Labour have picked up a whole 107 votes - the Tories are down 24k, almost mirroring the fall in turn out but clearly some ex Tory voters who bothered to go and vote did so for Reform. Lib Dem decimated as well, and green lost a few. There were more independent candidates which is what hurt the LDs most.
Greens lost a couple
In short absolutely nothing positive for any of the established parties, Labour did not win here - the Tories lost. The one tiny ray of sunshine is that if Reform stand candidates in the GE they will probably hurt the Tories much more than Labour.
This was a by-election whereas 2019 was the General Election. Turnout at by-elections is always lower than a GE.
Are you implying those who didn’t turn out yesterday were all Tory voters, and that all who’d previously voted Labour in 2019 did vote Labour again yesterday?
Tories lost 19k votes, Labour were also down 5k votes - looks like supporters of both parties stayed at home this time
LD’s did terribly again, down from 3k. Some due to the low turn out no odoubt but not all. Reform picked up 2.5k though - I can’t see LD voters directly migrating to Reform but perhaps there was drift from LD to the other parties who in turn lost a similar amount of support to Reform. Green about the same again which means they are doing doing well relatively speaking (one the low turnout is factored in) but making insufficient headway to have a snowball in Hell’s chance of affecting the overall result.
Well, it’s hard to say - but when the number of people staying at home almost exactly matches the loss of votes for a deeply unpopular party of government (replacing a disgraced MP) it’s certainly one interpretation, isn’t it?
If I have time I might work out the proportions from 2019 and compare them to the elections just gone.
Doubtless there are much better analyses than mine kicking around.
However people who previously voted LD will have done something whether that was stay at home or vote for another party.
One point in all this is that Labour don’t look as though they are winning hearts and minds in large numbers. They will win but that win could be fragile and fall apart in '29
I do fully agree with your observation that it’s difficult to compare by election and GE results, not least because of the big difference in turn out.
My position exactly, having at last got back my democracy I am at a total loss how to best use it.
Also, did I miss something? Was there a falling out of the Greens in Wellingborough? The Gen. Elec. candidate standing as an Indy against the Green in the by-elec.
There has been a similar pattern across a good few of the recent by elections.
The Tories are deeply unpopular - but I’m not sure Starmer is sufficiently appealing even to those on the left of the Conservatives, add in a disgraced MP (Bone) and a tone deaf constituency association who picked his wife as the prospective candidate and I really can see a lot of ex Tory voters not wanting to support the Tories at the moment, but not really wanting to support any other candidate either.
I can see some jumping ship to Reform, maybe one or two to the Lib Dems (but scant evidence of that in these two elections).
Of course to an extent I don’t care - we need the Tories gone, Labour are winning and all Reform will do if they stand is rob the Tories of some support.
It does seem very likely that conservative voters will have stayed away, while given the deep unpopularity of the conservatives, I can imagine that a chance to eject them would be significant motivation to get labour voters out.
I notice that in Wellingborough an independant came in ahead of the Green candidate and not far behind the Lib-Dem, who used to be the ‘obvious’ third option. Interesting that Reform came third in both seats, suggesting that as many as 10% in Britain may really have an apetite for going further right.
Regarding the Lib Dem vote, I would guess that a proportion of Lib Dems voted tactically for Labour to ensure the removal of the Tory MP.
Neither are seats where the LibDems had any chance of winning.
I think in the General Election there will be a lot of tactical voting, in some cases with Labour supporters voting LD (such as where I live in South West Surrey in order to get rid of Jeremy Hunt).
But we shall see. By-elections are always an opportunity for protest voting and don;t necessarily predict a GE outcome.
Well, first past the post is never democratic. Until such a time that the UK has a fair & proportional voting system the best use of your hard won vote is to give it to the candidate most likely to prevent the success of one that you disapprove of.
Clearly which party that candidate represents will vary according to where you have your vote.
We moved constituency in 1988 & I’ve had to vote tactically since the 1997 GE, having wasted a vote in 1992 by voting for what I believed in rather than voting to defeat the Tory.
It sticks in my craw to have to vote that way. I fail to understand the logic of those who throw their franchise away by casting a protest vote for nut-jobs like Reform/Reclaim or Lord Buckethead.
Once again, we are as one on this, but when almost all are as bad as one another…
Just received a LibDem commitment email and for the first time (although I save all these I don’t read them all so may have missed it) they have made a firm commitment to PR.
In answer to the question as to what I would like to see from them is
A firm commitment to rejoin
But rest assured my vote won’t go unvoted next time but I will have to ID the runners and riders in the constituency in deciding where it should go.
I was listening to a Conservative MP speaking on the election results and he was blaming Rishi Sunak for not being Conservative enough. He thought that either Suella Braverman or Jacob Rees Mogg shoukd be PM.
He named both of tgem as centre right, which just goes to show how far right the Tories have gone.
Someone else, in response to the claim that the Tories were a broad church replied that it was now so broad it should be called a cathedral.
I think that it is a good thing that Reform takes the extreme right into another party.
Mind you, in my opinion, Rees Mogg et al are extreme right.⁵
Yes the moderate Tories who used to run the party have either retreated to the back benches / been sacked or left altogether.
As for “not being Conservative enough” that’s completely illogical - if that was the problem it would be Reform UK topping the polls not labour.
But since the same people think Brexit is a failure because it’s “not Brexity enough” then I suppose it reveals their true intellectual and analytical capacity.
