All smiles: but now Paulette Hamilton will have to prove she deserved to win Birmingham Erdington – and, with Keir Starmer’s pale Tory policies in a hugely-deprived constituency, that won’t be easy.
Let’s discuss the elephant in the room first: socialist candidate Dave Nellist caused a tremor in UK politics by coming third in the Birmingham Erdington by-election.
He beat candidates from Reform UK, the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats.
But he only received 360 votes and the result is unlikely to disturb the plans of either the second-placed Conservatives (6,147 votes) or the winner, Paulette Hamilton of the Keir Starmer Party (currently still misnaming itself as Labour).
Turnout was extremely low, with just 27 per cent of the 67,598-strong electorate bothering to vote. So the real winner was “none of the above” – and it seems the worst enemy of democracy in the UK is still a bit of rain.
And the fact that the turnout was low means news reports of vote shares are skewed (being based on the shares parties received of votes cast, rather than shares of the electorate.
The Starmer Party didn’t increase its vote share from 50 to 55 per cent, as is being claimed in the press.
The late Jack Dromey’s 17,720 votes in 2019 netted him just 26.8 per cent of the possible vote, ahead of Tory Robert Alden, whose 14,119 votes totalled 21.3 per cent of the electorate.
The two main parties’ shares of the possible votes were reduced to 14 per cent for the Starmer Party’s Paulette Hamilton (9,413 votes) and just 9.1 per cent for the Tories’ Robert Alden (6,147 votes).
Starmer has made much of his representative’s win, saying she has “made history”. He meant this was because she was the first black person, and the first woman, to take the constituency’s seat.
But it would be more accurate to say she made history by winning the seat with the lowest number of voters supporting her in the entire history of the constituency.
Undoubtedly some readers will want to suggest that pointing this out is just sour grapes on This Writer’s part, as I supported Mr Nellist and he won fewer than one per cent of the available votes. I’d say that was a fair comment. This was a missed opportunity, in my view.
But everybody has to start somewhere and this shows that left-wing politics in the UK is not dead.
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