Live Commentary
10:08am Saturday Wikipedia says the Weliingborough result was the largest Tory to Labour swing at a by-election since 1994 and the second largest since WW2. It was also the largest drop for the Tories at a by-election and the largest for any party since 1948. It was the worst Tory vote share in Wellingborough’s history, falling below the 25.4% they received in 1923.
3:28pm So another great UK by-election night for Labour and a dismal one for the Tories. I will cover the Feb 29 Rochdale by-election, which is interesting after the disendorsement of the Labour candidate. Before that, I will cover the Feb 24 South Carolina Republican primary, where Donald Trump looks set to effectively seal the Rep presidential nomination. Both these events occur the next day AEDT.
3:12pm Labour GAINS Wellingborough from the Tories by over 21 points. This seat went to the Tories by almost 37 points at the 2019 election. Another high vote for Reform, this time 13%.
2:46pm There’s a limited recount taking place in Wellingborough, just of two trays of votes, both on the same table.
1:53pm This was Reform’s best by-election result this term, easily beating 5% at Tamworth in October. The BBC reported at 1:40pm that the Wellingborough result should be soon.
12:56pm Labour GAINS Kingswood from the Tories, winning by 10% in a seat they lost by nearly 23% in 2019. Far-right Reform won 10.4% (new here).
12:26pm Unconfirmed reports from journalists that Labour has won Wellingborough. This is the more difficult one for Labour to win.
12:13pm Wellingborough turnout 38%, down from 64% at general election.
11:46am BBC live blog says turnout in Kingswood was 37%, down from 70% at the 2019 general election. Turnout is usually well down for a by-election.
11:39am Guardian says Wellingborough result expected about 3pm AEDT today, while Kingswood will be between 1pm and 4pm AEDT.
Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here, and his own website is here.
Polls close at 9am AEDT today for by-elections in the UK Conservative-held seats of Wellingborough and Kingswood. Wellingborough Conservative MP Peter Bone was suspended from parliament for six weeks in October over a male employee’s allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct.
An MP can be recalled if suspended for more than ten days, with a recall triggered if at least 10% of registered voters in the seat sign a petition, with the petition open for six weeks. Bone was recalled when 13% of voters in Wellingborough signed the petition. Recalled MPs can contest the by-election, but the Conservatives chose a new candidate. In 2019 Bone won Wellingborough by 62.2-26.5 over Labour with 7.9% for the Liberal Democrats.
Kingswood Conservative MP Chris Skidmore resigned from parliament in early January in protest over the UK government issuing more oil and gas licenses. In 2019 Skidmore won Kingswood by 56.2-33.4 over Labour with 6.9% Lib Dem.
While both seats should be safe for the Conservatives, they’ve lost safer seats at by-elections this term. Labour won the October 19 Tamworth by-election by 45.8-40.7 over the Conservatives. At the 2019 general election, the Conservatives had won Tamworth by 66.3-23.7 over Labour.
In UK national polls, Labour continues to be far ahead of the Conservatives. However, two polls taken in the last week gave Labour 11-12 point leads, down from the normal Labour lead range of 15-25 points. The next UK general election is likely to be held by late 2024, though it could be held as late as January 2025. It’s been a long time since the last UK general election in December 2019, when Boris Johnson led the Conservatives to a thumping victory.
There will be a by-election in Labour-held Rochdale on February 29 owing to the death of the previous MP. In an embarrassment for Labour, they were forced on Monday to disendorse their candidate after nominations had closed owing to comments he made implying that Israel knew of the October 7 Hamas attacks, but did nothing to stop them. Labour defeated the Conservatives by 51.6-31.2 in Rochdale in 2019, with 8.2% Brexit Party and 7.0% Lib Dem.
Pakistan, Finland, German and Tuvalu elections
Former Pakistani PM Imran Khan’s party was banned from running at the February 8 election, but independents linked to him won the most seats, but were far short of a majority. Of the 336 seats, 266 were elected by first-past-the-post, with a further 60 for women and ten for non-Muslims elected by proportional representation based on the number of FPTP seats won. On Tuesday, a coalition government was formed by various parties to shut out Khan.
At Sunday’s Finnish presidential runoff election, conservative Alexander Stubb defeated Green Pekka Haavisto by a 51.6-48.4 margin. Both candidates had qualified for the runoff by finishing top two in the January 28 first round.
A repeat of the 2021 German federal election was held Sunday in 455 of Berlin’s 2,256 polling booths owing to irregularities in the original election. The only change in seats was a one-seat loss for the pro-business FDP, with that seat also removed from the total number of MPs. The governing coalition of centre-left SPD, Greens and FDP retains a majority, but polls are bleak for them ahead of the late 2025 election.
Tuvalu’s previous government had been pro-Taiwan, but at the January 26 election the incumbent PM lost his seat. Tuvalu’s population is estimated to be just 11,900, but the China-Taiwan issue was significant internationally. There are no political parties, with all 16 parliamentarians elected as independents in eight two-member electorates representing the islands by FPTP.
Here is the Britain Elects write up of the the by-elections with a history of both constituencies.
https://medium.com/britainelects/previewing-the-two-parliamentary-and-five-local-by-elections-of-15th-february-2024-342642d31e82
It looks like apathy and farnarkling are in the lead, according to the BBC:
“Higher turnout than expected in Kettering
At the Kettering Leisure Village, it has taken several hours to get all the boxes in and to verify the vote.
We have now been told that the turnout is 38.1%, slightly higher than many party officials were expecting.
The count has now moved onto its next stage.”
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/farnarkel
Key pollster suggests Labour win in the electorate it got only 26.5% in 2019:
“Reports suggesting Labour has won Wellingborough
Professor Sir John Curtice
Polling expert
Some professional journalists on X are saying both Labour sources and Conservative sources are in agreement Labour has won in Wellingborough.
This is the more difficult of the two by-elections tonight for Labour to win. It requires an 18% swing – the kind of swing not far short of the over 20% swings that Labour have secured in by-elections back in the autumn.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-68277176
This may be the first UK election where voter photo ID is mandatory, even if voters turning up is not.
“Following a law change last year, people who vote in person on 15 February will have to remember to bring a form of photo ID with them.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-67759402
Rochdale sounds like a balls up and a half. The Labour candidate didn’t even need to open his mouth to win that but instead he spewed out nonsense. No wonder he got dumped.
The dumped Green candidate is not campaigning who got canned for similar statements.
Then there is George Galloway – just being a pain in the arse to the centre left.
I guess the Labour party could encourage people to vote for the Lib Dem but as the area used to be quite strong for the Lib Dems that might not be wise.
Labour take Kingswood with majority of 2,501 with a swing of approx 16%
Labour vote up by 11.5%. Tories down by 21.3%
@ B.S.Fairman
In Rochdale the now unendorsed Labour candidate will still be on the ballot paper and listed as the Labour candidate even though if he wins he’ll sit as an independent.
Once nominations have closed it’s not possible to withdraw a nomination nor change the candidates party description on the ballot paper.
The Rochdale result will be very interesting.
The candidate will still appear on the ballot as a Labour candidate.
Extraordinary stuff!
Thank you Adrian for your posts.
Edit: Oh, and First Past the Post remains an idiotic voting system. 2pp in these seats may have thrown up a different result….
Dr. D, BSF, CC, BSF
It is really very sad and unfortunate (some say a complete wasted opportunity) for British Labour (Starmer) not to put forward a bold reform agenda for coming general election because they would have mandate for it after winning the election even though they may not win with thumping majority as polls and continuous line of by-elections predict other wise.
A British leader may never get an opportunity like this in future to implement their agenda
Do any of the 2 by-election seats come under red-wall category?
@Ven
Not really. They’re more Bellwether seats, the type that Labour held in the Blair years but have since been fairly safe for the Conservatives.
@Ven – why the hell would Labour risk blowing this by giving wary voters any excuse to not vote for them? Labour needs to win by a big margin just to get into majority.
You can be bold, without being scary… you can reform without blowing shit up. But I don’t think the harder left understand this? Anything which isn’t revolutionary change is automatically bad?
Also – based on the vote shares, I doubt 2PP counts would have changed the outcome, at least in Kingswood.
It’s probably foolish of me to do so, but I’d guess if they had preferential voting in the UK, the result for Kingswood would be roughly 54-46 between Labour and Conservatives (with the random number guessing of 75% of Reform preferences going to the Tories, 75% of Green preferences going to Labour, and Liberal Democrats going roughly 50-50).
So probably not much of a difference compared to the outcome today.
Rochdale seems like it’s right up there for the most monumental car crash campaigns in history, with the Labour and Green candidates both disendorsed after close of nominations, the former Labour MP running for Reform, and George Galloway trying to come back from the political dead after his reality TV career.
@Kirs – yep, my rough estimate was 53/54% to Labour.
Tories get their arses handed to them in Wellingborough.
Wellingborough by-election result in full
Here are the results in full:
Labour: 13,844
Conservatives: 7,408
Reform UK: 3,919
Liberal Democrats: 1,422
Marion Turner-Hawes (Independent): 1,115
Green Party: 1,020
Kevin Watts (Independent): 533
Britain First: 477
The Official Monster Raving Loony Party: 217
Andre Pyne-Bailey (Independent): 172
Ankit Love Jknpp Jay Mala Post-Mortem (Independent): 18
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-68277176?
28.5% swing…
Labour majority of 6000 in Wellingborough, much more seismic result than Kingswood.
Rochdale is a stuff-up, assuming Galloway wins the seat in the byelection, Labour can win it back, in whatever redistributed form, in the general election, provided that they preselect a better candidate next time.
@Democracy Sausage
That’s probably right. According to the table here, Rochdale’s new boundaries are only going to affect about 10% of its voters in the redistribution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notional_results_of_the_2019_United_Kingdom_general_election_by_2024_constituency
jt1983 at 3.12 pm
It was only a 19.5% swing to Labour in Wellingborough. There was also a 13% shift from Tory to Farage.
If Farage’s outfit contests the General Election, it will ensure Labour’s win will be bigger than in 1997.
Sorry, I see you referred to the swing from Tories to Labour, now reported by BBC as follows:
“The swing from the Conservatives to Labour in Wellingborough was 28.5%.
That’s the second largest swing from Tory to Labour at a by-election since the Second World War.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-68277176
Part of the complication is the turnout. The Labour vote did not drop although turnout was nearly half.
The arrogancy of the Tories to run the domestic partner of the recalled MP Peter Bone and think that would they would benefit from it. He had reportedly threatened to run as Independent if they didn’t run his other half. They must have known they were at risk of losing the seat, so it was a crazy move.
At least if they had a different candidate and Peter Bone had run as Independent they could have used that as an excuse.
And Reform is going to real hurt the Conservative in every seat where they stand. They have no yet announced candidates for about half the seats in England, and there are some gaps in Scotland and Wales.
Minus 37 is an astonishing drop, with ~65% going to Labor and the rest to the Far-Right..
At what point does Sunak get a tap on the shoulder to go to an election before the entire party gets wiped out from both ends?
They are not changing leader again. They would be mad to make another change this term. They just need to bring it on sooner than later or else they will bleed more support.
It seems to me that THE major problem being demonstrated in both the UK and the US is the loss of faith in representative democracy which is being demonstrated by the large proportion of people who are not turning up to vote at all.
Maybe the should co-opt Farage.
@Boerwar
That might be the long term plan. Let Sunak lose the election, have Farage run for his seat when he resigns, Farage becomes leader, then fills the party up with his mob of fascist clowns at the election afterward.
Rees-Mogg is still right behind Sunak – apparently.
The BBC reports “Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg blames a low turnout and insists Rishi Sunak’s leadership is “solid” and “by-elections don’t change that””
Kiss of death that.
Rees-Mogg’s seat is not safe at all, that is the newly redistributed seat he’ll be defending at the next election. A whole lot of Sunak’s cabinet could be in some major trouble if there’s a replica of the 1997 Blair landslide.
The Tories would be a laughing stock if they tried to replace Sunak with a new leader(Penny Mordaunt?) before the next election, or the right of the party came up with another attempt to put Boris back into the Commons.
‘Kirsdarke says:
Friday, February 16, 2024 at 5:14 pm
@Boerwar
That might be the long term plan. Let Sunak lose the election, have Farage run for his seat when he resigns, Farage becomes leader, then fills the party up with his mob of fascist clowns at the election afterward.’
——————————
I doubt they do long term. It is just a sort of ongoing foaming mouth/dead brain generator.
‘Rebecca says:
Friday, February 16, 2024 at 3:06 pm
Rochdale seems like it’s right up there for the most monumental car crash campaigns in history, with the Labour and Green candidates both disendorsed after close of nominations, the former Labour MP running for Reform, and George Galloway trying to come back from the political dead after his reality TV career.’
——————-
+1
Boerwar at 5.57 pm
There would be a lot of competition, even in the UK. Just wait under Sunak really hits his stride.
Meanwhile, keep an eye on this tally for the Tassie election:
‘Scratched/Disendorsed Candidates Tally:
Since Election Called: 1 (IND 1)
Before Election Called: 3 (Labor 2 Liberal 1)’
https://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2024/02/2024-tasmanian-state-election-guide.html
Dr Doolittle says:
Friday, February 16, 2024 at 6:12 pm
Boerwar at 5.57 pm
“There would be a lot of competition, even in the UK. Just wait under Sunak really hits his stride.”
There seems to be a couple of missing ‘s’ in that 2nd sentence.
I think Sunak has does something to his strides today.
Paul Tu at 6.20 pm
See this:
‘We reported overnight that Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was present at the count in Kingswood, had reacted to Labour’s win by insisting Rishi Sunak’s leadership was “solid” and that “by-elections don’t change that”.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-68277176
Sunak has to go to an election in May or else the position for the Tories will become steadily worse.
“But these days, Sunak can’t even control the things within his agency. He is a man almost entirely without political instincts; a piece of unwanted flotsam being tossed carelessly from side to side. Time and again his character is exposed and he is found wanting. Decades of inhabiting a gilded cage have turned him into an ingenu.
Someone unable to deal with the real world. Unable to respond as a human to other people’s lives – or, indeed, their tragedies. He is all at sea. His wiring is all wrong, unusable even in a faulty 1980s computer. What he is even doing in No 10 is something exercising the minds of almost every Tory MP, many of whom are actively trying to remove him. The rest have merely decided it would look even worse to get rid of him.
So Rishi gets to stay. The interim prime minister. Loved and admired by no one. Not even his cabinet colleagues. Especially his cabinet colleagues. They are the ones who get to see his shortcomings close up. The ones whose ambitions and careers are sacrificed on his altar. Whether this can last till the next election is touch and go. Because, the more we get to see of Sunak’s character, the less there is to like.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/07/weak-weak-weak-needy-rish-makes-a-spectacle-of-himself-at-pmqs
Rebecca wrote, “Rochdale seems like it’s right up there for the most monumental car crash campaigns in history, with the Labour and Green candidates both disendorsed after close of nominations, the former Labour MP running for Reform, and George Galloway trying to come back from the political dead after his reality TV career.”
Nonsense! the previous Labour MP died in office thereby causing the By election.
@Clem Attlee
The one before the previous MP. He was expelled from Labour in 2015 for exchanging explicit messages with a 17-year-old girl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Danczuk
@jt1983
>@Ven – why the hell would Labour risk blowing this by giving wary voters any excuse to not vote for them? Labour needs to win by a big margin just to get into majority.
You can be bold, without being scary… you can reform without blowing shit up. But I don’t think the harder left understand this? Anything which isn’t revolutionary change is automatically bad?
—–
Manifestos are more important in the UK because ‘the convention is’ that manifesto promises can’t be blocked by the House of Lords. By default Starmer is going to have difficulties dealing with them as it is both full of Tories, and too big courtesy of Johnson handing out honours to every mouth-breathing idiot who ‘helped’ him.
Other issue for Starmer is that the UK has got problems all over the place and not having a mandate for a plan to deal with them is an invitation to get slow-walked to oblivion.
@Clem Attlee
“The one before the previous MP. He was expelled from Labour in 2015 for exchanging explicit messages with a 17-year-old girl.”
Well, that was in 2015, a long time before this poll. Lloyd was the MP from 2017. So, a bullshit point made by the original poster and I stand by my rebuttal.
Can Starmer abolish the House of Lords?
I assume he could stack it with 500 short term lords whose task it is to dissolve the lords.
It is not as if they deliver value for money.
I believe Starmer has actually promised to either abolish or democratise the House of Lords (or at least he did promise that… not sure where he stands at this very moment.) I can’t say I’m a big fan of the guy, but – honestly – even if all he ends up achieving in his first term is reforming that stain on democracy, I’d consider his premiership worth it. The very existance of the House of Lords in an ostensibly democratic country in 2024 is abhorrent. I’m stunned that it isn’t a bigger deal in Britain’s political discourse.
Though, if fully abolishing or democratising the House of Lords proves impractical, a potential compromise could be as follows:
– A ban on any further appointments to the House of Lords. When any currently appointed members resign or die in future, their seat is left vacant.
– The House is expanded to include an extra 50-300 new members, all of whom are democratically elected on a one-vote, one-value basis. (Ideally through some form of proportional system, as single member electorates would just turn it into a rather redundant duplicate of the House of Commons.) The exact details of when these elections would take place, whether there are staggered terms a’la the US and Australian Senates, and the size and number of electorates would be something to be debated.
– The House’s name and its’ members official titles should be changed to something that more accurately reflects modern democratic values.
– Personally, I’d also like the see the Lords Spiritual gone immediately too – because, holy hell, how is it considered acceptable to have official representatives of the church (and of only one particular denomination, too!) in a democratic legislature in this day and age!? – but I imagine the almighty stink it would raise would make that rather unrealistic.
That way, the House of Lords would only undergo mild changes intially, but over time would become increasingly democratic, until the final appointed members are all eventually gone around half a century from now. One imagines too that as the years pass, the presence of these old dudes appointed decades ago in an otherwise democratically elected chamber would become increasingly controversial and there would be more and more pressure on contemporary governments for them to go.
I’ve been pondering this for the past day or so that the Conservatives might have a long term plan for an ultimate hard-right comeback via Farage, but, several doubts about that have arisen, especially when the party seems to be on the verge of splitting apart more viciously than Labour did under Corbyn, where it would have no chance of recovery for at least a decade if that happens.
That said, I expect after the most likely election result this year of a landslide Tory loss, Farage may make a move to gain power at some point in the next 10 years, if only because Father Time is catching up on him. He turns 60 in April.
“not sure where he stands at this very moment”
That’s pretty much his default position.
I don’t see the Farage idea coming off.
The UK conservatives are coming precariously close to being, like the US House conservatives, almost ungovernable – the right may be internally ascendant but there’s enough of a mainstream rump that won’t tolerate another Truss situation. They wouldn’t even need to split – just repeat the same kind of tactics used against Corbyn, again with a faction more committed to destroying their own leadership than the opposition are. Farage could still do well as a third party, but he’s had so many tries at that and never been more than a distant minor.
Reforming the House of Lords was a Labour policy, but Starmer gutted it earlier in the year.
Starmer’s so phenomenally gutless that he makes Albo look like a militant socialist, and I honestly think if he’d been born a generation or two earlier he would’ve been a Conservative MP.
clem attlee: What a bizarre comment. I’m not sure where in my comment it was that you hallucinated a take on the circumstances in which the by-election came about, but I’d love to know.
@Rebecca
The reason I think Farage is such a threat in UK politics is because of the incredible amount of support he gets in the UK right-wing media. We’ve already seen how that plays out, from the moment in the USA in 2015 when Trump descended on the golden escalator among other events where far-right politicians were introduced and then cultivated by their media environs. Such as Australia where almost all of them locked into supporting Tony Abbott from 2010 until he started screwing up badly in 2015.
Of course at the moment Nigel Farage wants to distance himself from Sunak’s Conservatives, given they’re set to lose even harder than the fractured remnants of John Major’s Conservative Party in 1997, so that he would be in a position to be the saviour they need to turn back to in order to defeat the likely Starmer Labour government of 2024-2029.
A big factor to my last post was the impression this interview between Dominic Cummings and Lorraine Kelly, in which Cummings would simply smirk ScoMo style at questions in which a normal person might have expressed some degree of contrition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TNV5C9EkV4
In the end, Cummings said his plan is to sink back down among the amorphous blob of anti-progressives that want to help revert modern society back to Dickensian workhouses and such.
Rebecca:
Ugh. Should have expected as much.
At least, the anniversary of the Rochdale By-election will only happen every 4 years (it is on Feb 29th).
The thing with Farage is that none of this is new: the hard-right Tory media in the UK has always loved him, he’s always had a good run, and his electoral performance has been electorally middling anyway.
I always saw the bigger danger as being from the far-right of the establishment, particularly Braverman (who is essentially at this point an outright, honest-to-god fascist) and Badenoch (who’s very similar but has better political instincts), and saw real danger of them being able to execute an Abbott-style takeover. But I’m more hopeful of that not coming to pass now, given the impact of the Truss disaster on the mainstream Tories and the enduring popularity of Johnson, who, for all his wackiness, is considerably more moderate on a number of issues than Braverman, Badenoch or Truss.
Dominic Cummings is essentially the UK’s answer to Peta Credlin – someone who failed dismally as an all-powerful chief of staff, then turned second-rate conservative commenter to keep the paycheck coming. I’d put about as much stock in anything he says as I would Credlin.