “every single vote on this journey has to be earned”.
Some Conservatives are being far more realistic about their own performance:
The Tamworth & Mid-Beds by-elections are extremely bad for my party @Conservatives, and I don't think it helps to suggest otherwise, as some party figures have done this morning.
The current national polls are dreadful for us but these results are even *worse*.
But at least Frost isn’t lying to you. Starmer’s words are disingenuous at best.
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Well done to Scottish Labour for winning the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election on Thursday (October 5) – but I think some people might be overstating it a bit:
Huge win for Labour in Rutherglen & Hamilton West, a 20.4pp to Lab from the SNP.
One by-elex. But that sort of swing, if replicated in a GE, would see Lab gain 41 seats & SNP reduced to just 6. Lab would return to being largest party in Scot & opens door to a Lab majority. https://t.co/H62QBMX2eL
The percentage swings are all wrong, of course, because they are only ever taken as percentages of the turnout – and not of the electorate.
So let’s run the numbers. The electorate is currently taken to be 81,124 people. So in the 2019 general election, when Labour won 18,545 votes, that would have been around 22.9 per cent of the electorate.
On Thursday, Labour won 17,845 votes – around 22 per cent of the electorate.
So instead of a 20.4 per cent swing to Labour, the vote actually showed a 0.9 per cent swing away from that party; 700 fewer people supported Labour.
Now look at Beth Rigby’s comment below:
The turnout was 37%. Labour did not even maintain it's own vote:
2019 Labour Co-op Ged Killen: 18,545 2023 Labour Michael Shanks: 17,845@damian_from@BillWard60
— MerryMichaelW ☭ 🎗 #Socialism #Equality (@MerryMichaelW) October 6, 2023
“That sort of swing, if replicated in a GE, could see Labour gain 41 seats”. Really? Losing 0.9 per cent of the vote in every constituency in Scotland at a general election will give Labour 41 seats?
I have a doubt…
Of course, the turnout for this by-election was extremely low:
🏴 Voter turnout in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election:
📊 37.2% (-29.3)
This is very, VERY low for a competitive by-election.
Here are the turnouts for by-elections over the last two years: you can see that Rutherglen and Hamilton West had the lowest turnout of the lot – and the second biggest percentage fall…
The percentage change is what's important, and it's within the range you've posted. Silly point as usual
… so Joe Pass’s comment makes no sense to This Writer. The percentage change is important, but being within the range quoted doesn’t make the point silly – it reinforces the point, because it’s the second-greatest fall.
And the greatest fall was in a constituency that still had 44 per cent turnout – that’s 6.8 per cent more than Rutherglen and Hamilton West, with an electorate of nearly 88,000 – so, around 7,000 more voters to start with, and around 8,500 more people voted. That means Joe Pass’s claim is doubly wrong – the actual number turning out is important.
This is not a “huge win” for Labour. It is a minor disaster.
It could be argued that the numbers are less important because a general election always attracts more votes, but if that just means a proportionate drop in voters, then Labour will be in even more trouble.
And there’s no evidence that this won’t happen.
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Chris “Pincher by name…” has resigned as an MP after losing his appeal against suspension for groping two men in a club.
His decision parallels one by Boris Johnson earlier this year – the former prime minister who was pitched out of that job after being found to have dishonestly claimed he did not know about Pincher’s misbehaviours.
Johnson had been found to have broken Parliamentary rules over the Partygate scandal and resigned in a fit of petulance, rather than suffer the indignity of his then-constituents petitioning for a by-election to get rid of him.
Pincher will also avoid the further embarrassment of a recall petition – but it seems that is the only parallel between his resignation and that of the PM his sexual shenanigans brought down.
According to the BBC, he said he came to the decision after talking with his family and staff:
He said: “I do not want my constituents to be put to further uncertainty, and so in consequence I have made arrangements to resign and leave the Commons.”
It is set to be the ninth by-election since Rishi Sunak became prime minister.
Good for Pincher; at least he has managed to do one thing in the right way.
Of course, the announcement make it possible for me to repeat the saga of how Pincher brought Johnson down – partly because many of you probably didn’t get to see it when I published it earlier this week… but mostly because I enjoy it:
Initially, he was best-known as the one who hid behind other Tories in order to shout abuse at then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn during Prime Minister’s Questions:
But on July 1, 2022, he resigned as a Tory whip after it was alleged that he groped two other men at the private Carlton Club.
In his resignation letter to Johnson, he said he “drank far too much” and “embarrassed myself and other people”.
But the apparent double sexual assault was not investigated by the Conservative Party, nor were the police, apparently, contacted.
New claims against Pincher stacked up in the following days. The BBC listed them in the following way:
The Sunday Times reported Mr Pincher had placed his hand on the inner leg of a male Tory MP in a bar in Parliament in 2017.
The newspaper reported Mr Pincher also made unwanted advances towards a different male Tory MP in 2018 while in his parliamentary office, and towards a Tory activist in Tamworth around July 2019.
The Mail on Sunday carried allegations he had made advances against an individual a decade ago, and that a female Tory staffer had tried to prevent his advances towards a young man at a Conservative Party conference.
The Independent carried allegations from an unnamed male Conservative MP that Mr Pincher groped him on two separate occasions in December 2021 and June this year.
The Sunday Times reported that the MP involved in the alleged incident in 2018 contacted No 10 before Mr Pincher was made a whip in February, passing on details of what he said had happened to him and voicing his concerns about him being appointed to the role.
Former Johnson aide Dominic Cummings was said to have claimed that the then-prime minister referred to him as “Pincher by name, pincher by nature”. But Johnson himself was said to have considered the matter closed after Pincher resigned as deputy chief whip.
This raised concerns about unequal treatment of MPs who are accused of inappropriate behaviour (or, in this case, sexual crimes). Pincher was subsequently reported to Parliament’s independent behaviour watchdog and an inquiry began.
The controversy – and Boris Johnson’s failure to act in a timely way – led to renewed speculation over his fitness to continue as the UK’s political leader. This intensified after it was stated that he had indeed known of Pincher’s behaviour before appointing him to the Tory whips’ office:
Boris Johnson was made aware of a formal complaint about Chris Pincher’s “inappropriate behaviour” while Mr Pincher was a Foreign Office minister from 2019-20, BBC News can reveal.
It triggered a disciplinary process that confirmed the MP’s misconduct. Mr Pincher apologised after the process concluded, BBC News has been told.
BBC News understands the PM and the foreign secretary at the time – Dominic Raab – knew about the issue.
The Prime Minister’s office claimed that “no official complaints [about Pincher] were ever made”.
McDonald of Salford, a crossbench peer who was formerly (as Simon McDonald) Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, blew that – and subsequent li(n)es out of the water.
In a letter to Kathryn Stone, then-Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, he stated: “This is not true. In the summer of 2019, shortly after he was appointed minister of state at the Foreign Office, a group of officials complained to me about Mr Pincher’s behaviour. I discussed the matter with the relevant official at the Cabinet Office. (In substance, the allegations were similar to those made about his behaviour at the Carlton Club.) An investigation upheld the complaint; Mr Pincher apologised and promised not to repeat the inappropriate behaviour. There was no repetition at the FCO before he left seven months later.”
The letter added that a BBC website report stated: “Downing Street has said Boris Johnson was not aware of any specific allegations when he appointed Mr Pincher deputy chief whip in February,” then added: “By 4 July, the BBC website reflected a change in No 10’s line: ‘The prime minister’s official spokesman said Mr Johnson knew of “allegations that were either resolved or did not progress to a formal complaint”, adding that “it was deemed not appropriate to stop an appointment simply because of unsubstantiated allegations”.’
“The original No 10 line is not true and the modification is still not accurate. Mr Johnson was briefed in person about the initiation and outcome of the investigation. There was a ‘formal complaint’. Allegations were ‘resolved’ only in the sense that the investigation was completed; Mr Pincher was not exonerated. To characterise the allegations as ‘unsubstantiated’ is therefore wrong.
“I am aware that [it] is unusual to write to you and simultaneously publicise the letter. I am conscious of the duty owed to the target of an investigation but I act out of my duty towards the victims. Mr Pincher deceived me and others in 2019. He cannot be allowed to use the confidentiality of the process three years ago to pursue his predatory behaviour in other contexts.”
He didn’t say Boris Johnson had been lying in his letter, but in a subsequent interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he might as well have: “I think they need to come clean. I think that the language is ambiguous, the sort of telling the truth and crossing your fingers at the same time and hoping that people are not too forensic in their subsequent questioning and I think that is not working.”
The peer’s revelations triggered a slew of new accusations against Boris Johnson and his administration.
Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “The prime minister knew about the seriousness of these complaints but decided to promote this man to a senior position in government anyway. He refused to act and then lied about what he knew.”
It became apparent that Downing Street had not even provided the government’s spokesperson-of-the-day with the facts, when Dominic Raab tried, on the Today programme, to push the line that Boris Johnson had not been briefed about disciplinary action against Pincher.
Himself a former foreign secretary, Raab said he had spoken with Johnson over the last 24 hours and had been assured that the prime minister had not been briefed.
Then Lord McDonald appeared on the same programme and categorically stated that Johnson had been told everything at the time.
So Raab’s story changed by the time he got to LBC radio: “There was a review, an investigation if you like … to decide whether a formal disciplinary action or an investigation and process was warranted.
“The review, conducted under the auspices of Sir Simon – now Lord – McDonald was that disciplinary action was not warranted. That doesn’t mean that inappropriate behaviour didn’t take place. We were clear that what happened was inappropriate, but we resolved it without going for a formal disciplinary process.”
Raab said he told Pincher “in no uncertain terms” that his conduct had been unacceptable.
So Raab was saying that the complaint against Pincher had been upheld, but that did not mean he was guilty – even though Raab himself had told the MP that his conduct had been unacceptable.
Does that make any sense to you?
It didn’t make sense to Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain, who grilled Raab over his misuse of language:
They called for a change to the rules of the 1922 Committee to allow another confidence vote to take place against him.
Later that day – July 5 – Johnson’s Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, quit – along with several junior ministers who were Parliamentary aides to Cabinet ministers: Jonathan Gullis, Saqib Bhatti, Nicola Richards, and Virginia Crosbie.
Tory vice-chair Bim Afolami was also out – he quit on TalkTV’s The News Desk show:
Andrew Murrison resigned as Johnson’s trade emissary to Morocco, as did Theodora Clarke, trade emissary to Kenya.
Ms Clarke said in her resignation letter: “To learn that you chose to elevate a colleague to a position of pastoral care for MPs, whilst in full knowledge of his own wrongdoing, shows a severe lack of judgement and care for your Parliamentary party.
“I was shocked to see colleagues defending the Government with assurances that have turned out to be false. This is not the way that any responsible Government should act.”
Attorney General Alex Chalk threw in the towel late that evening. His resignation letter stated: “To be in government is to accept the duty to argue for difficult or even unpopular policy positions where that serves the broader national interest. But it cannot extend to defending the indefensible.
“The cumulative effect of the Owen Paterson debacle, Partygate and now the handling of the former Deputy Chief Whip’s resignation, is that public confidence in the ability of Number 10 to uphold the standards of candour expected of a British Government has irretrievably broken down. I regret that I share that judgement.”
Then came a flurry of resignations, intended to fit in before Prime Minister’s Questions.
First to go on the morning of July 6 was another Parliamentary Private Secretary, Laura Trott. Her resignation letter, posted on her Facebook account, said trust in politics was of the “upmost [sic] importance”, adding “but sadly in recent months this has been lost”.
Next was Children’s Minister Will Quince, who said he was left with “no choice” after 10 Downing Street sent him out to defend Johnson with “inaccurate” lines. He said: “I accepted and repeated assurances on Monday (July 4) to the media which have now been found to be inaccurate.”
In media interviews, Quince had said he had been given assurances that Johnson had not been aware of complaints against Chris Pincher. It later emerged this was not true.
Robin Walker, Minister for School Standards, quit saying the government has been “overshadowed by mistakes and questions about integrity”.
Lee Anderson, the Red Wall Tory who was ridiculed for saying it was possible to cook nutritious meals for 30p, quit at around 10.30am. On the Pinchergate lies, he stated: “I cannot look myself in the mirror and accept this… Integrity should always come first and sadly this has not been the case over the past few days.”
Also quitting were Treasury Minister John Glen and another PPS, Felicity Buchan.
Oh – and Justice Minister Victoria Atkins.
And key backbencher Robert Halfon also announced that he had lost confidence in Johnson. In a letter, he said he was “previously against any leadership change… during Covid, a cost-of-living crisis and the war in Ukraine. However, after the events of the past few days and the resignation of Cabinet members, I feel that the public have been misled about the appointment of the former deputy chief whip [Chris Pincher].
“The parties at Number 10 Downing Street were bad enough but the appointment of this individual and the untruthful statement about what was known is unacceptable to me.”
Also withdrawing support were Chris Skidmore and Tom Hunt.
Later that day, “Levelling-Up” secretary Michael Gove publicly called for Boris Johnson to give up and go gracefully, and a delegation of Cabinet ministers attended 10 Downing Street to beg him to see sense. So Johnson sacked Gove.
This triggered a new wave of Cabinet resignations. Key among them was Michelle Donelan, who was only appointed as Education Secretary two days previously, after Nadhim Zahawi was promoted to become Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Zahawi himself appeared to have been moving to slip a knife into his boss’s back – because he was urging Johnson to quit by 8.45.
Also out was Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, while the total number of resignations from the government climbed towards 50.
By lunchtime on July 7, Johnson finally gave in to the inevitable and resigned as prime minister.
All that, just because he could not admit making a bad decision about one of his MPs.
And now that MP is following in Johnson’s footsteps, triggering a by-election that is likely to erode the Tory landslide of 2019 even further.
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The winner: and isn’t it ironic that the first member of the Party of Brexit to win an election after the UK split from the European Union was a man called Louie French?
Here’s an election that will tell misleading tales.
Conservative Louie French has been elected to take over the Parliamentary seat of Old Bexley and Sidcup from his late Tory colleague James Brokenshire – so the Tories will claim a huge victory and that confidence in Boris Johnson has not been shaken by recent scandals.
But the low turnout suggests otherwise. Fewer than half of the voters who turned out for the general election bothered this time (70 per cent of the local electorate in 2019 v 33.5 per cent this time around). That’s a drop from 46,145 votes to 21,733.
And most of those who didn’t bother coming seem to have been Tories. Brokenshire’s vote in 2019 was more than the total number of votes cast this time around, at 29,786 (45 per cent of the local electorate). French managed to scrape up 11,189 votes (just 17 per cent of voters in the constituency).
That’s a massive drop – and I don’t think we can attribute it solely to the normal fall in turnout for a by-election. French received only 37 per cent of the number of votes Brokenshire had. I think it’s fair to say that thinking Conservative voters didn’t bother coming to this party because they don’t want anything to do with Boris Johnson any more.
More importantly, the fact is that 83 per cent of people in this constituency didn’t want the Conservative, but he is still going to occupy their Parliamentary seat. If ever there was an argument for proportional representation, this is it.
But of course the corrupt Tories won’t ever accept the argument for change because the current situation benefits them.
And then there’s Labour. Keir Starmer will undoubtedly crow about his candidate, Daniel Francis, increasing that party’s vote share by 7.4 per cent. But it’s only a relative increase – that is to say, Francis received a higher share of a lower number of votes.
In fact, Labour lost 4,123 votes in comparison with the party’s performance in 2019. Candidate Daniel Francis’s share of the local electorate was just 10 per cent – a drop of six per cent from Dave Tingle’s share of the constituency’s available vote in 2019 (16 per cent). That’s how 6,711 votes compares with 10,834 votes when the total local electorate is taken into account, rather than those who bothered to vote.
Starmer might be happy that his candidate lost fewer votes than the Tory – but when the best you can do is discuss relative falls in the number of votes you’ve received, you’re on shaky ground.
Looking at the other parties, the Liberal Democrats continued their decline. In 2019, Simone Reynolds received 3,822 votes (5.8 per cent of the local electorate). This year the same candidate scraped up only 647 votes (less than one per cent of the local electorate – a 4.81 per cent drop).
Perhaps the big shock of the by-election was the fact that the Green Party’s Jonathan Rooks didn’t scoop up support from disillusioned Labour voters, as the party has in local government by-elections since Starmer became party leader.
He picked up 830 votes – down from Matt Browne’s 1,477 in 2019 (1.27 per cent of the local electorate v 2,23 per cent). Again, the relative figures show a swing of 0.6 per cent upwards for this party when in fact its support has fallen.
Finally, we should discuss the popularity of Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party) and its candidate Richard Tice.
Former prime minister Gordon Brown demanded an investigation into this party’s finances in May 2019, after concerns were raised that it was receiving foreign money, possibly from hostile governments that were trying to destabilise the UK’s political system – like that of Russia.
Tice had insisted that all donations to his party were in Sterling but this referred to its PayPal account and was therefore unpersuasive; if a person or organisation opens a PayPal account in the UK then payments into it will be in UK pounds.
The party’s website had no safeguards to ensure that donors were eligible to support UK political parties and a Mirror investigation found that it was possible to sign up as a Brexit Party supporter under the name of Vladimir Putin, giving the address of the Kremlin.
Well, if foreign countries have been bankrolling Reform UK, it hasn’t worked – although Tice did make a big splash for a small party candidate, with 1,432 votes, equivalent to 2.2 per cent of the local electorate.
None of the other candidates had more than 300 votes.
Incidentally, a quick poll by This Site after the vote was closed showed that Vox Political readers correctly predicted a Conservative victory, but the comments suggested they agreed with This Writer about the reasons for it – that only the most tribal Conservatives would pay this by-election much interest.
“If Boris Johnson had s**t on the paper and shoved the pencil up his bleached anus Tories would have politely pinched their noses, licked the pencil tip and put an ‘x’ in their box cos they think someone else’s ballot was accidentally s**t on and not theirs,” tweeted one person.
Looking at the result, who can argue with that?
AFTERWORD: the following tweet is satirical, but maybe it should be shown to all the voters in Old Bexley and Sidcup who didn’t bother to vote in yesterday’s by-election, as it tars them with the same brush as all those who voted for the new blue suit:
Huge thankyou to the people of Old Bexley and Sidcup for voting in favour of higher prices, empty shelves, turds in our rivers, corruption and sleaze, higher taxes, suppression of protest and privatisation of the NHS.
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What will be the excuse this time? Whatever Starmer says, the facts are clear: he has led Labour to its worst by-election result EVER. The party is on course for destruction under his leadership. If he stays, we’ll know that is what he wants.
Don’t think for a moment that the Liberal Democrats are on the rise again.
Ed Davey’s claim that his party’s victory in the Chesham and Amersham by-election means his party is now the main threat to the Tories in many areas is nothing but hot air.
No – the main shock of the by-election (triggered by the death of Tory Cheryl Gillan) is the collapse of support for the Labour Party under Keir Starmer.
Labour scraped together just 622 votes – that’s just 1.6 per cent of the votes cast, meaning the party even lost the £500 deposit it paid to take part.
It is the worst by-election result in Labour’s 121-year history.
Yes, turnout was lower than at a general election; yes, there may have been tactical voting to remove the Conservatives; and yes – Labour has never been in a position to win this particular Parliamentary seat.
But in general elections with turnout twice as high, Labour has historically won around 7,000-8,000 votes, with the 11,374 it received under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in 2017 its best result of all.
Once again, claims that Labour would do better with any leader other than Corbyn are destroyed.
And once again, Starmer will be looking to his Big Book of Excuses for a way to explain why he is dragging a once-great socialist party down to ruin in a mire of sub-Tory neoliberalism, focus group psychobabble and flag-waving.
Once again we see that the British public wants genuine, traditional (pre-Blair) policies and won’t be fooled by sharp haircuts, sharp suits, and vague announcements.
Labour is now in crisis. If Starmer continues as leader, he could drag the party down to destruction.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
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